Thinking changing From Solidworks to NX 3

[SMOKES]

Hi

I previously used SolidEdge ST3

I am working with a small company converting autocad files from 2d to solidworks 3d format.

I currently have to design complex castings and fabrication for pump units. I know solidworks is going to give me more grief over time. I have already come up against limitations of the cad surfacing and drafting package. I also feel that the FEA and CFD for solidworks is not as good as the rest of market.

I terms of price point NX is 500 pound more than solidworks pro

What am trying find out is has any one or company transitioned from Solidworks to NX.
Is drafting NX the same a solid edge and part creation similar to both. Or will I need extensive training

Also how does teamcenter pdm compare to the vault pdm?
Also the fea nastran and NX Flow are there companies in the UK that I can out source the fea and cfd work to as I don't think i can cirrently justfy the cost of these packages.

 

[jerry1423]

If you do a search in this forum and enter "Solidworks" you will get some threads that may help you make your decision.
NX is perfect for complex casings, and is much better than Solidworks. I have work on Solidworks only little, and I liked their tubular weldment stuff better than it can be done in NX, but that all.

 

[Stavanja]

I work for a company that uses NX6 exclusively. We have a few people here that moved from Solidworks when they came here, and they are all very happy with NX. Much more stable with large assemblies, and they love the Syncronous modling tools.

As for the drafting in NX, especially when compared to SolidEdge... It is *nothing* like SolidEdge drafting. I'd say drafting is one of the weaker parts of NX, where SolidEdge's drafting is one of, if not THE best in the industry.

Hope this helped


...rick...

 

[dtharrett]

Smokes,
I made the transition from SolidWorks to NX in January (switched from a SolidWorks company to an NX company). If you are proficient with SW, you can be modeling in NX within a few hours with a few tips etc.

Drafting in NX, I found to be a little intuitive. Basically I had to hunt around a bit more to find the commands I was looking for. I also found some items that were automated in SW were not automated in NX so I have to do things the old fashed way (more key strokes). Early on, I figured I was ~40% less efficient with NX.

Now that I have been at it for a little while (8 months with NX vs years with SW), I would say I am ~20% less efficient with NX but the gap continues to close.

One thing to keep in mind is that I switched to an NX company so there are plenty of experienced NX users here to field questions...

 

[mlamping]

Smokes,

I'm familiar with one software/services company in the UK that has its CAE/CAD roots in I-deas and has migrated itself and many users to NX. They have beta tested our software for a number of years and have extensive knowledge in the structural and flow disciplines. Here's a link to their web site.

http://www.team-eng.com/

I'm sure they'd be happy to talk with you.

Regards,
Mark

Mark Lamping
CAE Technical Consultant
Siemens PLM Software

 

[alj722]

I've used IDEAS, SolidWorks and NX and have been on NX exclusively for the past few years. We also had a few hardcore SolidWorks users at our site move to NX. In general, NX is far more capable, but you pay for it in learning curve. SolidWorks is easy to use for simple parts and small assemblies. Our SolidWorks users weren't happy for the first few months over the UI and lack of some very slick SolidWorks features. The UI in NX is pretty cluttered. The "Roles" help to some degree, but by including almost every command going back to version 0 (somewhere around the 1920's I believe), there is only so much they can do to clean it up.

The infrastructure aspects of NX can be pretty ugly too. Setting up things like drawing templates and user defaults is very time consuming and requires a lot of calls to the help desk. The Siemens Help desk is outstanding with you getting a human being almost instantly. It has to be, since the documentation is very weak. NX is a challenging tool for a small shop without a CAD Admin staff.

TeamCenter is not for the faint of heart. It is probably a great PDM tool if you are Boeing or GM, but for a small shop it is way too much. We have 3 people full time on it and are bringing in Siemens services on a contract and we only have a couple dozen users. It is huge beast requiring lots of cubicles filled with dedicated TC gurus to implement. Maybe once it is up and running it won't be so bad.

All that being said, once you get used to all the goodies you get in NX and don't have in SolidWorks, it is hard to go back. If Siemens would only port the I-DEAS TDM data management system over to NX, it might be useful for the small shop environment. TDM was almost effortless to implement and manage. Trading that in for TC when we went to NX was a staggering shock.

Sorry for the long winded posting. At least I feel better now...

 

[JohnRBaker]

{quote alj722]
...going back to version 0 (somewhere around the 1920's I believe)...[/quote]

This is NO lie, I actually started on Unigraphics (what NX was called back then) on what you would have to describe as having been 'Version 0', but that was only 1977 ;-)

Unigraphics 'workstation', circa 1977

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[vball85jb]

We are transitioning from Solid Edge ST3 to NX shortly and after reviewing all the different cad packages the NX drafting is one of the worst we saw. We are seriously looking at going paperless when we make the transition and putting all the info on the model, pmi and notes.

