A CATIA freshman from SolidWorks has questions

[edykes]

I've been using SolidWorks for over 7 years now on some big projects. Everyone in the industry talks about how much better CATIA is over SolidWorks for big and complex designs. I have a copy of CATIA V5R16 on my PC now to use to learn it.

In SolidWorks I like to design in the top-down and all in contexts method. So for example using assembly sketches to drive the design down to the creation of the final parts. I also like the variable design approach where parts can automatically adjust to changing design parameters.

The question is, how do I get started in this approach?

There's quite a lot of different terminology in CATIA. So if someone who has experience in Solidworks and CATIA, and could offer any tips, it would be of great help to me.

 

[itsmyjob]

Did you get a training ?

Eric N.
indocti discant et ament meminisse periti ​

 

[KevinDeSmet]

I am a SolidWorks and CATIA user so I can hopefully shed some light here, firstly just forget the whole "CATIA is so much better than SolidWorks" thing because it's an old wives tale that probably wasn't even true back in 2000 and certainly isn't today.

It depends on what you're doing, CATIA has entire workbenches dedicated to Composites so if you use that it's obviously better. It has more advanced surfacing workbenches for conceptual modeling and class-a modeling which you will not find in SolidWorks. It has Human ergonomics tools which are nowhere to be found in SolidWorks.

Now I'm going to wager a guess that you don't care about any of those things. So, for the majority of mechanical design work it's going to be pretty much on-par with SolidWorks. That's solid part modeling, assembly modeling and drawings. The sheet metal in CATIA is on-par as well but its version of Weldments called Structure Design is quite a bit weaker.

If you pair CATIA up with ENOVIA VPM it can become more efficient for big and complex designs as it stores assemblies in a database. If you're using CATIA stand-alone file based you are absolutely missing out, it's a n00b thing to do so just ... don't do it!!! it will hurt more than it did with SolidWorks if you do.

As to your question, it's actually a very similar way of working top down as you would in SolidWorks. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that assemblies (.CATProduct) can not contain planes or sketches, so you'll need to make a skeleton part to keep those in, which you probably already did in SolidWorks anyway. There are some settings you'll want to check as you would in SolidWorks too, in CATIA's Tools > Options go to Infrastructure, Part Infrastructure and make sure "Keep Link" and "Show newly created" is ticked on and "Use root context" I'd recommend checking off.

Anyway I could write a lot more but I'll leave it at this, if you have anymore question just shoot.

 

[edykes]

Thanks heaps for that Kevin. These are the top level questions I have and you've answered them and so much more.
I guess I am working with CATIA on a stand-alone system. I just really want to learn where everything is so when I apply for work here in Germany I can confidently say I know my way around CATIA. Then there I would assume they have a proper server setup, but now I know what to look out for.

Thanks for the tip on the skeleton part, I've done this before many times in SW.

This gives me some confidence to have a go at something knowing I am roughty going in a forward direction.

Cheers.

 

[itsmyjob]

...I can confidently say I know my way around CATIA ...

i takes me less than 5 minutes to know if someone knows his way around CATIA. If the company is looking for an engineer, it would be OK for you to tell them you are ready to learn CATIA and you don't see that as a challenge because of your adaptability skills, if they are looking for a Catia guru, then you need to learn fast with an outdated version.

You can search YouTube for plenty of Catia videos, you can learn a lot from them.

search the online doc for links and publication, it will help for skeleton methodology.

Eric N.
indocti discant et ament meminisse periti ​

 

[KevinDeSmet]

It's my pleasure to help, what itsmyjob said is right, CATIA has a concept known as Publications and it's a little like the Solidworks Mate References so that when you modify and/or replace parts, your linked geometry will be far less fragile and break less often. Of course basic concept like linking to sketches not model vertices, edges or faces still apply in CATIA as they would in Solidworks.

It's very hard to learn CATIA on your own, if you get at least some work experience with it though, learning more and more workbenches CATIA has to offer on your own (using the help documentation) does work surprisingly well though. It's just hard to do that when you are coming at CATIA from scratch, at least I found that to be the case for me.

CATIA stand-alone will do fine to learn but just remember, if the companies are even remotely competent or big enough they have it tied together with either Windchill, ENOVIA or Teamcenter. And you'll be using the PLM system with CATIA pretty much half and half so it's not an unimportant part of the whole picture of a design engineer on CATIA.

 

[ferdo]

Hi,

I've done a search here in forum for best practice , it was interesting to see different opinions a long the time (including mine)...

Regards
Fernando

https://picasaweb.google.com/102257836106335725208

https://picasaweb.google.com/103462806772634246699/

 

[edykes]

Thanks guys again for all the advice. I've been watching lots of youtube videos; some people have some really complex ways of doing things. I've been playing with the surfacing tools which seem to be a lot more capable than SolidWorks'.

I get overuse problems in my right hand from lots of left mouse button clicking, and watching the youtube videos I'm seeing many mouse clicks.

So to summarize so far: Catia isn't the holy grail of CAD systems it's made out to be; It's potential is only reached if used with a parts database; Best practices from Solidworks still apply to Catia.