I agree that MSC is on the ropes. Ansys workbench with ANSYS clasic is far ahead of them on all fronts. I don't agree that PATRAN is better for composites at all. Its all MSC's fault, they have been a cash cow company relying on the fact that engineers are horrendously conservative. Anyone who...
NE and MSC are very nearly the same. You can play them off against each other to get a better deal, perhaps. I don't know nx. FEMAP is a good little program. I have used it with external Excel VBA programs with great success.
However, for the money ANSYS is the better deal because it is better...
Ansys/ed - if you don't have a licence, the educational version of ANSYS is the best tool for learning. It is about $300. The ansys documents in the software are the best learning tools in my opinion. ANSYS distributors also offer short courses but they are expensive. Sorry, I have never heard...
I have terrible trouble using hard points on areas. Typically the meshing fails if there are more than a few points. After repeated attempts with different meshing parameters the model becomes corrupted. One symptom is that it starts creating hundreds of keypoints at 0,0,0 on its own. Also, the...
I did this a while back for denting aircraft skins. If I remember ansys has simple rigid shapes availble for this in the contact module. Other wise you could just create a sphere of dummy elements and then use cerig with the centroid node as the master. If I dig up my old program I could email...