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CAD - Engineering - Technical > What is the most used or best CAD engineering Software

stickyfox
Key Veteran
Location: Troy, NY, US

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I don't know the best but I'm pretty sure what the worst is. We switched from SolidWorks to Unigraphics (UGS/NX) for one year and it was terrible! I mean, it's very powerful, but you have to click on save every minute because it will crash at the drop of a hat, and it crushes the CPU just sitting there. If by some miracle NX managed to keep running, our license server would crash, and then we'd have to pray that we'd be allowed to save before the program bailed.

Oh yeah, my favorite NX feature. If you quit the program while it's saving your work (i.e., hit save, then quit), the program actually stops saving your work, then quits, so you end up with a corrupted file and no way to recover it.

-fox

06-09-2008 Over year old.

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Edwardn
Heliman
Location: USA, CA

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Wow. I was convinced that UGS is most stable CAD in the past, but I guess I never dig all the way. I am glad I never stop on UGS. As I've metioned before I am working with SW and one thing I have learn over the years-key of performance is hardware. If hardware-video card, RAM, proccessor-everything on place-never problem. I am running Moldflow and SW in the same time and don't even see performance slow down. Never had corrupted or missing files.

BTW-first thing my teacher told me-in the CAD "save" is first command I have to learn.

06-10-2008 Over year old.

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SSN Pru
Elite Veteran
Location: Taxachusetts

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Quote
Pro/E is ok, but their stupid hierarchy menu structure and excessive dependence on Father-Child association make it counter productive. In reality you just want the job done fast instead of thinking how to make the model universally parametric so any modification would be possible with minimum time loss, which is never the case.

Solidworks has the same 'Parent-Child' dependencies too. It's a pain sometimes. Even with careful planning beforehand, you still run into problems requiring more time to rebuild.

I use SW exclusively at work on a Dell Precision 690 Workstation. I routinely fire up two instances of SW and open pretty large assemblies . It get's slow sometimes but never crashes.

**Fingers Crossed**

Oh, I also love the built in tutorials in SW. I taught myself how to use the program by sitting down for 8 hours and running through all of those tutorials. I still refer to them sometimes if I forget how to do something...

I recommend at least the Student Edition of SW to anyone looking to learn a 3d CAD package.

06-10-2008 Over year old.

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stickyfox
Key Veteran
Location: Troy, NY, US

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The value of being able to just grab an eraser and go crazy on a drawing cannot be overstated. Computers still have a little way to go in that area.

-fox

06-10-2008 Over year old.

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SSN Pru
Elite Veteran
Location: Taxachusetts

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Yes, I print my drawings out to redline them.

CAD packages are severely lacking in this area.

06-10-2008 Over year old.

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Torquestar
Heliman
Location: California

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I stumbled across a program called Alibre Design Expert awhile back. They bill themselves as having 80 percent of the features of Solidworks, at 1/5th or 1/10th the price (somewhere in there).

They offer a free version to download that limits you on the number of parts in an assembly I think, and then the full blown version for about $1500 offers animation, rendering, and even CNC mill CAM software.

What's also cool is they run contests with the free version on their forums and someone modeled a 3D heli head and won... I forget which heli it was, though.

06-28-2008 Over year old.

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cclark440
Heliman
Location: Lake Forest, Ca USA

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I have been using Alibre for almost 5 years now. I know that it isn't as powerful as some of the other CAD software, but for the price you can't beat it. I did some consulting work for Technopower Engines, he builds radials for scale planes. I modeled is biggest radial engine with Alibre
Here is an image of his big 9C. This engine was completely modeled in Alibre Pro/Expert.
(Large pictures so I will just gove you links.)
http://www.candlprecision.com/Alibre/images/9casm.jpg
http://www.candlprecision.com/Alibr...plodedfront.JPG
In my opinion there isn't anything on a heli that could be modeled in Alibre express, the free version.

As for the most popular everyday CAD package, it is Solidworks hands down. I deal with hundreds of customers all over the world, and the large majority use Solidworks.

Luckily as of the Latest version of Alibre I can open Native Solidworks files. Albire is connstantly getting better. They are releasing a major version about every 9 months, with Sps in between.

Just my $.02 worth

Clint
Caliber 30, Blade CX, Saving For Caliber5.

07-14-2008 Over year old.

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Roscoe
Senior Heliman
Location: garfield Hts.,ohio - USA

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Just downloaded the SolidWorks 2009 Beta; looks about the same as SW2008 toolbar wise; played with it a little and right off the bat I noticed a few nice things with mating in assemblies; will not allow you to pick items from the feature tree if N/A to a mate instead of picking it, clicking OK and getting an error (if you click on a point/axis/surface/etc. it will be highlited in red if N/A and green if Applicable -nice).

Been using SW since '98, man how times have changed for the better.

And as far as the most common CAD - SolidWorks is taking over; AutoCad is still up there usage wise.

IMHO Unigraphics is top dog power/feature wise.

Just my 2 cents.

Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.

07-29-2008 Over year old.

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Havoc
Key Veteran
Location: Ky.

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I use Inventor, mechanical desktop, and autocad. All autodesk products. I love Inventor. It is easy to create basically little programs without a line of code. Say you draw a feature on a part and want to use that feature on other parts but with different dimensions. You just click ifeature, click the components you need and then can create a table that governs it's dimensions. I've also have parts that I use frequently tied to excel sheets and made icons for them. So I can just click and add that part to an assembly and click the excel file to tailor it's dimensions to the project. The x-cell file has it's own formulas that govern tolerances and standards to make other changes to the part based on the few fields I change. All other parts in the assembly can be updated when changes are made to those dimensions. I'm sure many of the solid modeling packages have similar features. So I'm not trying to promote it. But I just love that I can do in hours what had taken days with traditional CAD software like autocad.

10-01-2008 Over year old.

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Steeltoes
Senior Heliman
Location: Mankato MN

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I use Turbo CAD Professional from IMSI design

AMA #913061
INERTIA RC REP

10-02-2008 Over year old.

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duckmansweb
Senior Heliman
Location: Sunshine coast, QLD, Australia

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solidworks and mastercam for producing g code

05-22-2009 12:02 PM

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beeflyer2
Elite Veteran
Location: Woodstock, GA - USA

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+1 for CATIA V5.