The National Design Engineering Show

I attended the National Design Engineering Show in Chicago this week. I
won't bore you with the nifty engineering stuff I found. But I did get
a chance to spend some time in the CAD booths though I held off till
near the end of the day when things weren't so busy. Strangely enough I
spent most of my time in the SolidEdge Booth learning a few more things
about it. I threw out a mini modeling challenge to both the SE guru and
a SW guru. And I helped out a bit with a disgruntled Inventor user who
was looking at SE. Since we both had similar questions for the guru
this worked out quite well. I just had to bite my tongue once in a
while to keep from mentioning SW.

The discussion led into simplified parts and configurations. This is
one thing I had seen in SE and I was curious how simplified parts were
different from configurations with, say, all the fillets removed. SE
uses simplified parts for some of the same reasons SW exhorts us to
make a configuration with fillets and other extraneous geometry
suppressed. Assembly performance and drawings benefit from
simplification. SE has some tools that automagically find certain
elements in a part and they are put into a suppressed state. This takes
some burden off of the user. Simplified is built into parts and is not
to be confused with a configuration. It has it's own place in every
part which makes for consistency. When loading assemblies the user is
asked whether simplified should be used. If a user tries to do this in
SW it requires a lot of manual choosing of configurations during
construction of an assembly.

SE also handles configurations differently than SW. Whereas SW
configuration geometry resides in a single SW file, in SE each
configuration becomes a separate file somewhat like a derived part. The
master file remains in which parametric information resides, but the
various configurations are separate and apparently stand alone. I
suspect this greatly helps assembly performance. The technique could be
done manually in SW but I suspect this would place a certain book
keeping burden on the user.

The SE guru used a lot of keyboard shortcuts to manipulate SE. I guess
that is a good thing but I haven't yet figured them all out. And you
need them to do them to do some things he was doing.

I asked the SW and SE gurus to model a solid. At first they didn't
quite grasp what I meant, but they eventually did understand. In SE the
only way I could get the guru to make a tetrahedron was by creating two
plane sketches at an angle to each other and then he boxed it in with
surfaces and stitched it into a solid. The SW guru knew what a
tetrahedron was and amazed me by extruding a sketch with draft in about
15 seconds. Bingo, a tet. I then asked both of them to change the
length of one of the edges. Neither of these solutions would easily
allow that. The SW guru then built the tet in the 3D Sketcher, but it
wouldn't surface. I couldn't get the SE guru to do a 3D sketch, either
it doesn't exist or he didn't know it was in the software. I tried
doing a 3D sketch at home with v15 and had no problems making
individual 3D curves joined at the ends. What I couldn't get it to do
was put dimensions on the curves or create any kind of relations
between them. SE would put patches on these curves where SW would not
put planar patches on curves from a single 3D sketch. So where SW would
allow creating a wireframe solid with the necessary relations through
dimensions and equations, SE would not. On the other hand SE would
surface and stitch them into a solid were SolidWorks would not. They
are both pretty evenly matched, but both not quite where I would like
them to be with regards to 3D modeling tools. .

The Inventor user asked why I would want to build such geometry. I
mentioned geodesic domes and space frames for a start and the lights
went on. You can't be around Chicago public buildings too long without
recognizing the use of such geometry.

 

Great report, thanks.

SolidWorks Utilities, Simplify, creates a Derived Configuration. I usually
forget to use this feature.

Best Regards,
Devon T. Sowell
www.3-ddesignsolutions.com

 

Devon,

So a plain vanilla SW seat would not have this capability whereas all
SE seats have it.This would give SE a price advantage to those looking
at JUST SW or JUST SE to build large assemblies.

A good 5 minute presentation in a user group. I've had utilities for a
long time and forgot/didn't realize that that was there.

I tried it in 2006 on an M10 bolt from ToolBox. At default it got the
fillets. I tried to get the revolved cut around the top of the hex.
Revolves are not on the list of things it checks. In fact a lot of
features aren't. If I wanted to do just holes and fillets I would be
out of luck without a trick to fool it into making just one derived
config.

The trick would be to run it on the fillets with create simplified
config on, then uncheck it and add the other items. This brings up an
enhancement point. Since it is creating a config there should be a
couple more bits of information in the dialog box. One is the name of
the config it is going to create and two is that if create is on and
there already exists a simplified config for the current configuration
the choice should be given to add to it. Oh, and why not have the
capability to simplify all configs or chosen configs all at once. My
M10 bolt has over two dozen configs. SE shows the simplifiy information
right in the feature tree. And because of the way they do configs it
appears that one simplify would apply to all configs. I'll have to look
into that a bit more.

 

5 or 6 years ago, SolidEdge tried to create interest in their product here
in the San Diego area. A friend of mine got a job at the VAR they set up in
Carlsbad. I went to a few demos. It was very similar to SolidWorks. It
seemed like a good product. But in this area, nobody used it. They couldn't
give it away. After 2 years or so, they pulled up the stakes and left town.

Another interesting fact; According to my VAR, the first version of AutoDesk
Inventor was written here in San Diego. AutoDesk has a building near
Qualcomm stadium. This is interesting to me because I've NEVER encountered a
company in this area that uses Inventor. Sure, a few have a single seat
lying around, but they don't use it.

The San Diego area is definitely SolidWorks territory.

Best Regards,
Devon T. Sowell
www.3-ddesignsolutions.com

 

That is an interesting observation. From my perspective at the show SW
had a lot of direct employees in addition to VARs manning their Kiosk.
SW had an insert in every badge holder. The SE booth seemed to be
manned solely by VARS. And they were selling two products, NX and SE.
Of course I'll have to admint it is harder for me to differentiate SE
VARs from direct employees since I have known a lot of the SW people
for quite a while. Also, surrounding the SW booth were a lot of
Solution Partners. This I didn't see or notice for the others. I would
conclude that SW wants people's business more than SE does.

I wish I had taken the time to peruse the PTC Kiosk. The one thing that
caught my eye from the PTC booth was the eDrawings presentation on
their big screen. I think their level of effort at the show was on par
with SW.

 

Addendum:

Something Devon mentioned on another thread.

The SE18 interface was for all intents and purposes the same as the
SE14 interface. Everything worked the same. Devon mentioned burnout at
every release with SW. I experience the same thing. As SE put in new
functionality, but it seemed to go into dedicated modules not into the
part environment. The stuff I learned from the guru in v18 could be
transfered back to earlier versions.