PTC Wildfire?

ProE is somewhat less user-friendly than Solidworks, but due to some saturation marketing by PTC, is more pervasive here in India than SW. It is always good to know more, so please continue your efforts to learn ProE, maybe UG...etc.

How to get a copy? Buy it of course

Somewhat less user friendly? it is a freaking dinosaur compared to Solidworks. I'm working with it at my current job and I curse it daily. things that should be so very simple to do are virtually impossible with it. I want to find the idiot that wrote it and beat the snot out of him. I keep being told it is so much more powerful that SW but I have yet to find anything that it can do that SW can't.

After the CR4 rules made me a "Guru", i made me a promise not to #@! , hence the temperate language .... if you find that guy, give me a call, i will join you

You got yourself a deal my friend...

I have used ProE, Inventor and Solidworks. I have found that they all have their strengths.

It has been about 3 years since I used ProE but it was definitly a lot more powerful than SW and Inventor but at the cost of being a lot more fiddly.

At the end of the day it all comes down to what sort of work you are doing. Inventor seems to me to be quite good with sheetmetal but the rest of the pakage lacks some maturity.

I agree that solidworks to be quite user friendly but miss the more rigid structure of ProE especially when trying to debug or modify a model.

It is all very well to create 3D geometry but when you need to go back and modify things that is where you really test BOTH the software AND your modelling techniques. Demonstrations by software vendors seem to overlook this.

BTW I got the new 2011 Invetor discs today - 7 DVDs versus 1 DVD for Solidworks 2010. What's up with this? Downloads from the web?

The Inventor software is shipped as Inventor Pro with all it's add-ons plus all the utilities like Design Review, Drawing Resource Manager, etc, not to mention the Vault client and tons of standard library (Content Center) parts. You probably also got Mechanical Desktop along with it. That's why it's so big.

Of course if you only have an Inventor Suite license, a lot of what's included is moot.

I don't bother with the DVD's anymore. I just download it over the net.

Re PTC Wildfire. That user interface must be 20 years old now. They just occasionally rearrange it, then call it improved.

Hooker

I have been working with Solidworks standard for the past 3 years. The modeling seems very intuitive to use. But, it is the "REAL PAIN IN MY BEHIND" everyday trying to keep track of the changes to the file. Anyone can come in and twist it. I prefer the premium package because it has everything that you would need to do. The boss was too chicken to buy one.

PTC has also released a freeware version of its 3D CAD software - CoCreate Modeling Personal Edition