Two glaring issues would be that you are unable to embed microsoft excel table or word documents in the draft like you can with SE and other cad drafting packages. The other issue that blows my mind is the balloon stack-up, you can't snap to a quadrant, and the balloon stack-up doesn't stay together if you move one the others don't move along.

I am really hoping that Dave Wingrave takes the best from SE and integrates it into NX.

 

[jerry1423]

John B,

If I am not mistaken it was called "UNI-GRAPHICS" in 1977, I believe they removed the hyphen a few years later.

 

[JohnRBaker]

...you are unable to embed microsoft excel table or word documents in the draft...

Unlike SE, the NX data model MUST be compatible with ALL versions of NX, not only those running on Windows, but also on Linux and Mac OS.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[JohnRBaker]

If I am not mistaken it was called "UNI-GRAPHICS" in 1977, I believe they removed the hyphen a few years later.

Actually that was the name given to the product when it was first announced in 1973 since it was originally intended to be an add-on (see front cover of marketing brochure below) to United Computing's popular APT-based NC programming package, UniAPT. However in 1974 the decision was made to release it as a standalone program of it's own and to start integrating the NC programming functionality into it, so with this change of direction, they changed the name to simply Unigraphics, without the hyphen. Note that this was done just prior to the first system being installed at a customer site, which was in the fall of 1974.

Below is the cover of the marketing brochure which was being passed around our office just before we installed our first Unigraphics system in the summer of 1977 (actually our second, the first had been installed in the UK at our parent company a few months earlier).

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[SMOKES]

i thought that NX darft would be on par with SE as Se is the lower version of NX

 

[JohnRBaker]

SE and NX are developed and are supported by two totally different development groups and are marketed to different industry segments. Granted, there are some joint efforts, such as the fact that both use Parasolid as their solid kernel (but then so does SolidWorks as well as bunch of other CAD systems out there), the D-Cubed constraint manager (again something that Siemens PLM has licensed to other CAD vendors), they employs the same icon artist, leverage other redundancies, but not nearly as many as you might think however.

Now it is true that there has been a couple of 'technology exchanges' between the two groups, for example the NX Sheet Metal module is based on tools developed and maintained by the SE people and the Surfacing tools used in SE were developed and are maintained by the NX people. And the most recent example of a joint development effort is Synchronous Technology, despite the fact that the two development groups have taken slightly different approaches to how they implemented this or how well it's integrated into the traditional modeling workflows, in the end it was still a true joint effort. And while there may be opportunities for this to happen again in the future, it would be wrong to ever think along the lines that NX is somehow 'SE on steroids' or the SE is somehow a 'junior version of NX'. This would completely miss the point and would not give proper recognition to the efforts and talents of BOTH product groups, whether we're talking about the development people themselves or the product management team responsible for the messaging and positioning of the products.

Anyway, I how this sets the record straight ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[JohnRBaker]

The other issue that blows my mind is the balloon stack-up, you can't snap to a quadrant, and the balloon stack-up doesn't stay together if you move one the others don't move along.

NOT TRUE, at least not since the release of NX 7.5.

You can now, after the Parts List ID callouts have been added to your drawing, select the balloons you wish to 'stack-up', either vertically or horizontally, and once grouped in this manner, moving the balloon with the leader-line (it's assumed to be the 'parent' of the stack) will cause the other members of the stack to move with it.

And before anyone asks, you can always go in at a later date and 'ungroup' the stack, returning the ID balloons to their original locations and leader status.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[loki3000]

http://www.dezignstuff.com/blog/?p=853

t thought this might come handy

 

[christian928]

Hi Smokes,

I replaced our two seats of SolidWorks for NX 7.5 this year. As far as drafting goes I have found NX much easier. I used to use weldments all the time in SolidWorks and these were a serious headache to dimension.

NX does require more setting up but a good reseller should help with this.

All I can say is that I originally intended to run one seat of NX alongside my two seats of SolidWorks. Within a month of using NX my mind was made up to buy a second seat of NX and only use SolidWorks to load old assemblies (thankfully a rare occurrence).

One potential downside to consider is whether you use Configurations in SolidWorks.

When you open a SW part or assembly that contains Configurations directly into NX you will find that all the different Configs overlay on top of each other.

Converting to a STP file fixes this though.

the Synchronous technology makes working with any imported parts from SW a piece of p**s.

I used SW for 6 years and now I have spent 6 month with NX I would never go back. NX has made designing enjoyable again.

 

[ugguru54]

Mr. John Baker,

Thanks for the images of the old 4014 Unigraphics hardware; it is just as I remember my first "sit down" using UG back in April, 1979 ... my how things have changed.

 

[looslib]

SMOKES "i thought that NX darft would be on par with SE as Se is the lower version of NX"

One other thing to remember is that SE was at version 5 or 6 when purchased at the formation of UGS. It was at that point converted to use the Parasolid modeler kernel. SE was originally developed by Intergraph.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli