| A reader and I corresponded over the status of the CAD industry. He asked to be kept anonymous.
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PL: It seems like Solidworks and Inventor have gotten good enough to reduce people needing to move to higher-end packages like Catia or NX. Are there things from those systems that could benefit Solidworks users?
RG: Catia and NX do things Solidworks and Solid Edge cannot, and deliberately so -- such as advanced surfacing. For the most common kinds of MCAD, however, Solidworks and Solid Edge are good enough.
The primary problem with older CAD (Pro/Engineer, Inventor, Solidworks, Solid Edge) is that they lacked direct editing and modeling, which became vogue with the successful marketing of SpaceClaim.
CAD vendors took different approaches to solve the problem:
- PTC integrated ME/30 (from HP) into Pro/E and called it Creo. The transition took several years. The company has its own kernel, Granite.
- Siemens wrote the Synchronous Technology add-on to their Parasolids kernel, which brings direct modeling to Solid Edge and NX. (When Siemens licenses Parasolids to other CAD vendors, however, it leaves out ST part.) ST, however, suffers from being very hard to understand and implement, because you have to figure out stuff before you start drawing -- the very opposite to what direct modeling is supposed to offer -- and so few SE and NX users use it.
- Autodesk wrote a new CAD program to handle direct modeling, Fusion. (The company has its own kernel, the ACIS-derived ShapeManager.) Inventor carries on as a traditional MCAD history-based modeler.
- Dassault Systemes tried to port Solidworks to V6 (3dExperience) but failed, so they wrote bridging software -- modeling programs that use Dassault's CGM kernel and are meant for Solidworks users. These also failed, as each one required expensive annual subscriptions, were immature (lacked functions), and were data-incompatible (Solidworks uses Parasolids). I am unsure where Solidworks stands with direct modeling; my understanding is that it has only a kludge that imitates the effect of direct modeling, but I could be wrong.
Among smaller CAD vendors, several are starting to add direct modeling, with Bricsys having made the most progress, I think. Bricsys was fortunate in having only a rudimentary ACIS-based 3D modeler when they had the foresight to buy outright the direct modeling tech (and staff) from Ledas of Russia.
PL: Not being a CAD guy, what are the things that Dassault should be including in Solidworks that they are not? I know they have redesigned the UX [user experience] a few times.
RG: In retrospective, it is easy to see what Dassault should have done. They should have copied Apple, who successfully switched CPUs and OSes under the hood without users noticing much. Dassault should have done the following:
- Swapped out Parasolids for CGM, while leaving everything else in place
- Written a transparent Parasolid-CGM translator
- Added in direct modeling and editing
- Called it a day
Admittedly, geometric kernel swaps are easier today than a decade ago.
But head office in Paris was pressing forward with their V6 generation (known today as "3dExperience"), which uses Enovia as the central repository for Catia data and runs much of the ancillary software as Web-based modules. So no surprise that they thought Solidworks should be converted into that as well.
Never mind that its own Catia customers are disinterested in 3dExperience; after a decade, about 25% have transitioned from V4 and V5. Or that Solidworks is so much more successful at not being cloud-ized.
The final death knell for cloud-based mid-sized MCAD came when Onshape admitted they had only 5,000 paying customers. BOOM! Nobody is going to want to go that way now.
PL: But if they swapped out Parasolid for CGM (they certainly do not enjoy paying license fees to Siemens) they would have incompatible geometry yet again. Perhaps if they implemented direct modeling they would have had an improved ability to deal with it. I am not sure why they did not do that.
RG: That certainly is the position of Bricsys when they say that BricsCAD can import 3D models from any source, have some automated routines fix it up as necessary, and then work on it with direct modeling, like it was native.
My guess is that there is something about the structure of the code in Solidworks that prevents direct modeling from being implemented. Or maybe Dassault was thinking along these lines: if we have to implement direct modeling, we might as well write an all-new MCAD program that fits these modern times.
PL: But surfacing would be easier to add, I assume, since NX can support it with the Parasolid kernel. At one point, Dassault told me that CGM was better at it because it was second derivative continuous, a phrase that makes sense to this lapsed mathematician.
RG: In terms of marketing, surfacing is made to be the differentiator. Siemens told me Solid Edge uses the same version of Parasolid as NX, so it is a matter of switching features on or off -- kind of like mainframes of old!
