AJ's SolidWorks

SolidWorks is a dedicated 3D design package which is establishing itself as a viable option. AutoCad, TurboCad and IntelliCad are general drawing (ie drafting) packages with strong 3D capabilities. AutoDesk provide Mechanical DeskTop (MDT) which is built on AutoCad as their dedicated 3D package and have released Inventor which has been built from the ground up as a 3D modelling (design) package. MDT may be a logical choice for existing AutoCad users who want to continue to produce single .dwg files. Inventor (or SolidWorks) may be better for either new users (or older hands who are prepared to make the change) on the basis of the reality, or the promise, that a modelling package will better meet their needs than a traditional drafting packages.

SolidWorks was designed as a Window's based, intuitive to use, 3D modeller which incorporates work with Microsoft Visio to give 2D drafting capability. It reputedly works well with Nastran or Cosmos to give a finite element analysis facility that exceeds that of Mechanical Desktop's built in FEA facility (admittedly Cosmos do say it works well with and Mechanical desktop but how much of that is marketing hype I don't know but the owners of SolidWorks have brought out Cosmos so somethings going on). My boss said he is prepared to buy one SolidWorks seat so we can look at it (but we have to think about Inventor too).

18 Aug 01 My first report. SolidWorks has evidently learnt it's marketing from AutoCad. Users threatening to boycott service contracts. Meetings between senior users and SolidWorks to try to sort out difficulties. Being charged for Service Packs which are are predominently bug fixes. New releases with new bugs as well as the oldbugs. Sigh .. nothing changes. At least SolidWorks are going in the right direction from a designer's point of view. The Solidworks 2001 release will tell us if the association with MS Visio improves the drafting capbilities, and wether being Windows based, which was such an asset in the stable days of Win 95, has become a liability as Microsoft introduce frequent changes.

See some news group comments I've put together as Why Solidworks (press the browser back-button to return).

15 Nov 01 My second report. While SolidWorks is shaking things up and I think it's more intuitive to use than Inventor, there are issues with both for producing parametric drawings if sectioning is involved or for complex surfacing. Both are producing new releases featuring bells and whistles as 'new features' while not addressing core functionality problems in the previous release. My gut feeling is is ahead in the contest, but with five 'releases' and many service packs in under 3 years for Inventor, and not being able to keep count of the SolidWorks service packs, it looks like both companies are asking you to pay premium software prices to be in a beta testing program! For the time being we will stay with AutoCad vanilla, MDT (one license gets you both) and use the cost effective, robust and fault tolerant Rhino3D from www.rhino3d.com for free-form stuff (which we eventually import via ASIC.sat format into AutoCad for documentation). Rhino allows import/export between other applications to the extent that it is worth having as a conversion utility.

27 Apr 02 SW2001Plus is out. SW seem preocupied with copying AutoDesk bells and whistles at the Net Meeting sort of level. I don't see how you can do more with SW2001Plus that you could not do with SW2001, it just takes longer to do because of the increasing overhead. Also in Feb, Pac West Racing switched to SW. Suspicious ..their Inventor VAR evidently switched to SW also. Postings on the matter in AutoDesk's Discussion Forum were quickly removed ..that's not censoring the posts ..that's removing material that that does not meet posting rules!. Also in Feb Autodesk got tired of offering special deals to Mechanical Desktop users to convert to Inventor and started handing out Inventor free to any MDT subscriber, upgrader or new buyer so stand by to hear AutoDesk marketers referring to the size of the Inventor user base. Me! well I've worked on some Industrial Design stuff in SW and was impressed but my new love is Rhinoceros 3D which is great for say, roughing out designs, filling in the cracks and chinks left by other packages and translating between formats ..and hell you don't have to worry so much about SW (or Inventor) improving surfacing anymore if you've got Rhino (and MDT) around. But bottom line is we now have 1 seat of SW and 1 seat of Rhino 3D to go with our 20 seats AutoCad2002/MDT which means 20 seats of Inventor as well when we upgrade to MDT7 (which is called the the AutoDesk Inventor Series (AIS). And to think I argued to buy a seat of Solid Works to help decide if we would go into Inventor or not and now Autodesk is giving Inventor away to MDT users or charging chump change to bundle it as an extra with MDT. They gave away 50,000 copies of AIS in China alone! They only sold 20 to 30 thousand Inventors up to this AIS bundling thing now they will claim there is 200 or 300 thousand seats of Inventor out there ..as may many seats as Solidworks!

www.solidworks.com SolidWork's owners, Dassult Systemes of France, have taken over Structural Research and Analysis Corp (of Los Angeles) www.srac.com, makers of Cosmos (Fast) Finite Element Analysis software.

Solidworks is a dedicated 3D design package that has an easier, more intuitive, quicker to learn, Windows type interface. Qualifying students and academics can download SolidWorks 2001 Student Limited Edition from www.solidworks.com/education

Their website says their asia/pacific contact is in Singapore.

