What is CADDS and why

instead of Pro/E?
in conjunction with Pro/E?
for aerospace or maritime industry?

Wet behind the ears and trying to get a handle on it.

 

I know nuthin about it but Adam's reply and links piqued my curiosity.
A few additional references ...

http://66.28.40.12:82/read/messages?id=58436
"I can't speak for the company on this and we are not supposed to comment on our
specific software and business 'models.' But between you and me and from the
perspective of the trenches the trend is to use Pro/E on all new projects and
keep Cadds around for modifying and maintaining legacy (old) projects."

however ...

http://www.ptcuser.org/2004/cadds.zip (ppt presentation)

targeting emerging markets (?)...

http://www10.mcadcafe.com/nbc/articles/index.php?articleid=188806

http://www.ptc.com/appserver/wcms/casestudies/company.jsp?&im_dbkey=31800&icg_db
key=181

http://ptc.com/appserver/wcms/standards/textsub.jsp?im_dbkey=30127

 

Correct, when installing Cadds on a PC, the first thing it does is to
install the Exceed X windows server. Makes supporting Cadds, well,
rather interesting.....

Yes, PTC tried very hard to move Cadds customers over to Pro/E, the
problem is that many Cadds users work on very large assemblies which
simply kill Pro/E. As an example, I've never yet heard of anybody using
Pro/E for commercial ship design, let alone naval vessels (which are
several orders of magnitude more complex), yet Cadds is used by major
shipyards world wide.

The lack of enthusiasm in PTC for Cadds is causing severe problems here
though. BAE Systems in the UK are doing the Astute class nuclear
submarines as a completely digital design on Cadds. They have had
massive problems & delays in the project, quite a few of which have been
attributed to the software. Seems that they have been experiencing
update times of many minutes working on the large assemblies. PTC have
no other software which can cope with work of this complexity, so I
would think that most of the remaining large Cadds users are looking at
Catia as a replacement. Here in Denmark, I do not believe that there is
a single Cadds installation left. Most of them went to Solid Works &
Power Shape after the local supporter went broke (PTC refused to allow
the Swedish Cadds reseller to take over the Danish customers, and told
them that they would have to call PTC's hotline for support. A non ideal
situation, since the support contracts for Cadds specified local
language support ....)

Going waay back, Cadds actually had it's roots in the Medusa 3D package
developed by CIS in the UK. Computervision (which at that time was a
software division of Prime Computers, who were one of the 2 sources for
Medusa - its a complex story) bought the rights & developed it into what
was perhaps the most advanced 3D system available in the mid 90's. The
range of options for Cadds is huge - I never actually found out what
they were all for, but the configuration screen was several hundred
lines of options.

A great pity that CV had such financial problems and that PTC never saw
fit to develop it further.

Regards,
Steve.

 

I worked for an aerospace company that had Pro/E and CADDS5i.

As I understood it, CADDS was not parametric, but it was an advanced 3D
modeling package. Our CAD group had some pretty nifty routines
automated in CADDs that allowed them to construct 3D surface models
overtop of scanned point data. It also worked elegantly to lay out 3d
model surfaces for fabrication from flat stock.

That company has been downsized drastically, so it's hard to say if
/how they're using it now, but their push was towards Pro/E.

Dave