CAD advice needed

[rjwoods77]

Just because you dont use soemthing doesnt mean you should question it worth. "I dont need to learn this because I am never going to use it". We all have said that at one time or another. Fact is you do end up using sometime if you have to use if for something. Alot of SW newer "flashy unusable" features are for plastics design, mold design ,etc. They dont go throught the trouble just to make it flashy because people will buy it. It all has uses for different things. I guess pro-e is complete dog shit because it has a billion things in there menus to use that never get used. Your saying the same thing. Its used, just not for amature modeling like we do in formula. I say amature because I have worked with guys that did that very complicated shit that I was always scared of. Stuff that made me go "oh.... thats what that is for."

[MikeWaggoner at UW]

The new version of ANSYS has a Solidworks (SW) plugin, so modeling/switching is a lot quicker now. This is word of mouth from guys in industry I know.

I like having everything truly integrated, like Cosmos/SW, or Catia/Catia FEA/Catia NC. I think Catia is a little better choice since you can do NC easily, and adjust your part etc. The FEA has a couple more features than Cosmos also.

I found it really helpful in Catia NC to have my part and stock drawn exactly, and then being able to make dummy parts and having it avoid them to hit them separately, so I could do them later.

However, if your school has shitty CAD labs, or you computer sucks, SW is better because it's relatively quick on a slow computer(three legged horse, instead of dead horse) compared to Catia.

One gripe I have about SW is that it does weird shit on some part exports. Try making an egg shape part through rotation, and then exporting it via IGES and STEP. The surface is broken up. It also adds extra lines sometimes.

[Dr Claw]

well, for all that i've done in SW, there is truth to what i said. its also not a "dont need to learn this because im not going to use it", its a "lets learn this.....wait, this feature doesnt ever work, or is sooooo touchy that its not even worth USING". it doesnt seem to work until 3-4 releases down the line too.

but anyways, flashy and solidworks go hand in hand. the local reseller came through last year trying to get an exclusive CAD contract with formula and tried to brag about their spaceframe suite. you should have seen how easy you could gusset square tube to square square (because there is a flat face..). i asked them if you could gusset round to round because thats what we use and he waffled all over the place. i got all sorts of excuses

[Travis Garrison]

Sorry to re-hash a dead thread, but I stumbled upon this .pdf that reviews some suggested settings for Catia V5 and I figured it might help Didier setup catia a little better...

http://www.engineering.com/content/C...v5_options.pdf

Its from the puget sound catia operators group...

-Travis Garrison
UW FSAE

[Didier Beaudoin]

Thanks Travis, I'll try that tomorrow!

[Didier Beaudoin]

Talking about CATIA, I've had a rather annoying bug for a while. When I try to make a drawing and I want to do it in inches, no matter what units I choose in the options, everything comes up in millimeters. The inches work fine in drafting. Does anyone have an idea?

[jerry_jacob]

Getting back to the question of modeling an entire car in CATIA...
Based on my experience in Pro/E all you have to do is drop the quality of the model (that is display quality) in the display settings. There must be a similar option in CATIA. You dont need very high shading and edge quality algorithms to be running.
The model should not appear very poor and things should move and rotate fairly fast.
There are other options if this does not work for you.

[Carbaholic]

What Release are you using? The bugs change from release to release

Eric

[Wulfgang]

Catia...the best solid modeling package...

OK, now that I've stopped laughing, Catia v4 is a complete joke but it's probably only still around because DCX hasn't made the switch to v5 yet and v5 is about as un-user-friendly a package as I have seen. The learning curve is much, much steeper than with NX because it lacks the intuitiveness.

It also lacks the horsepower of NX in a myriad of ways.

I have used v4 & v5 (and I-Deas) and they aren't even in the same league as UG NX or NX2 for pure solid modeling. And anyone who has had extensive experience on both systems would completely agree (as all of my friends who have, do).

If that's not enough, Dassault Systems is a French company which is reason enough to dislike it.

Catia...the best solid modeler....hahahahahaha...snarf...hehehehehe...a-hem....a-hem....Aaaaanyway.....

[Keith C]

If you want to work in the automotive or aerospace industry, I suggest using CATIA V5.

The student price for CATIA is pretty low, so the sometimes prohibitively high price of CATIA isn't a factor for an FSAE team.