Pro/Desktop 1

[butelja]

Has anyone used Pro/Desktop Express extensively? I've just begun to use it, and am very impressed with its performance, price (FREE!), and interoperability with Autocad and Pro/E. For a free download from PTC, its seems quite capable as a 3D parametric modeler, although is lacking in some of the basic 2D sketching tools. Comments, anyone?

 

[Sirius]

Astounded by the lack of response here!!!!. I just got it about two weeks ago, havent really had time to fully suss it out yet though. Fisrt impressions are good, but call me cynical but there must be a hidden agenda here!!.

This is just to good to give away free, I was going to tell my company about it and get thier old 2d DOS evolved crap out the door, but it worries me for how long will it be free??. Say we get it installed in our small drg office and all get used to it and save our stuff in its native filetype, then 8 months down the line it ceased to exist or be free and you have to pay a liscence for any newer releases or something. Its gonna cause a nasty sting in the wallet area and a bad taste in the mouth.............

Can anyone confirm the long term issue??? whats the deal? If you dont need big assemblies like us it looks ideal - but is it too good to be true?

Cheers,

Sirius.

 

[butelja]

Sirius,

I share you thoughts and cynacisms completely.

As they say in the infomercials on late night TV, "But Wait, There's more!!" If you check out the following link:

http://www.ptc.com/go/sdrcideas/offer_info.htm

, you will find you can get a complete copy of Pro/E "Special Edition" for free. They do state that it is based upon the student version, is for noncomercial use only, and will not trade files with the "real" Pro/E. I think I'll check it out, as I don't have an extra $25K to spring for the full blown version to see what all the hype is about.

 

[Sirius]

Cheers, I will check out the link. At the moment at work we use a dos based (windows platform) 2d/3d cad wireframe surface CAD/CAM package. It has no solid functionality, even for inserting files, and is not associative or parametric in any way. You cant even generate 2d views from the 3d.

I found Pro/Desktop and was impressed for what you get for the price - free!!. The only thing is you cant do 'freeform' sculpting say like Mechanical desktop could do (associating surfaces and solids in a hybrid, and cutting surfaces away from solids to create a sculpted solid). We really need this functionality as we do a lot of fancy contoured press tools etc. But for *free*, what the heck, we could streamline using solids and gain some 2d views and still use our old system to some extent.

The only trouble is training, and if the 'free-ness' goes out the window, I doubt we could afford the full thing.

That special edition sounds alright , but we couldnt legally use it in a workplace could we????.

Does it do hybrid surfacing? Ill take a look now!!!.


Cheers,

Sirius.

 

Firstly I would like to thank you all for the positive comments on the PTC Pro/DESKTOP Express strategy. I would also like to put your minds at rest and tell you that we fully intend to keep Pro/DESKTOP Express available for free evaluation. Please allow me to clarify our strategy:

We recognised the need for Users to feel comfortable with a design tool before they had the confidence to use it in production, and as such, the previous standard 30-day evaluation did not allow for this.

We also wanted Users to experience the benefits of parametric feature based design with associative drafting. Many other product evaluations either remove key functionality or prevent printing or file saving, Pro/DESKTOP Express provides amazing levels of functionality thus allowing you to fully evaluate the product.

Pro/DESKTOP Express also delivers design collaboration and allows companies not currently using PTC products to work collaboratively with existing Pro/ENGINEER and Pro/DESKTOP Users. This also helps Users explore the benefits of collaborative design at their own pace.

As we continue to develop Pro/DESKTOP we will add to the capabilities found in the full version, Pro/DESKTOP (priced at $995), and actively maintain Pro/DESKTOP Express. We would hope that users recognise the value in the added functionality found in the full version and in time Users will upgrade to this full version.

I hope I have been able to answer your questions, if you require further information please don't hesitate to contact me.