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Excellent article! I've just returned an MX Master 3 mouse as defective (after 2 weeks of testing) that suffered the same problems reported here on the 2s. Ultimately for me, these were the top problems I had with it:
- Options replaced Setpoint and lost important features, such as acceleration (which makes it nearly impossible to move quickly across two large monitors and still be able to accurately select fine details)
- Non-replaceable battery (as opposed to the AA battery in my Performance MX)
- The incredibly poor quality of Logitech's customer support (email only, days for each reply, inability to communicate clearly or accurately respond to each individual problem or question)
- Their unwillingness to offer any sort of help to repair or replace my far superior Performance MX mouse with a failing left-click button.
You are correct when you say "Devolution has attacked the MX," and it seems to have also permeated Logitech completely.
Ultimately, however, I am grateful for Logitech's failure because it forced me to look deeper into my other options and allowed me to give my money to another company that I would not have otherwise considered -- and one which seems to listen to its customers. I have just spent twice as much money with 3Dconnexion for two of their products (3D SpaceMouse and 2D CadMouse), which seem to have consistently received good customer reviews.
- Daren (via WorldCAD Access) |
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Thank You, Readers
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- Direct Dimensions Inc: "Congratulations on your anniversary. We turned 25 this year as well. "
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ST seems cool in a lot of ways but I don't see it as superior to history based, just a different way to model and edit with its own pros and cons. It appears to fall down on complex geometry which is where the long rebuild in history model is at its worse. I have some parts that I don't know how ST in Solidedge could edit them because there is curve to them and/or extremely complex intersections of geometry.
I imagine once you learn it, its not bad and flows well, but I must admit the UI looks daunting....a lot of button selections.
Posted by: JC | Tuesday, June 16, 2020 at 08:22 AM
"Your reader believes that direct modeling is the next thing."
I nothing of the sort... I was simply pointing out that Ralph's reasoning for why Synchronous is not as wide spread is based on nothing but his dislike for Solid Edge. Which you seem to be cut from the same cloth.
And I don't think Spaceclaim's problems have anything to do with Direct Modeling on a whole. Their failure to attract enough customers had more to do with their single minded approach. Solid Edge has always been able to deal with both Parametric and Direct Modeling.
As Dan Staples said back in 2018:
"One might also wonder why if synchronous technology is as beneficial as its proponents claim, it’s not a more widespread paradigm. Staples believe the reason is that Siemens is just that far ahead of the technological curve, in large part because of its ownership of the Parasolid kernel and D-Cubed constraint solving SDK. But perhaps there’s a simpler reason, which he summarized nicely: “engineers are not people who like to change a lot.” History-based parametric modeling is still the dominant paradigm in the CAD world and, despite its drawbacks, it works just fine."
https://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArticles/ArticleID/16587/Whats-the-Difference-Between-Parametric-and-Direct-Modeling.aspx
Posted by: BobM | Monday, June 15, 2020 at 08:13 AM
" ST, however, suffers from being very hard to understand and implement, because you have to figure out stuff before you start drawing -- the very opposite to what direct modeling is supposed to offer -- and so few SE and NX users use it. "
ST does NO suffer from being VERY hard to use... Ralph, it's your bitterness towards Solid Edge once again that taints your opinion. Granted in the first few releases there were many issues with using Synchronous, and I was one of it's biggest critics at the time. However the Developers at Solid Edge made huge improvements to the GUI to help ease the understanding of just how it works. The ONLY people who find it difficult to use are those like yourself who are too stuck in their "OLD" ways to see it's brilliance.
Synchronous has matured into one of the best improvements in 3D CAD in the past decade and has saved my company countless time and money, so I'm not sure why you still hang on to such "old" perceptions and biases.
How much time have you ever spent using Synchronous Technology, and how honest of an attempt did you make to actually understand it? I've been using MCAD since the mid 80's going all the way back to Personal Designer from Computervision.
Or maybe you just can't say what you truly feel as to not upset the folks at AutoCAD or Dassualt eh.
Posted by: BobM | Monday, June 15, 2020 at 02:59 AM
If SpaceClaim is the evidence for the success of direct modeling, no wonder why the CAD industry is not investing there.
Your reader believes that direct modeling is the next thing. The truth is that it is an old technology that has been around way before the history/feature-based CAD and lost to the history-based systems.
Posted by: Gal Raz | Sunday, June 14, 2020 at 10:10 PM