What's the Best 3D Software?

Solidworks by far...... solidworks.com

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I agree with markar. SW is a great solid modeling software. I have used Pro-E in the past and it was more cumbersome to create models. I will say that once you did figure out Pro-E, it is an excellent software as well.

Do you homework or due diligence. Find out what your company needs the software to do. Most of the packages now resemble one another but some are particular to what you are actually modeling. Compare the costs and pull the trigger.

I am a Mechanical Engineer in the Aerospace industry as well as a SW user and have been very happy with its capability and the analysis programs that are supported with it which has now been branded "Simulation".

Good luck.

I'd throw in my two cents for SW as well. SW works just fine at those part counts and file size. However, ask your boss first if he's willing to buy you more memory than anyone else in the shop has and pay $2500 for a graphics card (You can get by with a $800 one, but, what the heck, while he's buying, go for the gold!).

Inventor works OK but, in my completely not humble opinion, doesn't allow enough customization of the interface. Ever since the druggist started putting Ritalin in my Geratol, I love changing all the colors and font sizes till they look comfortable to me.

There's no advantage to importing existing AutoCAD drawings to use as starting points. In fact, I'd strongly recommend against it. Model like you machine. STEP or IGES should work OK, but you're a little bit at the mercy of your supplier to do a good job there.

If there's any customer/supplier conflict, go with Inventor. Don't row upstream if you don't have to.

The nice thing about SW is that, if you've done any machining, it's completely intuitive.

"If there's any customer/supplier conflict, go with Inventor."

A very good potentially serious issue to point out.

We have our tooling built and inspect our castings to the customers native file format in NX to avoid any conversion issues altogether .........but we do our in-house modeling in SW.

I've used mainly SolidEdge. It's OK, but I think SolidWorks is better. The 2-D editor is, I believe, completely AutoCAD compatible. Pre-E is good, but has a steep learning curve and Parametric doesn't understand the word "affordable".

Alibre Design cut prices by 10 folds begining Febreuary 1st 2010. You can buy the Alibre Design standard for $97. It will do every thing you need and it is as easier and native to use as Solidworks. It also includes a Solidworks and other programs file translator. See at www.alibre.com

I am trained in solidworks, inventor, and a couple of non-mech 3d programs, and 2d softwares (autocad, visio, paint. etc)

The savings for 3d software which can be quite pricy is in reuse of models, and in modifications to existing drawings.

Yes, I can create models in solidworks faster than anything else. If you add in the time to create and detail drawings then it is just slightly faster than inventor. (training and use dependent)

But if your requirements really only need well done 2d drawings than autcad LT is a better choice, if you still require precision drawings. and Visio or paint if you just need 2d sketches. (Yes paint can produce some reasoable drawings.)

When I used to create a lot of drawings and reuse a lot of them, we noticed that drawing components get used over and over again, in a given line of business, and that programs like visio make mods to text and 2d symbols so fast that I can outperform Solidworks most days of the week. and it is much more affordable..

so you really have to analyze what you intend to do with your drawings, and how the operator spends most of their time (creation/modification/reuse)

If you are doing multiple configurations of similar models of parts, then Solidworks wins hands down with multi-config parts. If you are doing 2d drawings with text only mods, then I would seriously consider visio.

if you are doing animations for assemblies, and importing IGES or SAT.. you can also consider 3ds max. (although iges has problems with normals when imported)

you can also consider a contracted drafter who will provide you with what you ask for.

Inventor seems to have some capacity to handle large part counts better, but it all depends on geometry of the parts. (more curved surves is proportional to slower speeds, on any system)

all 3d software is expensive (except Alibre which I haven't used, but it is supposed to be good.

Chris

Doesn't sound like you need more than a mid range package with the appropriate file type input/output. I happen to use TurboCad Pro cause it was cheap yet substantial - it can do way more than I need. Depending on your budget and what you can justify spending it might be worth a look.

Have a look at Salome-MECA. Maybe not as "user friendly" as solidworks, but the price differential may justify a bit of a steeper learning curve. Salome-MECA is an OpenSource front end to a fairly sophisticated finite element package. Not only open source, but free. An outstanding package for the price...

I have SW and Inventor... I prefer inventor!

Why is that?

I have SW and Inventor as well. I find Inventor has some good sheet metal tools but for the bulk of fabrication and machining work we design.

I have not done much in the way of routed systems. Is that the difference?

One thing to keep in mind for the OP. You haven't said whether you're ever creating 2D drawings out of these models. That can make a big difference. Some folks still see 3D as only a step on the way to the ultimate product - a paper drawing - while others of us would be perfectly happy to see most 2D drawings completely disappear in the case of mechanical assemblies. Before you electronics guys rise up im mighty wrath, I think schematics and board layouts have a 2D future for at least a decade yet.

Anyway, if you are bouncing back and forth between 3D and 2D, SolidEdge does that nicely as does Inventor. SW would not be my first choice here.

The other thing you have to think about is YOUR skill resume. The news from here in the heart of the rust belt is that no industry is secure, so what can you learn that will survive a job loss? The answer there, again in my very exalted pompous opinion, is SW and 2D AutoCAD. Those two are sort of like English and French - no matter where you go in the world, somebody speaks one or the other.

Thanks for the replies guys. I'm tending to think that Inventor would be the best bet for the company and also the cheapest since we could crossgrade our Autocad license to Inventor.

