How easy is Pro/E? 3

[Doohickie]

When I was a newly minted engineer in the 80s and into the 90s, I did a lot of design work on CADAM, and to a lesser extent on CATIA and AutoCAD. I have a natural aptitude for picturing things in my mind and transferring them into a CAD program.

The last five to ten years, I've moved over to doing some project management, systems and test engineering, but I found out today that my current work group may be dissolved. My manager said he can put me to work doing some CAD design using Pro/E if it comes to that. I told him I could pick up Pro/E quickly and wouldn't mind getting back into design at all.

So now that I've sold myself into a Pro/E job, my question for the forum is can I do it? For those of you familiar with, say, CATIA (my most recent CAD work experience), how hard is it to pick up Pro/E? What resources would you recommend to rapidly get me up to speed?

To be honest, I'm almost hoping my current group does go belly up if it means I can get back to doing design. I enjoyed it when I got to do it in the past.

 

[Doohickie]

I did some further googling and found the PTC's Getting Started Guide for Pro/E 2001 online... almost 200 pages in pdf. That will get me acquainted.

As of right now, I haven't heard anything on my job situation, whether my current position is going to continue or go bye-bye; the word is we'll find out in a week or so. One likely scenario will leave my current position alone for now, but my manager said it still would be a good backup plan to pick up some Pro/E knowledge.

I'll start out with the Guide, then see if I can get some time on Pro/E to play around (that office is a few miles from my normal work site).

Thanks for the tips, guidance and background.

 

[mjcole]

If you want to do things using the 2001 functionality you can go to Applications > Legacy to enable the Menu Manager.

You also may do your own Menu Mapper. The Legacy mode will enable a Menu Manager that is close to but not identical to 2001. It should help you out a bit. Even the Menu Mapper will allow you to see and take pictures of the Menus and sub-menus that exist and print them out for reference.

Feature > Create > Datum > Curve > 2 Projections
Select both Curves from Tree or screen while holding CTRL key, Pick Intersection from the Edit menu or Edit Features toolbar.

You can also select the first curve then hit the Edit Feature icon you want or have to use then pick the second reference and your feature is created. At first it took time to figure out what Pro/E wanted me to select to create specific feature but now it's really easy.

One thing of many that Pro/E could learn from SolidWorks is not to obsess on the CTRL key. In SolidWorks you can select a feature type then make selections without the CTRL key or make your selections and then select the feature type.

I don't expect any meaningful changes to Wildfire until WF7 or 8 if they get that far.

Michael