Alternative CAD tools
Sometimes you just need a different tool. No judgment calls about why, you just might for whatever reason need a different tool. I’ve looked at a few CAD tools, and found things that were important improvements over my current tools, and also things that were impossible compromises. After having used mainly one CAD tool for the last 11 years, it can be difficult to be objective about it or alternatives, but I’ll try.
Purpose
What do you need your CAD tool for? You know, not all CAD tools try to be what SolidWorks tries to be. SolidWorks seems to try to be a one-stop-shop. To some extent it succeeds, but sometimes you might just need specialist tools. For example, I’d say that SW is pretty good for stuff like machine design and sheet metal. It’s great for machined parts. SW certainly has capabilities in complex shapes and plastics, but it is far from ideal for these functions. SolidWorks isn’t great at piping or wiring, either, but it does it. I wouldn’t use it for architecture, but you might make it work.
Anyway, here is a little list of things I put together about a few CAD products. I’m not directly familiar with most of these, and I’m not shilling any products or trying to promote any ultimate solution, just talking about alternatives for various purposes. I encourage people with specific experience with some of these products to share what you like or don’t like about the tool, and what kind of work you think it is best suited for. The categories aren’t meant to be definitive, just to give an indication of where I see the tool fitting or not fitting into what I do. The categories certainly oversimplify things. Don’t get worked up about the categories. (Geez, why am I getting defensive about this already? Premonition?) I’m sure I’ve left something out or miscategorized something, and this is the kind of junk that some people get really upset about, so please, no flame war here. I’m looking for considered opinions, not dogma.
General purpose modeling
Complex surfaces (nurbs)
Digital sculpting (mesh)
Simple concept models
(Moment of Inspiration – MoI)
Architectrure
Reverse Engineering
Rapidform
Geomagic Raindrop
Revworks
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Of these, there are a couple of products that I want to have a closer look at. I’ve used Rhino off and on, but in the next weeks I will try to write about how Rhino can fit into the workflow for a product designer, plastic part designer or complex shape modeling scenario that is somehow tied to SolidWorks.
I obtained a trial license for SolidThinking, a seemingly overlooked piece of software from the Altair company that is involved in some pretty high end software. This looks interesting to me, and could possibly have my type of modeling more squarely in its sights than does SW. Complex surface modeling is at best a niche sideline for SW. For SolidThinking, it appears to be dead center.
Maybe its just the similarity in the names, but Think3 is another product that I get confused with SolidThinking. A recent interview on Novedge rekindled my interest in this product.
Other tools interest me as concept modelers, such as MOI, Shark, and modo. If I had multiple lives to live, I’d love to be a digital sculptor. It’s one of those things that looks like fun, but I’m not sure I could make a living at it.
In conjunction with the digital sculpting is the reverse engineer sofware. Rapidform is one I’ve played with and threatened to do a review of, but have never done it. The connection between digital sculpting and reverse engineering is the point mesh data that both work with. Reverse engineering software enables you to take mesh models from CG/digital sculpting applications and make them into NURBS models compatible with SolidWorks.
modo is hot news these days too because they come from the Luxology company, who is responsible for the PhotoView360 software. I think it is a bit overkill that SolidWorks has sunk so much development resources into rendering, and they have a half complete simple renderer, along with a too-complex, halfway renderer – both about half finished after all of this time of delivering half finished product. It;s like going to my brother’s house. He has 4 construction projects half done. What a mess. Anyway, modo is a newish CG/digital sculpt/mesh modeler, and it looks pretty good.
So you can see I have no end of curiosity, but not near enough time to play with all of this stuff enough to say something useful about it. Any suggestions or favorites from the list for different applications?
matt, i have a question here, NX and solidworks are build on the same kernel, so when you invoke for example the fill surface feature,solidworks actually calls a parasolid function, and the kernel creates that surface. so things must not be that dramatic for solidworks. am i right? so why solidworks lacks many surfacing features which NX offers?
Thanks.
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That’s a great question, and one I’m not qualified to answer. Still, it won’t stop me from taking a poke at it. Some of the SolidWorks functions are not from Parasolid, as I understand it. Some are actually from Catia. So they’ve got multiple geometry engines in there. I doubt they have the entire Catia kernel, but they have at least a part of it.
I’m not sure about why SW would not have implemented something that is in Parasolid. It could be that NX also uses functionality that is not in Parasolid. The whole Synchronous Technology things is said to not be from Parasolid. Could be that there are other things too. Siemens knows that their Parasolid is licensed to competitors, and they may not put all of their best tricks in that bag, but I don’t really know.
The fill surface stuff is from CATIA and is actually fairly unique in the industry. Other apps have heal commands that do similar things but nothing has the kind of feedback you get in SolidWorks (apart from maybe CATIA of course).
I have it on good authority that NOBODY who licenses parasolid uses vanilla parasolid to drive all the geometry.
Hey Matt,
forgot to add a couple of other apps to your list:
3D Architecture – Archicad, AllPlan and VectorWorks (http://www.nemetschek.com/en/landing_page.html)
Product Design – Ashlar-Vellum Xenon and Cobalt (www.ashlar.com)
Sub-Division modelling – Cinema 4D (www.maxon.com)
Solids and Sub-Div – FormZ (www.formz.com)
All the above are Mac and Windows apart from AllPlan.
solidworks fill surface is even more powerful than catia’s! in solidworks you can define constrain curves but in catia you just have a passing point,not lines,splines or other curves as constrain:
http://i35.tinypic.com/mr2q2v.jpg
Matt,
As long as this tool has been around, it really hasn’t gotten it’s just due. Sensable. From a Product Designers point of view, this tool really can let you “feel” what you’re designing. The voxel based geometry handles very differently than any other 3D Package out there. If you get the high end version of the system, it has the same auto-surfacer that Next Engine has to export out the data as a NURBS patch. (Lic from Rapid Form)
I have been using it for about 7 years now, and hands down the Sensable to Solidworks combo is amazing. The haptic feedback that you get while designing give a sense of insight that, in some ways, makes it one of the most intuitive design tools out there.
