Theophilus
Mechanical
- Dec 4, 2002
- 3,407
This might appear as a rant, but it's really a bit of research. I've recently endured a change from v2007 to v2008 for a hand tool design--lots of surface work with Fills, Sweeps, Lofts, etc. I had some rather predictable bugs pop up when my assembly was in v2007. My client had someone else working on a different model of hand tool, but he did it in v2008. So I had to move to v2008, get up to speed instantly with the interface updates, and get cracking. I have a way of modeling things that makes editing later a piece of cake--usually involving a master part with bodies split and then saved as separate parts at the end of the tree for detailing as separate parts later. After seeing this other colleague's assembly for this tool (not that it was bad--just more difficult to edit/tweak forms later on), I decided to remodel the whole assembly, figuring it would be quicker. (If using v2007, I'd have been correct--lots of later tweaks to handle curves and other geometry.)
I was instantly faced with a barrage of bugs. My v2007 hand tool had a couple of consistent bugs in the feature tree (things like forgetting what surfaces were included in a Trim), but these were always consistent, and I simply labeled which features would fail and fixed them as the edited part was rebuilt (roll back, fix along the way). Annoying, but no big deal. My rebuilt v2008 hand tool has had many more critical failures, but this time they switch, depending on the edits I make upstream--no more predictability. My problem with this is that the failures aren't the typical geometry corrections that are needed, but software bugs that have features that once worked fine failing flagrantly. I cannot merely delete and redo the feature, since up to ten hours of downstream features would be lost if I did so. So the feature problems must be (somehow) solved by keeping the same features. This involves lots of surfaces, so most of the time I add in lots of patches/hacks/fixes rolled back before the failed feature to solve things.
Here's the big question I've got:
For those who do modeling of this sort, are you seeing fewer bugs in v2009 than in v2008? This is wasting huge amounts of my time and I've got to solve this issue--I have other projects that need my attention, and this current hand tool design is stuck in v2008 (I could have done it much better with v2007 and saved all this hassle--it simply handled surfaces much better with fewer bugs). Please let me know your experiences with the two versions and I'll push my client to allow an upgrade to v2009 if that's yielded better results.
Thanks!
Jeff Mowry
A people who value security over freedom will soon find they have neither.
I was instantly faced with a barrage of bugs. My v2007 hand tool had a couple of consistent bugs in the feature tree (things like forgetting what surfaces were included in a Trim), but these were always consistent, and I simply labeled which features would fail and fixed them as the edited part was rebuilt (roll back, fix along the way). Annoying, but no big deal. My rebuilt v2008 hand tool has had many more critical failures, but this time they switch, depending on the edits I make upstream--no more predictability. My problem with this is that the failures aren't the typical geometry corrections that are needed, but software bugs that have features that once worked fine failing flagrantly. I cannot merely delete and redo the feature, since up to ten hours of downstream features would be lost if I did so. So the feature problems must be (somehow) solved by keeping the same features. This involves lots of surfaces, so most of the time I add in lots of patches/hacks/fixes rolled back before the failed feature to solve things.
Here's the big question I've got:
For those who do modeling of this sort, are you seeing fewer bugs in v2009 than in v2008? This is wasting huge amounts of my time and I've got to solve this issue--I have other projects that need my attention, and this current hand tool design is stuck in v2008 (I could have done it much better with v2007 and saved all this hassle--it simply handled surfaces much better with fewer bugs). Please let me know your experiences with the two versions and I'll push my client to allow an upgrade to v2009 if that's yielded better results.
Thanks!
Jeff Mowry
A people who value security over freedom will soon find they have neither.