SeGuruCool
The Largest Independant Solid Edge Resource Outside UGS
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SeGuruCool The Largest Independant Solid Edge Resource Outside UGS |
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www.oocities.org/SeGuruCool  segurucool @
indiatimes.com |
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Windows Integration The late 1990s and the following years saw the rapid demise of support for UNIX and DOS based CAD programs. As the Windows OS rose to prominence, a new generation of CAD programs appeared on the scene. Most CAD programs were built with an aim to harness the core strengths of Windows like user-friendliness, consistent look and feel and seamless data exchange across different applications. |  |
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Out of The Dark Ages 2D major AutoCAD discontinued its unix flavour with release 13 and DOS with Rel 14. Big names in the 3D world such as CATIA from Dassault systemes and Pro/Engineer from PTC hurried their way to the Windows platform away from the dark world of UNIX and DOS. While Dassault overhauled CATIA V4 completely to suit Windows, PTC was still grappling as lately as Wildfire 2. |  |
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Why did this happen ? With the Moore's Law holding strong, and Windows getting into every other PC in office and at home, the world saw the dawn of a new species of CAD programs called MCAD programs. The first and foremost among the breed were Solid Edge from UGS, Solid Works from Dassault and Autodesk joined the bandwagon lately with its Inventor software. All MCAD (Mechanical CAD) programs as their genre indicates, were targetted at the mechanical industry segment. They provided almost all intermediate to advanced features on the Windows platform, what only the HighEnd sofwares like UG, CATIA, I-DEAS, ProE could boast of. |  |
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What is Windows Integration ? Most MCAD programs were built to be strongly Windows compatible, infact SolidWorks boasted as being the first among the lot and tighter integration into the Windows Operating system. So what does that really mean for a MCAD program ? see figure. |  |
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Who is the best at this ? This article tries to assess as to how far and deep have the three major MCAD programs viz. Solid Edge, SolidWorks and Inventor have been successful in complying to these standards. |  |
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Appearnace and Menu Layout As far appearance and menu layout goes, Solid Edge has left the competition to dust by implementing Windows XP styled icons. Not just the icons on Standard toolbar but also the Features and other CAD-specific toolbars in Solid Edge radiate a refreshing look. SolidWorks still dangles in the era of 8-bit computing with its old-styled yellow-green icons and Inventor sticking to blue-yellow color scheme. Furthermore, in Solid Edge all commands on the Features menu are represented on the Features toolbar by means of flyouts, while in SolidWorks few commands are available on its Features toolbar and for the rest, the user is required to wade all through Insert > Features > Hole > Wizard... for example. In SolidWorks, the Cut, Copy and Paste icons are not to be found on the Standard toolbar although they are under the Edit menu. With SolidWorks, inconsistency prevails... |  |
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Support for Drag_Drop : Assembly With Solid Edge, you can drag and drop parts into an assembly document both from the Windows Explorer and the EdgeBar. SolidWorks' equivalent of the EdgeBar called the PropertyManager miserably lacks this functionality and instead throws a Browse... button to locate a file. |  |
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Support for Drag_Drop : Drawing Views The saga continues... With Solid Edge, you can drag and drop Part, Assembly, Sheetmetal and Weldment documents into a draft document both from the Windows Explorer and the EdgeBar. This creates three standard views for Part files and a Pictorial (Isometric) view for an Assembly. SolidWorks' PropertyManager lacks this functionality, although its possible with Windows Explorer. |  |
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Support for Copy_Paste Although both Solid Edge and SolidWorks support Copy_Pasting of features, Solid Edge is far more user friendly. Firstly, the Copy and Paste options are accessible from five convenient places : Whereas in SolidWorks, its only from its Edit menu or the keyboard. Secondly, SolidWorks needs a plane and position to be preselected for pasting the copied feature. Solid Edge on the other hand makes life easier by showing a preview of the feature's profile as you move the cursor over different planes on the model. |  |
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Further, with SolidWorks, a feature cannot be pasted multiple times in the same step. You must resort to the Edit > Paste menu everytime. To add to the misery, if you paste on the same face a second time, SolidWorks greets you with a message saying : Cut-Extrude5: The intended cut does not intersect the model. Please check the sketch and direction. Solid Edge can paste multiple times, on different faces, in the same step. And to take Windows Integration to the height, Solid Edge allows you to drag and drop features from the EdgeBar on to the model to Copy and Paste it in a single stroke. |  |
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MCAD and MS Excel One of the most prominent Microsoft technologies that all MCAD programs have harnessed is data linking with MS Excel. Having used this feature with all of Solid Edge, SolidWorks and Inventor over the past few years, I would give away 8/10 peanuts to Inventor, 5/10 for SolidWorks and a handful of them to Solid Edge. Solid Edge again beats the rest when it comes to linking cells from an Excel sheet to model variables. Although SolidWorks and Solid Edge have all the functionality required to establish and control links, there are significantly more number of steps involved with SolidWorks. With Solid Edge, its a simple Copy-Paste and the link is established in a jiffy ! |  |
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MCAD and MS Excel : More The makers of Solid Edge have painstakingly laid out its architecture so that users feel at home when using it. When it comes to handling numerical stuff, many of Solid Edge's feature exhibit a behaviour closely resembling MS Excel. When you double-click a dimension value in Solid Edge, a formula strip appears in the ribbon bar. Here you can establish relations using a combination of dimension pick and key-in mathematical symbols (+, -, *, /, etc) or advanced trignometric functions from the Formula Wizard drop down list, all in one place. This is strikingly similar to Excel's core behaviour of picking cells and building formulae in addition to advanced functions from the Functions drop down list. |  |
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Tushar Suradkar segurucool @ indiatimes.com |
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