better design programm for mech. design?

Hello,
I have been worked 10 years with Auto CaD 3D for mechanical design. What other programms, Solidworks, Solidedge or Inventor anyone can recommend to me? What is better suit and more widely used and how better to study it?
Thanks!
Have a nice day!
Mati from Estonia.

 

First , I introduce myself,from china, mechanical design for 7 years, main use 3D software: Pro-E, UG, Solidworks
UG: It is advantage to make the ID, the curve feature is very strong.
Pro-E : it is advantage to make the structure, and it is easy to study it ( I familiary the software in two month. hehe, and more chinese complay use the softeware)
Solidwork: the command is very simply , and can easy to study it.
above is only my comments. any good comments will be appreciated.
thanks.

 

I agree a little with the previous post.

I mainly use Pro Engineer (2001) but they also have Wildfire which is made by the same manufacture (PTC). Pro Engineer is fairly easy to use. You'll notice Wildfire and Solidworks look similar and they all do the same basic functions. Each one has their own advantage and disadvantage. I'll try to list some.

Pro/E: The cost is much higher with this one. It is also server based. So you need to run the license file on a server.
Solidworks: It is much cheaper to buy. You can also just load it oneach machine.

Each will have their own learning curve, but they can achieve the same results.

I do like the importing file function of Solidworks a bit better.

I hope some of this info is helpful.

 

A good discussion to get you thinking about other software would be the What is the best 3d modeler Poll http://www.mechanicaldesignforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=9 in this Forum.

Lots of good ideas are there. Personally I think the best modeler is to start on the white board with brainstorming then use the program you are most familiar with. I used Autocad for 15 years then Mechanical Desktop then a myriad of others but ended up with Inventor because it made the best use of my legacy Autodesk data. That may be the case for you too. These days Inventor is as good as any other mid range modeler I've used (including WildFire, SolidWorks and SolidEdge) but if you are a jobber or contract person, look at what your customer base wants you to have. All of them are good and there are huge differences in what your money will buy.

 

I used to use Pro/E some years back and now use Inventor Professional.

I dont know what the latest versions of Pro/E are like, but I can say (with the one exception of not being able to joggle dimension lines in Inventor) that there is nothing I used to do in Pro/E that I cant do in Inventor. Of course this will depend on the type of work you are doing, but unless you need high end CAD (and the associated costs) then Inventor (and probably Solidworks) are very easy to use for general engineering use.

 

Well I personally like NX as it creates accurate drawings and is user friendly too.... and once u know it almost any other CAD software will feel familiar...... Also it has many features which many others dont have....

 

Funny, I recall I mentioned in my last post about another forum where the merits of different CAD systems are often discussed, but this comment seems to have been deleted.

Concidering that the other forum (which must not be mentioned) has over 2180 users and this one 601, it is likely that more varied views can be compared by using both forums. As I do.

Censoring mention of other recources does seem a little petty.

 

I have worked with Solidworks 95-2010, Pro Engineer 13-Wilfire and Autocad 10-2002. I have 10's of thousands of hours with each of these programs. Each has their strengths but overall I would pick Solidworks. Pro Engineer is ok but has fell behind Solidworks in my opinion in development and is more difficult to use. Autodesk Inventor is a joke, it is lagging several years behind Solidworks and Pro-E in terms of features and usability. They are just introducing features to the software that Solidwork has had for years.

 

There is an OpenSource program that gets very little attention with the "professionals" that is very, very capable, called BrlCAD, available for Windows or Linux operating systems. This was originally developed in partnership with the US Army to address limitations of the more popular commercial solutions. The original intent was to study the effect of ballistics on military equipment. Excellent ray tracing capabilities, compatability with most common drawing formats, good animation capabilities, capable of very intricate assemblies. While it may not have the sophisticated GUI interface you might be more comfortable with, the price makes it hard to justify anything commercially available today...

 

Hi Guys
I am using Catia V5 from last three years. Surface modeling is so strong in it. I love it
Pro/E for last 11 years, its excellent in designing and manufacturing too. I love it tooo
I also used some other softwares like Solidworks, SolidEdge, Inventor, VX etc etc.
Whatever you can use as expert is best for mechanical design.