Here's a list of file formats SolidWorks will open...it hasn't change much in the last few years except that they added the Photoshop and Illustrator options around 2008. Covers all the major cad platforms with the exception of Catia.

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Jason
-I don't know if I'm alive and dreaming, or dead and remembering.

"Chuck Norris can speak braille."

1. Using equations in constraints
You

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Jason
-I don't know if I'm alive and dreaming, or dead and remembering.

"Chuck Norris can speak braille."

A decent Enterprise PDM system cannot survive unless it supports all major CAD systems, and SolidWorks is most definately one of them. I have personally worked on the back end of TeamCenter and SolidWorks. I works about as well as the integration between NX and TeamCenter.

We reviewed Teamcenter and it has some impressive functionality but its SolidWorks integration was poorly done. It was also very expensive.

SolidWorks Enterprise PDM is about the easiest PDM to use when it comes to managing files....it just lacks some of the PLM functionality which I guess were something like Enovia is suppossed to come in.

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Jason
-I don't know if I'm alive and dreaming, or dead and remembering.

"Chuck Norris can speak braille."

I avoided the specifics on the SW integration to TcE as I didn't want to start (another) religious war. The SW integration to TcE is very similar to the NX integration to TcE. The Inventor integration, on the other hand, is event driven and in the window, nicer but... Both integrations require you to change how you work. The Inventor integration does not (yet) support some of the advanced tools, like routed systems, frame gen or anything else that has folder dependencies. All the TcE integrations seem to want to flat file everything. I think that is pretty archaic. I cannot imagine being forced to work in one folder only.

I think you are better off using SW Enterprise PDM, unless you are a multi-billion dollar company with design offices spread around the entire globe with thousands of designers / engineers. Actually, even then, I would recommend you put the effort into the ERP system first and connect SW EPDM to it. If not that, there are plenty of other nice PDM systems that won't kill the company's productivity.

That's our plan......if we need to scale up to a PLM system.....we will probably keep Enterprise as the PDM portion and connect it to some PLM (Agile, Teamcenter, Matrix (Enovia).....what ever fits best.)

Most of the higher end system do everything but their file maangement part always seems too cumbersome. I used eMatric at a company a few years back adn file management was so poor that engineering would use it until the very end of the project. We worked off the network out of folders. Enterprise's windows explorer interface makes file management almost seamless......easily the easiet to use that I've ever seen. Everything's drag and drop.....same things you would do without a PDM.

_________________
Jason
-I don't know if I'm alive and dreaming, or dead and remembering.

"Chuck Norris can speak braille."

If you did that in Inventor, it should throw an error but it might work if there is no parameter 'd2' defined. The correct notation for this "formula" is "d1*2" If you want to name the variable you are working on, you would put that in before the equal sign. In example, if you wanted d2 to be named "OAL", you would type "OAL=d1*2". I am assuming that d2 is the dimension you are working on.
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All of the SolidWorks integrations I have seen are pretty good, certainly very usable. The Inventor integrations tend to have more capability but that is because it was designed from scratch specifically to work under PDM control. I doubt the users would care so long as it works, but the developers of the other PLM systems do.

You can't type in the dimension edit box.......a feature I miss from UG as well. The problem is that the eidt field allows for math operators. To add an equation, you edit the dimension, select the drop down arrow in the value field and select Add equation which puts you in the equation edit dialogue. Not a lot of hoops but certainly an extra two clicks.



It applies to the entire part....right click the part in the drawing view and select component line font....change its thickness and type. It's not a particular function like IV......although there is an option in ana ssembly to make the part reference and not show in the BOM....it just doesn't change way the part appears in the drawing.



Didn't know what he was doing...its fairly easy and has been int he software for years.



It is odd......you edit feature and you can change the number of instances and spacing dimensions, add new features or faces to the pattern, select.deselect instances to skip. You can't change from a linear to circular pattern.......but I can't think of a case where you would need to.



You copy one of the Hole Wizard/Toolbox standards like "Ansi".......call it your company name. Then you can modify and add new sizes or uncheck what you don't want. Hole callouts will reflect whatever you tell it when you define the standard.



Same as any CAD system....you would be doing a translation. With IV installed on the system, you could opent the IV file directly, but its still a translation. You could use featureworks to let it add features although this doesn't always work on complex models...particulaly anything with complex surfacing. You would ahve to do direct face editing on the dumb solid stuff the Featureworks could make a feature from.



Those companies offer plug-ins....not sure about Vault though, that's Autodesk right?



This one baffles me....SolidWorks has been native 64bit since around the 2006 version. Our first installs with it was from 2007 due to us needing the additional memory on larger assemblies. I've never heard of an emulator add-in nor seen evidence of one. As a cad admin, I handle the installation images here where I work and see the various add-in components for SolidWorks and windows components it relies on that get installed since its all unpackaged. You can check the executables easy enough to see if they are compiled in 32bit or 64bit. You can also tell from the task manager is the process is 32 or 64 as its labeled.

