Mechanical Desktop vs. Inventor

Only you can determine what tool will fit your needs the best. Get a 30-day demo of Inventor, and test drive it yourself. If you get a canned-demo, have the demo-jock work with your parts, not theirs.

If MDT 4 is working well for you now, and you don't find yourself lacking in any capabilities, then maybe you don't "need" to upgrade/change CAD systems... unless you just have a desire to stay current with technology.

If you are planning to upgrade MDT, you should hurry, as of 02/06/03 AutoDesk will discontinue MDT... unless you buy Inventor.
Further reading: "The attempt and not the deed confounds us."

If you don't upgrade, but would like to improve the functionality of MDT 4, and if you do sheet metal, I highly recomend looking into Autopol. We don't have it on our MDT 6 system, but we do on our MDT 4. We still use it to do complex sheetmetal parts. Both building, and unfolding. It is very powerful, and you can even put in your own K-factors for your particular tooling.
By the way Madmango, Autodesk dicontinued selling MDT as a standalone product in Feb. of 2002, not 02/06/03.

Smcadman, yeah, I noticed that after I typed that. "The attempt and not the deed confounds us."

Having used, CATIA, MDT, Inventor SolidWorks and ProE, my only suggestion is this:

These companies are now to the point where they do a major release at least once a year. The products leap-frog each other constantly. If you like the interface of Inventor but SolidWorks has a feature you feel Inventor is lacking...wait for it. In a few months Inventor will likely have it plus features Solidworks doesn't have...

Feature for feature, my personal preferance is either SolidWorks or Inventor. MDT has it's shortcomings and CATIA is overkill for most people. I am not fond of ProE so I wouldn't endorse it...

Food for thought...

Never had any of the crashing problems that CadAndy describes. The newsgroup for inventor over the last 3 months has been much more informative that the solidworks one has (since SW created their own "subscription only" newsgroup). Most people over there are only too willing to provide assistance.

I concur with Tazinor, but:

I'm currently using Solidworks, and can't recommend it over Inventor. The greatest weakness of SWX is the lack of a working undo: You can delete or suppress or add new mate, or change a sketch dimension, and cause errors that propogate thru the model, all the way down to rebuild errors in parts of subassy's... and undo isn't available. Even reversing the change you made won't fix the problem. This is a huge issue when you'd like to explore different design options, or make a change to something existing.

Well, dont believe the hype. This is a very sticky debate, especially about Solidworks and Inventor - everyone says something is best cos they use it. Scare stories about crashing computers works on both sides and should be taken with a pinch of salt, everyones had bad experiences at some point.

A good few points have been mentioned though. Get some decent demo versions, define EXACTLY what you want it to do and *dont* let the sellers show you a 'pre scripted' sales routine. Make them do something which is very hard to achieve in a 3d package related to your work and see how well the package (not necessarily the salesmen - unless they are your support team!) cope.

Im sure folk remember me on here, and no, we still havent decided which package to get!.

For example, we do Jigs and Fixtures and press tooling for automotive parts and exhaust systems. On a short trial of both Swx and Inventor it was found very difficult to model in "Car-Line" orientation (ie starting off on compound angle related to a bracket on a car exhaust at a point other than 0,0,0 in space and modelling other non contacting parts based from there etc),also manouvering the equivalent of the UCS about in relation to other parts was a real nightmare in both cases unless your initially very good.

MDT, which albeit is seen as getting old hat could still do most of our work, if not all of it. I like the feedom to do whatever the hell you want in it when you want, which is not the case in some other packages. Sheet metal and 'working' assemblies is admittedly poor though compaired to Inventor if thats your bag.

I like Inventor, from what Ive seen so far, its very slick and very impressive and not as far behind as other brands imply, infact it has some great innovative features. I dont care if this sounds funny too, but I felt more 'relaxed' with the interface compared to solidworks.....its very superficial I know, but its the truth.

If your main buisness is 'product design' and sheetmetal stuff then you should seriously look into the Inventor or Solidworks products, they are probably just as good as each other for general use - but its your speciality field you have to cover your arse on so make sure you know EVERYTHING you expect it to do and that it does it simply enough.

They all work pretty much the same these days, and it will seem alien there being a different 'environment' and file types for say sheetmetal,drawing,sketching,assembly etc.

In autodesk stuff, for presstools I would lean at Inventor and for Jigs/Fixtures and detailing/non 3d work I would lean at MDT/series. For 2d mech work I would use Mechanical and for difficult surfaces Id spent 600 pounds on rhino3d. That is a hell of a lot of software to learn though!
We are in limbo what to do ourselves, its a difficult decision to make isnt it?, it will either work out great, or everyone will hate you for it and cost a lot of money....

A good understanding of thier shortfalls is essential, however this is not easy to come across without propoganda creeping in from different manufacturers. Its a minefield, and,like others,Im not wanting to get my leg blown off!.

If youre looking to stick with Autodesk, there is plenty of downloadable pdf's explaining the differences between the two. Somethings have to be seen to be understood or believed though, you dont appreciate what its saying until you need it!.

good luck.

See ya.

Sirius2

"Inventor platform was not
designed to be used on a PC unless they did
some debugging within the last three months.
Inventor will crash your system running a pentium
4 with 256 MB RAM almost every time you open
another program."

If I am not mistaken, Inventor recommends AT LEAST 512 meg of RAM (best is 1 gig) and a P4. That's why you have problems running Inventor on your PC.

Get someone who represents Autodesk to come in and give you the 30 minute spiel on Inventor. It's well worth your time. They will give you all the reasons why Autodesk has dropped MDT and gone with Inventor. One big reason is that MDT still used the same DB as AutoCAD, which limited it's overall performance and abilities.

As far as day to day stuff, I like having seperate files for parts, assemblies and drawings. It's not all in one huge file (like SW and ProE). I like Inventor's drawing layouts. It's got some nice quick features and is a bit more intuative about what you may like to do. I also like no more command line entries. All typed commands are 1 keystroke. I like Inventor's ability (I-part) to use the geometry of one part to create a mating part. All in all, I can do a drawing approximately 50% faster than I could in MDT6.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Hello cdm369,

I was in the same position as you. I worked in Manufacturing using Mechanical Desktop. We eventually upgraded to Inventor and I was very hesitant. I actually found that Inventor was so much more intuitive, easier to use and it didn't take near the time to learn that Mechanical Desktop did. I don't think you will have any problems switching over and I think you will enjoy using Inventor a whole lot more than Mechanical Desktop.