Creo 2 simulate licensing 1

[dgallup]

Long time Pro/E user, just getting around to testing out Creo2. I installed Creo Parametric 2.0 M50 and it littered my desktop with Creo Simulate, Thermal, Structure & ModelCheck icons. Now we have never had licenses to any of those things in the past but I thought maybe PTC had seen the light and decided to give everybody limited functionality access to these modules in the hope that it would get users to pony up more money for more powerful versions. So I fired up Creo Simulate for the first time and opened an existing part. The first thing it says is "Unable to get required Creo Simulate License."

So has PTC just teased me and wasted a bunch of disk and desktop space for software I can never use or did I miss something in the setup/install?

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[brep]

Creo Simulate Lite is available on all Creo licenses. Did you check the box (Simulate Lite) in the dialog for Model Setup?

 

[dgallup]

I do not see any Simulate Lite check box.

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[dgallup]

I figured it out. You can not run Simulate Lite if you fire up Simulate. You can only do it if you start out in Parametric and choose the Simulate application. Then you get the extra Simulate Lite check box. Thank you PTC for once again creating an obtuse user interface.

So the Creo Simulate, Thermal and Structure icons on my desktop are indeed completely useless.

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[loki3000]

simulate lite is just about useless for anything but quick pretty drawings for management.
i think you can get a student or an eval version even if you are not a student. contact your ptc rep.

 

[dgallup]

I'm just trying to see what is new, improved, useful or FUBAR in Creo2. Seems heavy on the FUBAR.

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[brep]

Not sure I get the FUBAR reference, but just FYI the Creo release of Simulate was a big one, with the following major improvements: Large deformation contact, coupled nonlinearities, load history controls, 2D Axisymmetric nonlinear, nonlinear springs, solid bolt preloading, temperature dependent conductivity, grey body radiation, moving thermal loads... Not to mention the ability to created mapped (hex) meshes, automatically mesh prismatic parts with hex/wedge, better thin solid recognition... Oh and revamped fasteners...

Creo 2.0's development focus was on robustness and performance, specifically in contact performance and for dynamic analyses. Comparisons for contact analyses between Wildfire 5 and Creo 2.0 are, in my opinion, particularly "useful and improved".

And the new, useful and improved will continue in Creo 3 with a couple of significant nonlinear enhancements, a revamped results environment, easier to use/smarter bolt preloading, and so on.

 

[jvian]

I totally disagree. Creo 2.0 has its bugs but not like Creo 1.0 did and has definitely increased our productivity by orders of magnitude. In simulate we have been able to take solution times for dynamic analyses from 30+ hours down to 2-4 hrs with more confidence in the results. That takes several iterations down from weeks to days. Our user experience has been nothing but positive once we were used to the changes and the interface. We still have a couple of seats using WF5.0 and it drives me crazy now that I am used to Creo 2.0. The FUBAR in all versions of ProE/Creo imo is with drawings and feature availability and location changes. Certain features used to be available to all standard modeling packages and are now part of the specific 'extensions'. If it were not for the simulation advances in dynamic analyses introduced in 1.0 and improved in 2.0 I doubt we would have looked at the update but I can honestly say that we as a company are in a way better position after having done so. I feel the help and documentation have improved (although are still terrible) which is helpful since direct PTC support is pretty useless still.

Oh and I agree that simulate lite is nothing but marketing strategy to get you interested; completely useless. Also the icons always install with each update but a lot of software suites do this now days anyway and it is easy to clean them up. I prefer this to the days of WF3 and WF4 when the installations were separate for modeling and Mechanica. To me those days were a pain in the neck and dealing with 'liscense simplification' and such. I shouldn't have to run several batch files in several locations to install and setup brand new software.

These are just my thoughts as it seems so many have resisted the Creo change because of the 'ribbon' without diligently evaluating its performance and we have been very happy. We did wait for the second major maintenance release however as we always do before trying anything.

 

[dgallup]

My comments are strictly as a Pro/W WF user moving to Creo2 who now has access to Simulate Lite for the first time. I obviously have no knowledge of previous versions of Mechanica or the more advanced capabilities of Simulate. My FUBAR reference is indeed aimed at the drawing mode which is way worse and the idiocy of the ribbon interface in general and the PTC implementation in particular. Getting a few custom mapkey icons into the ribbon interface is something like 27 different modes is ridiculous.

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[jvian]

I have to admit that I am glad drawings are not my primary focus as I only work test fixturing and tooling type drawings or I would get frustrated a lot more often. Good luck with the transition to Creo 2.0 if you keep up with it I think you will ultimately be satisfied. My recommendation has been to people here not to fight and resist the change too much as we have a few people people who do and they are the ones who get irritated the most. Similar to using add-ons to keep the ribbon in office 07+ away and back to the toolbar style. Again they are the ones who have struggled the most. Now we are all fairly proficient and back to a satisfied working environment. Have to admit the ribbon changes over the last few years were rough for quite a few of us, me included in the beginning. Can't remember how many times people had to get up and go get coffee or something to keep from throwing monitors across rooms. Funny how little changes in software can ramp production to a halt trying to learn something unnecessary because it looks better or so they say. There was a lot of wasted money and effort trying to 're-find' commands.

Just rambling sorry, good luck,

- J -

 

[dgallup]

Sweet. Got some time to come back to try simulate lite. My model has 249 surfaces. Simulate lite has a limit of 200 surfaces. Looks like it's defeature time.

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[dgallup]

Well, defeatureing didn't work. The model I want to use is an instance of a generic. Suppressing features in a generic is only temporary, I know that but figure it's OK. I suppress of a bunch of unimportant features, go into simulate lite and the first thing it does is regenerate the model which immediately brings back all the features I just suppressed. Brilliant. Does anybody at PTC actually try to use their software before they release it?

I know, I know, I can break my model out of the family tree, rename it, blah, blah, blah. Just disappointed that it requires so many extra steps.

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[dgallup]

It keeps getting better. I pick Nylon_6-6 from the available materials, set some constraints, set a pressure load, pick analysis. Error message: The following materials have invalid Young's Modulus: Nylon_6-6. It's their material data, how can it have invalid settings?

Time for a cold one. This will be here next week.

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[dgallup]

Well, it's not just the Young's Modulus, there are no material properties other than density in the supplied materials. Really useful. So I found an appropriate Poisson's Ratio, Young's Modulus, UTS, etc. Entered them on the Structural page and hit OK. Now I get the error message:

Parameter PTC_HARDNESS is not defined. The material is invalid.

I have no idea where one would input PTC_HARDNESS, it's not on any of the tabs. I tried to create a user defined parameter PTC_HARDNESS but it said that was a reserved parameter. I did find a HARDNESS surface property, it would not take VERY as a valid value. I put in a random number, now it wants Hardness Type, who knows what is a valid response here?

It's actually running the analysis, I'm sure the result is completely bogus but it's a start.

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[brep]

ddallup,

Is the Nylon_6-6 material you refer to one of the defaults? Might it be a carry over from a previously user defined material? The NYLON material that ships with the software has the all the correct mechanical/thermal properties needed for analyses.

The Hardness parameter that you refer to appears in the "Miscellaneous" tab of the material property dialog box. You'll see a section called "Surface Properties" and three parameters can be entered - Hardness, Hardness Type, Condition. Referring to the help documentation (which is always a good idea), you can see the allowable values for these. Real >0.0; String; String respectively.

Note that these material parameters are not required for any Creo Simulate analysis (and have no effect) as they are for detailing/drawings/annotation. A while back (sometime in Wildfire era, I forget the specific release) the material definitions were unified across the design, drawing, simulation etc modules. You can also enter things like cross hatching, color/appearance, sheetmetal bend tables and so on - all of these are not required for Simulate.

Does this help?

 

[dgallup]

Thanks for that tip, it did turn out that the config.pro was pointing to an old materials database. Not sure where any of those even came from, we don't generally assign materials to any of our parts since it doesn't do much of anything useful without the simulation.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.