Now you can install the 32bit version of SolidWorks on a 64bit OS but I'm not sure why you would.

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Jason
-I don't know if I'm alive and dreaming, or dead and remembering.

"Chuck Norris can speak braille."

Yes, there is a plugin for Autodesk Vault for both SolidWorks and Pro/E. It is in the Vault Professional version, which is what you would want for an large (Enterprise) company anyway. I have set it up and used it. It works very similar to the Inventor integration and different than PDMWorks.

I think UI really comes down to what you learned 1st. I was taught SW in school and have used it for 5 years. The company i work for was bought and we were forced to switch to IV last year to match the other divisions. So after about a year of IV here are the things I miss:

creating revisions in SW: we would use suppression as a tool for revisions. ie. a part is no longer needed in an assembly, so we suppress it (so when the customer changes their mind, its there waiting to come right back). In IV it seems I'm forced to delete it, if i suppress it a level of detail is created- but any parents still refer to the master LOD. IV handles it right in parts, allowing you to suppress features w/o creating LOD's. I'm not a fan of IV's representations- overly complicated- I know i need to understand them better, but I really miss the simplicity of configurations in SW.

selection workflow - gildashard mentioned earlier how SW lets you preselect or post-select. This is a very fast workflow and is deeply missed. Also the selection window in SW that list all your selections and allows you to quickly and easily add and delete selections.

constraints are another spot i really miss the selection window. removing unwanted constraints is a pain w/ IV. In SW having that window simply list each constraint for the selected geometry and being able to easily select certain ones to delete is very helpful versus bunched icons crowding all over a sketch that are sometimes visible or invisible.

component patterns: SW handles patterns in assemblies better i believe. They are treated as a feature is in a part level. The part being patterned remains in the part tree and the pattern is separate. So you can use that singular part for multiple patterns. I don't think you can do this in IV. Once part of a pattern the seed part can't be used in another pattern separately. Also when you create a pattern in 2 directions in IV you can't pattern seed only- I really miss that feature too.

there lots of little things I miss that i feel are slowing me down, but i know I'll get faster in IV, but right now I don't see myself ever being as fast and efficient as I was in SW. That being said I'm sure there are some answers to my issues above and hope to hear from the IV peeps w/ help.

I'd advise new users to 3D modeling to learn SW. Some parts may be harder to learn at 1st, its the 1st thing i learned so its hard to compare to learning IV after i knew SW, but moving to IV after knowing SW i imagine is easier then IV to SW. The main parts i got hung up in understanding in IV were representations, project files/workplaces. But of course it comes down to your specific situation and what's important to you.

ok one more thing, in SW when you do a 'save as' it replaces that part in any open assemblies with the new one. when you do a 'save as' & click copy, it doesn't. IV's 'save as' doesn't do this, it does the same as 'save as copy' and you have to take additional steps to replace the original part w/ the new one. why have save as and save as copy when they do the same thing?

Well I just finished up my four day, SolidWorks Essentials class, and I can see right away that I will be missing a few things when I start using SW regularly. I'm still using IV every day and probably will be until I get proficient enough with SW and get over (or get faster in spite of) the loss of equations and the insert mate. There are some things about SW 2010 that are a big improvement over the version of IV I'm using (yeah, I know, I'm still on R10), but the things I'll miss most are:

1. Easy to create and professional looking 2D Drawings

Although I had heard others complain about SW's ability to make professional looking 2D drawings before, I just figured they couldn't be right. SW just had to be on a par with IV, or how could they have sold so many seats? Well, from what I've seen so far, IV may have its drawing quirks, but SW has many more. One example, you can't get a view label on a drawing view (non-sectioned/detail) without putting in a note. In IV you just check a box. Another example, while you can move dimensions from view to view easily enough in SW, once you've moved a dimension (even to the other side of the same view) you can't adjust the gap between the witness lines and object lines as far as I could tell. This goes for all witness lines actually. If a model dimension has witness lines that are attached to a sketch in an plane inside the part, moving the extension lines to the edge of the part is possible, but they just didn't seem to have the right gap when I did. Also, why don't the Section Line arrows flip automatically when you slide the Section View preview from one side of the line to the other? The instructor told me that it wasn't part of the ANSI, or any, standard, so you have to place your section view and then click Flip Direction to make the arrows point away from the view placement. Does anyone know if the ANSI standard dictates where an aligned (non-free floating) section view should be placed relative to the Section Line arrow direction?

