Basic NX Set-up and use help

[Tractioneer]

Hello all,

I am a newbie to this forum.
I need some major NX help. I am a majorly frustrated former Pro/E user.
I have been subjected to NX 6.5 for almost 2 years now and we recently have installed NX 8.5 on my machine for me to test out.

A little background on me:
I have been in the Mechanical Design Field fo 28 years.
I have worked in many widely varied fields from Heavy Duty Construction Equipment, to Electronics Packaging to the Aerospace Industry.
I have worked in both Product Development and Manufacturing roles. And often worked in both at the same place of employment.
I have worked with plastic injection molded components, castings of all types, weldments, composits, assembly and testing etc.
I started out doing Ink Drawings on Mylar, and worked thru a couple different Flat CAD packages (AutoCad & Anvil).
I am a former Pro/E user, Wild Fire 5. I was on Pro/E for 19 years. I have been heavily involved with the configuration and set-up of Pro/E.
I have done a lot of work with Pro/E Mechanisms.
I have about a year of Solidworks 2012 experience now too.

The company I currently work for uses NX.We are currently on 6.5 but are making the jump to 8.5 soon. I have a seat installed on my machine for me to test out and try to become comfortable with etc. before we switch over. I can not say I am a big fan of NX. I miss my Pro/E. Our company also was recently forced to aquire a few seats of Solidworks for some collaberative projects etc. So when I got a chance to get away from NX, I jumped at it. Solidworks is OK, but it is no Pro/E.

Anyway, back to NX issues.
Like I mentioned, I was heavily involved with getting Pro/E set-up at a couple different places I work for. Like setting up of configuration files, drawing detail files and drawing formats etc. and establishing company paramerters for use in the models and our PDM system.
I understand the use of model parameters and attributes etc. At my current place of employment, our CAD administrator is not a dedicated CAD administrator, it's a secondary duty, his function is in the machine shop as a machinist/Manufacturing engineer. He also does a little mechanical design. The only CAD systems he has worked with was SDRC/Ideas and now NX. He does not tend to offer up much helpful info, unless asked for it and is kind of narrow minded when it comes to the needs of other users, as in if he has never needed to perform any particular form of feature creation, nobody else needs to know how to do it etc. Also our current product line has mostly consisted of large weldments and some sheet metal enclosure design, nothing too tricky.
So most other useres here have not needed to create much advanced geometry. I have been doing some new product development here incorporating plastic injection molded components. So I have the therory that if you don't know no better, you don't miss it. I have a feeling that may be what is/has happened here, our administrator does not know what a better set-up system can do and feels no need to try to improve how our system currently works.
Many of us believe our NX system as a whole could perform much better than it currently does if things in the operational background were set-up better.
Is there way to compare or mimic the operational set-up of NX similarly to the way config files do for Pro/E? including like dawing set-up files?
Am I looking in the right place to try to improve how NX works?

Also, in the past I have used a lot of surfacing within Pro/E. As a designer in Pro/E I embraced the use of Datum Planes, Axis and Points etc. In NX, Datums, Axis & Points seem to be of little use. Especially in sketches. Why is that?

Any help or suggestions will be greatly appretiated.

 

[vball85jb]

Hopefully you will get some of your answers through this forum (I am no help since I have only been on NX for 6 months myself), but you might want to see if your company will send you to PLM World. You will be able to spend several days with NX users and the NX project managers.

 

[looslib]

NX uses a configuration files differently than Pr/E does. You still have the various 'levels' of control; ie. multiple config.pro files; that can be set for company and user items. One difference is the drawing control settings are in the same file as the modeling settings.

When I switched from UG V18 to Wildfire, there were many things I wasn't able to control the way I could with UG. The fundamental approach of both companies is different and you need to understand some of that to understand system configurations.

Have you had any training on NX? If it has been learn on your own, there is no surprise you or your company are struggling. Training is not an expense, but an investment in a tool and the people. Talk to your boss about taking a system admin class in utilizing NX. There are a lot of things to set to make a system perform.


Picture a CAD system like a Dallara IndyCar chassis. Every team gets the same basic package. What your team does with it makes your car a winner or just a memeber of the pack. The same with CAD systems. How your company customizes it will make it work better for you or you will be always struggling to gert the optimal performance.

Background info: started with UG2 in 1987 and have used it for NC programming, part and assembly design, drafting, sheet metal and been a system admin for 13 years. Wrote many GRIP programs to customize UG for our environment and to do things the standard code did not. Added Wildfire usage in 2001 mostly as an admimistrator and added Windchill/PDMLink in 2004. I did some contract work where I did use NX 2/4 for 15 months in 2009/2010. I am currently doing Wildifre and Windchill support. 25 years using CAD/CAM/PDM systems and a degree in Manufacturing Engineering Technology. I have also done NC programming using APT.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[Toost]

A complex start question,...
You should definitely be at the correct place ( i.e here) to get help on your questions.
I have no experience of pro/E but 23 years of NX .
I will respond only to the last question, I have seen Pro/E in action but as said no real experience. Don't get me wrong here, i have full respect for Pro/E, but in my NX-colored view "they" sometimes do things in "more complicated than necessary ways". Where one in Pro/E needs to prepare before one can do say a surface, In NX the workflow will contain the necessary options /steps. But, as said, it's my perception. I have for example seen an example where ( we were running head to head in an evaluation) We should instance a piece of geometry along a path and the Pro/E user first instanced a number of datum coordinate systems along the path, then in a second command placed geometry copies on top of the coordinate systems. In NX I instanced the piece of geometry along the path, no datums involved. The final result was equal.

Regards,
Tomas