Regards

Mike Brown (prodesktop@ptc.com)
Product Manager
Pro/DESKTOP
PTC

 

[pipemakermike]

One thing that users of the free version will miss is the support that comes with a maintainence contract. Because ProDesktop is a very intuative tool to use this is not usually a problem. There is a very active support forum for ProDesktop at

http://www.prodesktop.net

This is where the experts hang out so help is both quick and useful

Mike Nelson

 

[jrobledo]

All,

I've been playing around with Desktop Express and have found it to be a useful little tool. This is a good tool for someone who has never used 3-D in the past. I've used Pro-Engineer for approx. 8 yrs, however, the site I currently work at does not have Pro-E, so I figured I'd download the Express and try it. It is good for very basic designs and small assemblies. It crashes periodically for no reason (maybe there's a reason, but I'm not sure why).

j

 

[peglor]

ProDesktop is a great package for showing off what parametric CAD should be able to do. However it can't be taken seriously as an industrial package as it is not really stable at all. I've taught ProD for the past 2 years and there are a few issues that keep cropping up with it.

This is a very bad package to start teaching people unless they've already got a very good grounding in geometrical constraining. It does not encourage people to build fully constrained models, nor does it tell you what assumptions it's making as you sketch.

The geometric constraints the computer puts on as standard with sketched shapes not only overconstrain many of the sketches, but worse than that the program usually misdiagnoses the cause of the overconstraint and starts complaining about valid dimensions added by the user. Getting design intent into a shape can be a nightmare.

The program still has issues with rotating parts relative to eachother (It was supposed to have been fixed in the version released two years ago). Usually if the angle is kept between 0 and 180 it's reasonably predictable, but not always. This is because the program doesn't seem to distinguish between positive and negative plane sides.

Working as a tutorial assistant in a lab with 30 computers I'll usually see at least one or two crashes with an hour. The problem is the program can often limp along seemingly still working but refusing to extrude/revolve etc. The program eventually crashes, but you never know how much work has been lost till you open the last saved file (Assuming it hasn't been corrupted - thankfully it's rare enough that the part file corrupts on this type of crash).

The configurations in the animation function are often ignored by the program in favour of leaving certain parts that should be moved where they were in the previous configuration. There's nothing worse than telling people to try building their animation again due to there being one configuration (out of about 10) which isn't working because that 'might' fix it. On occasion I've also seen the rendered version of an animation behave differently from the unrendered version too.

Whole assembly files have a nasty habit of corrupting for no reason too, rendering many hours of student's work unusable.

Here are a few guidelines for working effectively with ProD:
Use 'save as' a lot as you build single parts. This will save you from the inevitable crashes and the occasional corrupted save.

Keep sketches small, not because the program can't handle big sketches, mainly because troubleshooting overconstraints in the sketches is a nightmare once they get complex.

Never constrain anything to rotate more than 180 degrees relative to anything else. It works sometimes, but often fails in one configuration for no good reason.

When assembling a model use subassemblies of 5 or 6 parts. I've seen 2.4GHz machines with 256Mb RAM hang hopelessly on assemblies with 15-20 simple parts. They're extremely fast once you use subassemblies.

If a model is more than 50m long or so, the program will hang badly in generating features. I'm guessing this is because the program has a hard wired variable set as the maximum accuracy to which the program will work so it generates lots of extra facets when models get dimensionally big even if they're still quite simple.

One feature which is very usefu, but not too obvious is that you can get different coloured glasses by setting the part to be glass, right clicking on the part and changing its colour in the material properties.

The ProDesktop render is excellent too! It looks better as standard than ProE ever has. It's also got proper reflections between parts and refraction in the glass parts. However there aren't as many tweaks possible compared to ProE, so if your render looks poor there's very little that can be done to fix it in ProD.

ProD takes about 2 or 3 hours to get used to. More practice with it will only make you slightly faster. As an experienced ProE and ProD user I drew and assembled the model pictured below using ProE in about half the time it took on ProD.

http://www.skynet.ie/~ceason/cormac/stuff/ProD_Heli.gif

I hope people don't take my comments as being too negative though. ProD is free, it's easy and fun to use and has many powerful features (People who've tried 3D AutoCAD are disgusted by how easy ProD makes things ) and it's still better to use than most expensive packages. You'll hit its limits pretty quickly, but it'll whet your appetite for full on parametric CAD. ProE had a good look at the ProD interface before they redesigned their user interface for Wildfire - it's that good!