They have archived seminars (tutorials) useful for people making the 2D to 3D transition, want the SolidWorks practice or get some exposure to a design task outside of their own area of expertise.

My attention was drawn to SolidWorks by reading several months of replies and exchanges to the question "What is the best CAD 3D software?" in the Mechanical Engineer's Forum at at www.eng-tips.com (this link and some other useful engineering/science/education links can be found on my Links 2 page). There is no absolute answer to a question like this and my criteria is weighted toward relative ease of learning, availability of a student edition, pricing for institutions, generality of application and my own desire to broaden my CAD knowledge beyond AutoDesk products.

www.xchangeworks.com XchangeWorks
Free data translation plug-in that allows for the import of data from most MCAD products. XchangeWorks integrates seamlessly into AutoCad or Mechanical Desktop. Also, XchangeWorks allows for the direct import of native SolidWorks, Pro/ENGINEER and Unigraphics part files directly into AutoCAD or Mechanical Desktop.

www.nhcad.com/old/html/index.asp Joe Jones's New Hampshire CAD
Joe is good people. Provides free macros to download. Interesting thoughts on animation. Likes Rhino.

www.frontiernet.net/~mlombard/ Matt Lombard. A teacher/practioner with SolidWorks Certification who listens to the toolmaker.
See his 'SolidWorks Stuff'. His own views on using SolidWorks efficiently refined by consulting with comp.cad.solidworks forum members. He has both taught and consulted and I consider his 'Rules' on working with plastics to be rock solid advice for use of the shelling feature on any 3D package.

From: deleted
Subject: Re: Inventor vs. SolidWorks
Newsgroups: deleted
Date: Sept 2002

At our company I just went through my shootout' IV vs. SldWks. To be short and sweet they just delieved my SldWks Office yesterday. Ask the Invnentor people about asm features, importing geo, and performance of LARGE asm's. We will be dealing with much larger asm's here. 300-400 parts. Not huge but large. I did a VERY straight forward 'shootout' with the 2 packages. SldWks won without much trouble. IV is a GREAT product. There seems to be a great deal of innovation behind it. However, it is NOT refined IMHO as of yet. The things I didn't like about SldWks melted away as soon as the reseller made a deal. The only part of the deal from SldWks I didn't like was the price. Once they made a deal it was all over. I built asm's in BOTH softs, made drawings, and USED them both for over 2 weeks.

Things I didn't like about IV
1. Where the hell are my mapkeys/hotkeys.... *still looking*
2. Importing IGES almost does NOT exist. *fails badly simple parts*
3. Iparts is said to be probmatic/slow by many users @ adesks newsgroup
4. No asm features. *sad really*
5. Get a copy of IV and then mirror an asm with it. *this broke my heart*
6. I could go on but I won't

Things I didn't like about SldWks
1. Cost, Cost, Cost
2. Extra $1000.00 for 'nuts & bolts'
3. Reseller was sorta like buying a 'Saturn' no deals until they were SURE we were going with SldWks
4. Some of IV's kickass detailing features are missing in SldWks
5. The nuts & bolts were 'lumped in' with a bunch of things I will most likely NOT use.
6. I could go on but I won't

I was able to get a demo of IV 5.3 and a demo of 2001 'not +'. The SldWks demo was 'hard to get' but they did cough one up.

If you want the IV demo disk to try I will mail it to you, if not I will use it for a coaster... :)

Hope this was of some help.

Prelease was September 2002. Release date unknown.

The biggest feature in SolidWorks 2003 is the integration of a reduced-function version of COSMOS (regularly US$8,000 and up) called COSMOSXpress, free. COMOSXpress is for upfront analysis of parts, not assemblies.

250+ new features in SolidWorks 2003. The package will have 20 online tutorials. Click a command in the tutorial, and the associated icon flashes in SolidWorks. This teaches the user the location of the button.

Design tables link the drawing to a spreadsheet. Selecting a different design table changes the part, and vice versa. Dimensions are displayed in purple when they are linked to spreadsheet.

Selective regeneration of parts means shorter waits. A dialog box lists the time it takes for each feature to regen, so you can turn off the slowest parts. Other new features include:

Auto dimensioning.
Shared sketches.
Sketch colors.
Fit spline.
Sheet metal enhancements.
Auto fillet applies whatever fillet radius is needed to round off edges.
Untrim extends the surface of parts and optionally closed up holes.

SolidWorks was proud that this release implements six out of ten items on the SolidWorks user wishlist. Why only six? Evidently user-generated wishlists don't take into account the competition's features.

SolidOffice Pro adds PDMworks to SolidOffice.

Aussie John's Site Page Last Updated And Links Checked: 28 June 2003

SolidWorks