please dont answer the poll if you dont have experience, and please dont answer if you use one for your own manifold making company or whatever. id like to have a more acurate representation of larger companies.
thanks

either you personally, your company, or the designers that work in your company:
im curious what cad packages you use.
i use solidworks a lot and am fairly good with it, but i tried to play with NX5 today and i dont like it very much. im just curious what a lot of people outside of academics use.

 

at other companies i've worked for we used solidworks, unigraphics nx2, catia, autocad...

personally i like catia for creating stuff, but ug for creating prints off solid models. i've been for training on both softwares and i just found catia much more powerful and easier to go back and make changes. in my experience, autocad is more for 2d stuff. a lot of oem's and tier 1 suppliers are using catia or ug.

 

At the company i work for we use Catia alot, but theres another package coming more popular- Solid Edge.. Ive used it a few times, its similar to CATIA V5 but slightly stripped down and alot easier to pick up..

 

hmm i just love how intuitive SW is and its really easy to operate for me. i would venture to say its one of the easiest to pick up for a beginner.

 

We use autodesk architectural desktop (autocad). We do building design.

edit - oh yeah, worlds largest plumbing, hvac, waterworks supplier

 

We use Soildworks for all of are designs and autocad for easy prints or 2D parts.

 

CATIA is used by Honda (including HPD), Toyota, and Renault-F1.

If you use Solidworks, which is a very good program for basic CAD, you can learn CATIA in no time. Dassault Systems is the parent company for both, so the interface is similar.

CATIA has great toolpathing and FEA features.

 

yeah i figured catia would be easy to learn.

does anyone have experience with cosmos and flowworks too?

 

Is there anyplace that sells a student version of Catia?

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by NaPiEr &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Is there anyplace that sells a student version of Catia?</TD></TR></TABLE>

My school gets some sort of discount. Best thing to do is to contact Dassault directly.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by dfoxengr &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">hmm i just love how intuitive SW is and its really easy to operate for me. i would venture to say its one of the easiest to pick up for a beginner.</TD></TR></TABLE>

Solidworks is as intuitive as paint.

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by dfoxengr &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">yeah i figured catia would be easy to learn.

does anyone have experience with cosmos and flowworks too?</TD></TR></TABLE>

A lot of my friends have. They still prefer Fluent for fluids, most use ANSYS for FEA but that could be because the classes focus on it. I personally don't do much with them, I just do controls/systems modeling in Matlab.

 

I like SW since it's easy to pick up and like what some of you said, it's intuitive. But because I'm working in a architect firm, we use Autocad for 99% of the work. We come across some projects that requires some mechanical items to be drawn up and still we use Autocad for it. I wish we could use other programs to draw up the mechanical items or even some of the structural, but that 1% isn't important enough to convince the firm to get/use another program, and because it can be done with Autocad.

 

Difficulty with power....

SW = Easy to learn and use....not as powerful.
Pro/E = Harder to learn and use than SW, but more powerful without all the plug-ins.
Catia = Even harder and more complex, but much more powerful. I have/use all three and SW is by far the most basic and user friendly of all of the three I have listed.

Interface/integration with Nastran/Patran and Fluent has always been more complicated with SW than the other two as well and requires many more plug-ins to be able to use it to the level that we have needed to.

 

I use AutoCad 2000 for product design and a custom CAM program to write G-code for my CNC milling machines.

If you're looking for reccomendations, what are you using or planning to use CAD for?

Evan

 

If your planning on working for someone else, I would learn Mastercam or Solidworks. If your using CAD/CAM in your own business/shop, just use what you can afford and make sure it has the plug-ins and features available to support future designs and manufacturing growth.

 

In the last 12 years ive been in the CAD/CAM industry, i have used several different programs...SolidEdge, SolidWorks, lots of different versions of AutoCAD, Metalsoft's Fabriwin, GibbsCAM, CAMWorks, MasterCAM ProE, Trumpf's laser software, and a few others here and there on a limited basis. for designing, i prefer SolidWorks...Metalsoft's Fabriwin is kinda archaic, but works great for generating code for CNC lasers/punch/routers...and for CNC machining im partial to GibbsCAM.

at the company im currently working for, i am using Solidworks 2008, Fabriwin 8.2, Camworks 2006ex

 

ok so i love solidworks myself, but im having trouble using it to make CNC code. so we have to transfer is to NX to do that which is really annoying. also i havent played with the real cosmos, only the express version, which only does one stress-type, but people say its not as powerful as NX's FEM software, or ansys. i also would like to know how Flowworks does, as opposed to Fluent, if anyone has experience with that.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by fast2camciv &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">
at the company im currently working for, i am using Solidworks 2008, Fabriwin 8.2, Camworks 2006ex</TD></TR></TABLE>

Whats your opinion on Camworks? We tried it at my old shop (against my will) and I just hated it. The feature recognition was a neat idea but it just didnt play out well on the variety of parts we did. We eventually went back to Mastercam.

I work as a full time programmer in a mold shop now designing electrodes for EDM machining. Solid models of the mold inserts are designed in Solidworks, and then passed on to me where I design the Electrodes and machine them with Mastercam.

 

Damn, I just finished a project with involved a lot of composites modeling in ANSYS. I'm glad I'll never have to do this **** again after tomorrow. I can't wait to get back to Matlab/Simulink.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by Rosko &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">

Whats your opinion on Camworks? We tried it at my old shop (against my will) and I just hated it. The feature recognition was a neat idea but it just didnt play out well on the variety of parts we did. We eventually went back to Mastercam. </TD></TR></TABLE>
it sucks out of the few different machining softwares ive been involved with, it has to be the worst. well its just kinda half assed...there are some semi cool things about it, but most of them dont work like they should for real world parts (they work great in the tutorials lol) i try to use the feature recognition all the time, and most of the time i only get a hole here and there. it seems like im allways doing 1 or 2 steps more than what i should have to. i make it work because thats all we have...but if it were my choice, GibbsCAM would be my first choice, with MasterCAM coming in a close second, camworks wouldnt even be a thought in my mind

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by .dave &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Damn, I just finished a project with involved a lot of composites modeling in ANSYS. I'm glad I'll never have to do this **** again after tomorrow. I can't wait to get back to Matlab/Simulink. </TD></TR></TABLE>

how did you model composites in ansys?

 

im still on catia v4 at my workplace. i do the programming for a 4 spindle cnc drilling machine. i dont sit and program the ENTIRE airplane, so some genius created a software or IUA within catia v4 that will do all the programming for me
all i have to do is follow suit on what design engineering releases....enter in the part #, picture sheet #, and revision level .

i dont do alot of designing in catia v4 since im not a design engineer, but during my 3 wk catia v4 training session i did some design work, but i forgot most of that stuff now since i dont use it alot in my current position, im just a petty M.E.

i've never used any other cad/cam system other than catia v4, although sooner or later, i will be on catia v5, but dont know when.......ive seen v5 and it looks super neat and more friendly than catia v4

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by dfoxengr &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">

how did you model composites in ansys?</TD></TR></TABLE>

You can use a shell element (non-linear shell #91 I think), model the part as an area. Under real constants you can select how many layers you want to use, what material to use for each layer, layer orientation and thickness. Then when you build your material model you can enter the modulus of elasticity for each direction, same thing with failure criterion.

 

great, because we needed a way to do CF the other day. ill try that out

 

What are you trying to model? What kind of shape is it?