2. Equations

I know it's been beaten to death, but equations are SO MUCH easier to work with in IV. When I asked the instructor how to recreate my workflow in SW, he mostly wondered why anyone would want to use equations anyway. Maybe because in IV they are so easy to use! I found out that you can link values (the same as making one dimension equal to another in IV) but it requires that you name the dimension and then reuse it everywhere you need that value. It sounded like named parameters in IV, but when I asked if I could do this all in one place (like IV's Parameters dialog) instead of for each linked value, one at a time, I was told that there was no way, other than possibly to create a linked Design Table and change any the dimension names there. Sheesh! SW has the ability to create equations, but the length of the dimension names (the book even says they are cryptic and hard to work with) makes it a bear. Also, the ability to work right in the dimension dialog in IV is so much simpler. I don't know how I'll deal with this limitation.

3. Lack of an Insert Mate

I will try some of the suggestions mentioned above (Mate References, alt-dragging edges) but I have a feeling they won't be as easy as clicking insert from the list of available constraints. Unless the two cylindrical edges are the exact same size I don't think SW can mate them -- I could be wrong, I hope I am).

As for SW not really being 64-bit, while we were doing exercises in class, the instructor was fielding tech support calls and I overheard him mention to the SW tech that the user was running SW 2009 and the it was not fully 64-bit. He also mentioned that not until 2010 running on Windows 7 will SW really be able to take advantage of 64-bit processing. Could have just been his lack of knowledge talking, but that's what he said.

Hopefully I will get use to SW's differences/limitations. Maybe the things it does better will make up for them. I'm trying to keep an open mind.

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Tony

Quote:

you can't get a view label on a drawing view (non-sectioned/detail) without putting in a note. In IV you just check a box.

What would you want the label to say? Guess I'm sure not sure what orthagonal view labels would be....maybe Front, Side, or Top. Section, Details, and Aux views add a label but they are lettered. You can add notes and link them to configuration names or custom properties but I'm not sure if that's what you're after.



The gap is set when you drag the end points and drop them on a vertex, then it uses whatever is specified in the document proerty options. If there is no vertex, you have to manually drag them to where you want.



It used to, then they took it away several release back......not sure why. You can change it before sropping the view....or you can double click the section line after.



His answer is correct but has nothing to do with what you asked. The arrows should point "away" from the view in 3rd angle projection. However, if the software auto changed it (like it used to)....it would always be correct.



Linked dimensions are not quite the same as making one dimension equal to another. Linked dimensions are ashare the parameter name....so changing any of them change all of them. When you make one dimension equal to another, you can only change the original. You can also create "Global Variables" and link dimensions to them.



There is no one place unfortunately.....it is needed. You can select any linked dimension and rename them in the property manager....they all update.



Agreed...be nice to be able to edit them directly in the dialogues....miss that from UG.

Quote:

3. Lack of an Insert Mate
I will try some of the suggestions mentioned above (Mate References, alt-dragging edges) but I have a feeling they won't be as easy as clicking insert from the list of available constraints. Unless the two cylindrical edges are the exact same size I don't think SW can mate them -- I could be wrong, I hope I am).

Nice thing about "alt drag" is that you don't have to invoke the mate command. They do not have to be the same size. It still creates two mates (concentric,coincident) but it does it at the same time.

Quote:

As for SW not really being 64-bit, while we were doing exercises in class, the instructor was fielding tech support calls and I overheard him mention to the SW tech that the user was running SW 2009 and the it was not fully 64-bit. He also mentioned that not until 2010 running on Windows 7 will SW really be able to take advantage of 64-bit processing. Could have just been his lack of knowledge talking, but that's what he said.

Lack of knowledge or he was refering to something else.

_________________
Jason
-I don't know if I'm alive and dreaming, or dead and remembering.

"Chuck Norris can speak braille."

have you ran into any issues with this?

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Donovan's first rule of Vault installations: The likelyhood of a network installation commiting fubar in a new and unexpected manner increases exponentially with each additional person in a company’s I.T. Dept.

Second rule, make sure that I.T. has applied all necessary service packs to windows, 300 MBs still take awhile to download via High Speed Internet.

Caution, User may not be conscious at the time of posting.

You could do this through Ilogic, but really I think Inventor does it correctly. What you should be using is either the Vaults, or another file management type software.



I could see that being more useful then using shift to unselect.


Are you using a show all constraints on the RMB, or are you using the show constraint tool? Also, if you can't see certain constraints, RMB and pull up sketch visibility



In 2011 you can pattern a patter, but yes it would be nice if the original part was reselectable for additional patterning.


There's a tool for that in 2011 on the productivity panel, i think it's called something like copy and replace.

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Donovan's first rule of Vault installations: The likelyhood of a network installation commiting fubar in a new and unexpected manner increases exponentially with each additional person in a company’s I.T. Dept.

Second rule, make sure that I.T. has applied all necessary service packs to windows, 300 MBs still take awhile to download via High Speed Internet.

Caution, User may not be conscious at the time of posting.