Lightweight vs. Adaptive Data Engine

Can anyone that has evaluated at both SolidWorks and Inventor
specifically with regards to handling large assemblies please tell me
what you discovered about hardware configuration and memory
consumption. Our machines can exceed 10000+ parts. I have heard the
arguements Inventor uses against lightweight parts, but wonder what
limitations exist with Inventor's Adaptive Data Engine?

 

I have had bad luck using SW for large assemblies (7,500+ to 10,000+ parts)
and had even worse luck with them when we were evaluating Inventor.
Are you going to be creating cropped and section views with the large
assembly? If so, I would look at a more advanced CAD program or at least get
a 60-day evaluation of SolidWorks and really push it.
If you do end up with SolidWorks feel free to contact me for my horror
stories as well as positive experiences.

 

I had a customer using SW with a 15,000 part assembly and didn't have any
problems running the file. He could get the file open lightweight in around
a minute and fully resolve it, in 3 minutes. On top of that the file was
in-contexted with Equations and Design Table.

So just because one person has problems running large assemblies doesn't
mean everyone is. The machine he had was hoss (3 gig of memory) but the
video card I didn't recognize as a preferred card by SW. To bad he's not at
that job anymore I wish I could remember what it was.

Regards,
Scott

 

I would take a look at Solid Edge. It has been known to work well with
large assemblies, with some customers having assemblies of 100,000 parts or
more.

Ken

 

It is very vague to suggest that a system can or can't run with a
large number of parts. They key here is how many of these 10 or 100
thousand
parts are unique parts. To me, you could almost count out most
commonly used fasterners that used over and over in a large assembly.
It's also based on how complex the feature tree is on some parts such
as sweeps, lofts, feature patterns, etc... I bet there is a lot of
people that have 20 part assemblies
that can challege the most powerfull systems around.

Well, that being said, I would really like to see just how many of
these 100,000 part assemblies are unique and complex parts.

 

Correct.And the mates and other constraints might play a dramatic role too.

Have a look at http://www.dynabits.com/delta/index.htm for a small assembly
of simple parts, but complex mates.
It was one of the first models I did, back to SW 2000, and I was amazed to
see how smooth it went, and still is with a "flat" structure.
The same with 2 levels, patterned flexible subassemblies is practically
unworkable with SW 2003 and later...
I never reached to constrain this structure in Inventor (5) so that it moves
correctly.