Just 2cents worth
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I had an opportunity to play with it a couple of times. I know two groups that have it. It is cool. Kinda pricy, isn’t it? I forget.
Yeah, the high end system runs about the price of a new car (under 30k, but not by too much). You would think that after 10+ years on the market they would be reasonable and knock a few grand off.
One of the biggest side advantages is that with scanned data you don’t really have to worry about normals, surfaces, or things that would take a program like Geomagics, Raindrop, or something like that to fix. The Voxels just fill it into the scanned data and you can go from there. Items that would normally take hours to get through the normal data clean up process take 1/3 the amount of time.
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Sounds so cool. I’d love to have a job just playing with stuff like that.
HI,
I’am a 13 years experience industrial designer, I spent all those years working on small industrial design office. That mean I do a lot of different things and I work on a lot of different projects.
What I fear the most is starting to think like the sofware, not like me. So flexibility is for me a very important thing.
First I worked with Keycreator(cadkey)then I switch to Think3 now I am working with Pro/e.
The first two were used at my former job, most of the parts I draw was plastic parts and it work very fine.
Now i work with pro/e, it is ok for the kind of design we are doing here, mostly basic shape and small assembly. (less than 50 parts including hardware)
below a list of what I like ans don’t like about those software:
————————————–
Keycreator:
Strengths:
-No history tree ( I don’t like that, I’am always amaze to see how much time I spent working on the tree and not doing design!)
-Work great with imported files
-small files
Weaknesses:
-assembly file
-User interface, similar to autocad 10 but with icons.
-Difficult to understand if you are an history tree fan.
—————————–
Think3:
This is my fevorite, because it is very close to the way I think! Designer not engineer.
Strengths:
-Solid, surface, both at the same time, seemless integration.
-Design like a designer or an engineer, depend of what my needs are.
-small files.
-User interface.
-Assembly file flexibility.
Weaknesses:
-Difficulte to find someone who use it!
-import/export could be improve, especialy with SW
-Difficult to understand if you are working with SW/Pro-e style CAD.
-Solid are less powerfull than SW.
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Pro/e:
I hate it!
Strengths:
-Solid, solid, solid!
-New interface are good, when available.
-Assembly file.
-Strong even on though job.
Weaknesses:
-Difficulte to find someone who use it!
-Display is bad
-Bad integration with Windows, Unix link window popup with
strange messages.
-Saving file may be the most complicated think!
even if I hate it, I must admit that it does a great job here, maybe it is because it is used for almoste 20year.
Sorry for my english, french translation available upon request!
PTC is for sale now!
I was glad to see someone mentioned SensAble Technologies. I used to be VP of Development there and even though I left in 2002, I can’t help but feel that FreeForm is absolutely the coolest software on the planet. A couple points of note:
1. It uses the sense of touch to do your work. That is you feel the shape of the clay as you sculpt it. Sounds like science fiction but its not – -there is a real science to how its done. The first time you “touch” an object in the computer it will blow your mind (no porn jokes please, heard them all already!)The downside of this is that you have to be a skilled sculptor to use it. The upside is that if you can sculpt you can do cool stuff on your first day. I saw a sculptor from Hasbro create a a pretty detailed head and shoulders in 20 minutes!
2. Because it uses Voxels to represent the model and not NURBS you can create ANY shape in no time at all (again, assuming you are a sculptor). If you like CAD you HAVE to see the stuff it can create. See http://www.sensable.com/industries-model-gallery.htm#A
3. If you need to interface with CAD you can wrap the Voxels in NURBS and export to SolidWorks or wherever. This used to be manual (but was fast cuz you could touch the model to lay down the splines) but it looks like they’ve automated it since I left.
4. The speed of creation is mind-blowing. There is stuff on the website that was created in 4 hours that would have taken 2 weeks in regular CAD.
5. Its not as expensive as it used to be. The device that does the “Touch” was 10K, so that pushed everything up. Now, they have a model that is about 1K and they have plugins for Rhino and Alias I think also.
Anyhow, I don’t work there any more, so I am not trying to sell you this stuff, other than it is fabulouslly cool. You MUST check it out if you do early stage conceptual stuff or are in footwear, collectibles, jewerly, or other things that are most often sculpted by hand but give CAD hell(Hallmark for example, uses it to do collectibles; gillette did Fusion with it; converse and Adidas both do sneakers; and Creata did the McDonald’s Simpson toys with it).
OK, back to my real job…making Synchronous Technology rule the world!
I checked out the Sensable system a few years back and there was a version for about £2500 designed for modelling and animation set ups in Maya. The CAD integration at the time was around £16k. Having said all that if you do that kind of work it is the only tool for you – seriously. One of the features I particularly liked was the fail safe shelling- yes – it will shell anything. The Freeform Plus software had loads of tools for creating tooling from the wildest models – and it was fast.
Pity it costs so much though – if it was £4k it would be a no brainer for many.