I've downloaded the 30 day trial and was generally impressed except that it would crash when opening, saving as or shrinkwrapping the kind of models I mentioned above. I'm guessing this is more likely due to my machine's hardware limitations than the software though (Windows XP, Intel Core 2 Duo @2.66GHz, 3GB RAM,NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500). A colleague is running Windows 7 64 bit on a brand new machine and his trial seems to be working okay.

I'm also trialling Alibre but finding that it is crashing when opening the models as well.

The majority of the work we do is fine in 2D Autocad and the ultimate product is always a paper drawing so we don't need any machining capabilities in the software. In terms of my own skill resume I believe Soliworks is more prevalent here than Inventor but I'm sure if you learn one then the other should be fairly simple to pick up...

As a user of AutoCAD, Solid Edge and Solidworks (like most here in the posts) I prefer SW over SE for several reasons. Most of my employment design (non-contract work) has been in SE though. One that may be valuable to you is using SW to create a 3D model from your current AutoCAD drawings, provided they are accurately drawn. In an assembly creation, the relationship functions much better in SW than SE. I have also used the Inventor package, but no one in the supplier chains I have been involved with for the last 10 years uses Inventor, so direct file use doesn't work well. That may not be an issue for your company and Inventor might be fine. Another area of preparation for you is in the IT department and the network capabilities. The models and assemblies might be taxing its ability. We have assemblies with well over 15,000 parts and is managed by Teamcenter so we must simplify every part before release. Right now your assemblies may not seem too big, but look into simplifying your parts for future use as it will greatly improve the larger assembly model function.

I do think that Autodesk's Inventor is a great package, so try as much as you can while you have the trial and call your vendor and ask them lots of questions. They should be able to provide you with a day of hands on demonstration and training at your facility to show you all of the features that you would be using most of the time as well as others that you have not thought of. That would help give you, your co-workers and your boss answers to questions on your current needs and planning for future growth. They should be able to give your IT department technical requirements for your company to upgrade to their Inventor and possibly their PDM application.

I would also suggest that you get trial versions of SW and SE and run testing at the same time. Pick something to model and create the exact one in each of the packages. Make notes of good and bad points of each one and before the trials run out, make a decision which one of the three really won't fit your needs. Then work hard on the last two and pick one that truly fills your current needs but also will help you grow in the future. Whatever you pick now, you will probably be stuck with for a very long time. Try not to be biased towards any of them at first (yes, that's easy to say).

In the near future, you would want to look at a managed CAD system to lock down your released drawings and models. Maybe you already use such a system to manage your AutoCAD files now and it will work with the Inventor files too.

Good luck with the trial testing.

I have been using intensively AutoCAD, SolidWorks and Pro-E for over ten years. I can say that when I have a project that doesn't involve more than, say, a couple of hundred parts, I use SolidWorks. The interface is more intuitive and thus the design gets done faster. Even though SolidWorks has the "lightweight" mode, in which bigger assemblies are supposed to load and edit faster than fully "resolved" ones, it still slows down. Sometimes, one is forced to fully resolve all components anyway in order for complete regeneration to take place. The multi-sheet drawing environment tends to bog down after five or six sheets of heavier assembly detailing. I am sure that tailored workstations with jacked up memory and processor speed would solve this problem but I am assuming that you are going to use an off self type of workstation.

For larger assemblies I use Pro-E. Though its interface is not as user friendly as that of SolidWorks, Pro-E is a workhorse that delivers. Its price came down drastically in the past years. It used to be that CAD systems were classified as "low-range", "mid-range" and "high-end" in terms of both deliverance and price, with SolidWorks being a "mid-range" and Pro-E being a high end. Not anymore. They both deliver impressive capabilities and prices are comparable.

The last thing I would add is that we have Caterpillar as a customer also, but the plants we deal with, work in Pro-E. So, needless to say, at our company, Caterpillar projects are designed in Pro-E. While choosing a CAD system should not be based on or dictated by one customer's design tools, considering that Inventor is as good as SolidWorks (I had a few hands-on labs so I can testify), purchasing Inventor seems to make sense in your case.

Cheers!

I have been using Pro/E for ten years (and cut my teeth in CAD starting back in 1990 with 2D AutoCAD). Solidworks used to have a quote that went something like "...80% of the functionality of Pro/E at 20% of the cost". PTC (the maker of Pro/E) finally caught on around 2000 and now both packages cost the same; it's going to cost you roughly $5000 per seat of either Pro or SW, and each has a maintenance cost of roughly $1500 annually. (shop around - we got our seats of Pro for $4000 each). Pro has many, many more add-ons for future growth, and their data management package (first Intralink, now ProductPoint) is far advaced beyond what SW has. for years, Pro/E has been considered the software package that you use as a "grown up" in the CAD world. look at the large businesses that are using a CAD package; i'm talking about the places that use hundreds of seats with data management and lots and lots of add-on modules....they aren't using SW. have i ever used SW:... no. but i have two people who work for me who were SW users but learned Pro/E when they started here; their opinions are quite similar: SW is easier to learn, but Pro/E has vastly more capability. if you're a small player SW is fine; if you want to play with the big boys you need to look elsewhere.

I'm sure Inventor would be fine, I have used SolidEdge, SolidWorks and currently ProE. For the latter I would be glad if I never had to use it again. SolidEdge was good for sheetmetal but I prefer SolidWorks, by far and so do almost everyone else I speak to. Far more intuitive.

I can't speak about Inventor, but having played with it at a tradeshow, I found it very easy with my SolidWorks experience.