Solidworks 2004

[Jevakil]

Can any of you guys testing Solidworks 2004 give us a quick overview of the new features?


jevakil@mapdi.com

One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.

 

[diamondcat]

I just went to a seminar and found alot of little and big things in the 2004 that I am excited about.

- My favorite additions are the Weldment items. You can sketch a 3d structure of just lines then extrude different steel (tubings, angles, etc.) along those lines. You can show welds on a welded part (It adds the weld to the total mass of the part too!) It is not supposed to slow anything down and it looks really cool. You can add an automatic cut list chart into the drawing file. It is not an Excel table either and is very customizable. You can also pull off sub-details on the weldment sheet.
- Hole charts-It makes a chart and also labels all of the holes on the part. Easily customizable also.
- You can rotate and move a part in the assembly with out clicking the icons, it is all mouse driven.
- Ability to easily customize menus
- The feature manager will fly out in the drawing space and be transparent when another tab comes up, so it is not hidden under it.
- Tabs have been moved to the top of the feature manager
- Addition of a dimensions toolbar
- You can mark dimensions in your sketches to be used in the drawing, only those marked will show up.
- Easier Move/Copy/Rotate entities in assemblies
- Measure tool can always be on
- Revolve doesn't need a centerline now, can use and edge or other feature
- New wrap feature to wrap a sketch around a cylindrical part
- Internal and External Graphical threads are shown.
- Don't have to click add when putting in a custom property
- If you delete a plane in a part, the sketch on that plane does not automatically delete, just shows an error and allows you to fix it.
- Can put mates in seperate folders.
- In assemblies, you can see both the part features and its dependencies at the same time in the feature tree.
- New Limit mate (good for cylinders and strokes)
- New Symetric mate
- Lightweight sub-assemblies within main assemblies
- Lightweight drawings!!
- Can dissolve a pattern
- Auto balloons
- Semi-Auto revision table
- Save as pdf
- Native AutoCAD files imported into SWX will update when the AutoCAD file updates.
- Task Scheduler

Plus more that I'm sure I have already forgotten.

 

[JNR]

According to what I have been told outside the beta program constraints, any Quadro graphics board will be fine for SW 2004/RealView. And, yes they did mention this at our local roll-out presentation. The date given fro actual release to the street was about August 1st if I recall. I'm not quite so excited about the actual date myself, because we always wait for:

1. ...the dust to settle on ANY major software release - not just SW.

2. ...for SmarTeam (PDM) to catch up!!!!!!!! Not exactly performing per the Gold Partner standards - and they belong to the same company......

3/4 of all the Spam produced goes to Hawaii - shame that's not true of SPAM also.......

 

[littlef8]

I hope I don't offend anyone by saying this, but...

I used to use Solid Works and switched to Solid Edge. I find it funny how the two closely compete.

I have to admit Solid Works does a good job with the Wow tools, but when it comes down to serious modeling, the flexiblity is not there. Too many work arounds and what I consider taking the long route.

In being fast to market as they say, they took short cuts in programming from day one. Now they have the band aid effect going on. That's why Solid Works can't handle the large assemblies like Solid Edge can.

I like the fact that I can program with Solid Edge, I don't want to have to be a programmer to do my job, with Solid Works we were having to write macros to speed up the drawing/modeling process.

Also, there is too many add on's for Solid Works that are already offered in Solid Edges package.

As far as the new additions, I don't see anything different than what I'm already doing with Edge, including the material and textures.

Again, I don't want to offend Solid Works users, but we were told in the buying of Works process all the things we could do, to later find out we couldn't. Our sales rep didn't exactly lie, but didn't exactly tell the whole truth.

 

[littlef8]

I forgot to ask, is the pro-e translators included in 2004? The ones I'm talking about are the ones released in the last beta version and then pulled before release. This was one of the things that steered us from Works.

 

[linqur]

You tell if pro-e translators included in SE? If SW is having legal problems cracking the newest PRO/E file format then how is SE doing?

 

[littlef8]

I don't have any problems converting Pro-E drawings in Edge. There is interoperability between edge and Unigraphics and it would be nice if this was also available with Pro-E.

The company I work for is a third-party supplier to many companies, but one of our customers (a supplier to many companies also) are considering Works because they were told by the sales Rep there was total interoperability between them and Pro-E.

I'm just curious because I don't think the sales rep is being totally honest, which is what originally brought us to Edge.

 

[G1DESIGN]

Thats better all my gripes about solidworks pw2 will now be thrown out the window the realview uses cg shaders just like our alias maya software thank god that means that the wobbly pw2 renderer can go !!!

By the way now that sw are making inroads into real time shading and mapping does that mean they will drop pw2
seem's they might be going down two different roads even though the two are related cg shading and its proprietry shading language is only supported on quadro and their quadro fx last time i looked if ati support it could someone let me know ,

so that means to use it you need the right hardware what if you dont have the right hardware? pw2 will be supported on virtually any graphics card so it just seems there will be more choice again this comes back to the pw2 renderer and its time to render issue try rendering a 2 minute avi at 7.5fps it takes a long time.
The realview is cool because at an advanced level its better than scanline rendering for realism(this is how the pros do it for feature films etc)and its quicker too because of the hardware on your ggraphics card
but lets remember this isnt a feature film its an engineering package and why would you want a feature like this when pw1 was fine for what engineers need
Its the same old story lets find a new technology strip it to its bear minimum away from the full really good features and sell it or include it as a plug in

 

[Rocko]

No the PRO-E translator for the newer versions of pro-e is not available, nor will it. PTC has made a liscensing fee demand per seat that was to high for SW to pay.