Inventor V's Solidworks

Didn't know Pro-E was that cheap, I'll have to look into it. I know that
for what I am designing (drills/reamers) Inventor and SW are very tedious
and not worth the effort of trying to draw these things in them when I do
the volume of drawings that I do. Dimensioning is a complete pain in the
ass and it is just quicker and easier to do it in ACAD.

 

My findings:

I moved into an Inventor (R8) environment after several years on
Solidworks and I found that the IV top-down methods left a bit to be
desired...

The worst offender is 'adaptivity' - nice idea, in practice a bit of a
pain. There's nothing like a load of cross part associations crashing
down aroud your digital ears to ruin your day... The warning from
experienced hands that I should turn off adaptivity as soon as possible
in an assembly, or face the consequencies, suggests that the method
rather misses the point of top-down design.

I've done some fairly complex top-down assembly updates in SWX that I
wouldn't have dared with IV

Or so I found, anyway. The other designers seemed to manage reasonably
well, so maybe I was having trouble thinking outside of my SWx mindset.

I would point out that I suffered from a remarkable number of corrupt
files in such a short period - don't know if this has been fixed with R9.

Editing mates in IV is a lot more time-consuming than in SWx, and
managing / retaining part visibilty settings in IV is a PITA.

Solidworks assembly configs are a joy to return to after IV.

It's not all bad, though - the interface pretty good*, although the
dialog boxes are a little bit SWx98+, and large assembly speed is good.
Detailing is generally good, too.

Didn't have an opportunity to play about with surfaces, alas.

If you do an evaluation of Inventor make sure that you have a look at
Sean Dotson's tutorials - very useful. And try to mooch around the IV
user group too - the other users are really helpful, and you don't have
to put up with JB/Cliffy bandwidth-chewing crud.


Twit


*Having said that, I'm reserving a special place in hell** for those
that designed the 2d sketcher. Constraint / relation editing I found to
be remarkably irritating

** on second thoughts, they'll be sharing it with the design assistant team

 

Chris,

1) You get the help and support of this group with SolidWorks
2) What do your vendors use? Where I work we don't make 2D drawings.
SolidWorks IMHO does them very well but when I need to send a part to
one of our vendors I like to send it native. Things that are big for
this are tapped holes. Cosmetic thread as far as I know does not come
through on an IGES and to not have to make a 2D print just for that
saves us a ton of time.

 

The best thing to do is to get eval version of both and try to create YOUR
parts with them. See which you like the best, because to be honest they are
very similar packages.

I'd say SWX has the edge if you are doing "swoopy shapes" but for machine
design I honestly think it's probably a coin toss (some pros and cons on
both sides)

I use IV because I've been using it since R1. No reason to think I couldn't
pick up SWX and be just as effective.

 

Spork,

I think the moderation thing gets blown out of proportion. Unless it's some
other VAR spewing on about how bad IV is then the messages aren't touched.
Normal criticism of the product is not touched. Heck I'm one of the first
to point out the shortcomings and my messages aren't moderated.

I'll take a bit of moderation over the spam and useless postings that happen
in unmoderated groups anyday.

 

It is? I've used both Solidworks and AutoCad and SolidWorks is by far
easier to use. We have no problems using it to the ASME Y14.5M-1994
standards.

Among other things, we design machines with SolidWorks. Some with about
12,000 parts. Let me know if you have any specific questions.

Deb

 

Been using SW since 2001 and now using SW2005 which IMHO is the
best/nicest release to date. The 2D detailing has improved and I prefer
it to AutoCAD which is only used for wiring/schematic diagrams and
generating artwork for silk screens which it is still the best tool
for.

I moved away from Autodesk products (MDT3.5/4.0 & WorkCentre) to SW in
2001, having evaluated SW2001+/Inventor 4 & Pro E (to costly).

Both SW & Inventor have improved dramatically since then but If I had
to choose again it would still be SW over Inventor.

A visit to the Inventor discussion forum is worthwhile. Lots of great
guys offering plenty of help/workarounds, which begs the question, if
the programme is so good why are so many users having to seek help?

 

This may be true now. Wasn't always the case. I've had -- and seen --
many, many posts taken off of the AutoCAD group (I have no experience
with the IV group) for what would pass as just slight negativity in this
newsgroup. Perhaps Ann Brown isn't around any longer, or perhaps
they've given her a different mandate.

 

Exactly!
Personally I still think it has to do with many of the old 2D users
having to re-think how they do things and having acad/mdt at their
disposal reduces their chances in moving forward. It's like learning a
language and your environment still allows your native tongue to be
spoken,.. it's not a conducive learning environment, it's less
productive.
Can you imagine how much wasted time and energy is involved!?!? Talk
about loss in productivity and revenues!!

I have to note this,.. in my experience, every company that I've known
which has gone through cad changes (mainly acad users but not just
acad), the guy or guys involved with holding up progress, that is
changing cad systems, were the last people left in the company before
they went out of business. Just food for thought.

...

 

Not ready for prime time? Really? I've been using it for a couple of
months now for production work, and aside from quirkiness (do we EVER
get away from quirkiness), I don't really have any substantial
complaints.

'Sporky'

 

lucky for you....a lot of people have found it to be as buggy as any past
new release as posts at the SW forum attest...and no I don't consider it
ready...I definitely wouldn't recommend a whole office of new users jump in
at this point..
neil

 

Why was VX not considered ?

jon

 

Might have been a real bitch for Joe Greco to try to do a comparison of say
thinkID Global Shape Modeling with the utter lack of tools to do the same
kinds of things in SolidWorks or Inventor.

Joe Greco had a very tough job to do and did it well.

If anything Joe was much too kind to SolidWorks but probably appreciated how
much SolidWorks did for users by giving them a choice over Autodesk.

jon

 

VX if you want surface and solid modeling tools that work together
seamlessly.

Neither Inventor or SolidWorks even come close to how transparent the
approach is in VX.

jon

 

As per usual you have no idea what your talking about. Any idea how many
posts of Tony Tanzillo's that Anne Brown censored / removed ? The list goes
on and on. Even Dominic Gallello called me to apologize for Anne Brown's
censorship tactics... on a Sunday morning. :>)

The only good things I can say about Autodesk are that they hired Dominic
and they had a good woman in Brenda Discher. I found her to be very straight
forward in telling me the how and the why things were so fucked up with MDT.

jon

 

A euphimism was arrived at - the other SoftWare - that allowed general
discussion provided it did not turn into a feature-to-feature comparison.
Discussion of the 2 softwares is a poor substitute for test-driving them,
however. You can learn in 2 weeks of using what would take 2 months of
reading.

 

For customer base and sheer volume of installs this was a good decision on
your part. Going with some off-the-wall also rans like VX or thinkICan would
put you into a bad situation when it came time to communicate with
clients/vendors and hiring competent employees. You'd have to hire from a
very small pool and perhaps wind up with a psycho employee like you know
who. Speaking of which, blocking has been a real blessing in the last few
days.

 

Well, OK -- maybe I'm just lucky.
That would be the FIRST time, though . . .

 

Because you are the Usenet idiot.

Any more questions?

HTH

 

And now that he's dead and unable to defend himself ......
Hearing voices again are you?