CAD Forum

Jim Elias

You can toggle OFF the new sketch environment and continue to use the legacy sketching on the newer versions if you need or want to. Go to FILES>UTILITIES>EARLY ACCESS FEATURES and at the very bottom you can turn off the new solver & UI for sketching . I do see that 2306 seems to allow you to c...

Jim Elias

Still does most days. There are some things it does really well and some really cool features that'd be sorely missed going back to SW - Copy Design feature, smoothness of large assemblies and/or drawings, etc.... but in some ways SW was lightyears ahead of IV. Even SW 2015 is way ahead of IV in 3d...

Jim Elias

<snip> And you wonder why, at least here in Japan, many companies that use SW use a 2D CAD do make their 3d data 2d drawings exporting some views from SW I've just started seeing that directly because I'm interfacing with an Asian supplier who models in SW... I was surprised to see that the prints ...

Jim Elias

When I used Inventor, I realized it was a skin-deep copy of Solidworks. As much as we tend to rag on the company, the product of Solidworks was pretty good, and had a lot of functionality. Inventor only resembled SW in the first layer. SW has/had many layers, but Inventor only bothered to copy the ...

Jim Elias

I tried the new sketcher and see the value, but I'm still mostly using NX1872 because I prefer to use the Direct Sketch environment, which got dumped before the new sketcher got introduced. If they would bring Direct Sketch back, I'd upgrade to latest version immediately.

Jim Elias

Jim, your VAR is either misinformed or is trying to mislead you. You can still get perpetual licenses; it is just that Siemens is mandating that the VAR's put forth subscription quotes unless the customer explicitly asks for perpetual. Thanks, I'll ask if the topic comes up again. My VAR told me th...

Jim Elias

Which package do you use? Or do you buy it piecemeal? I have a perpetual "NX Mach Designer" (NX10101) bundle. As I remarked elsewhere, in terms of capabilities, it's not far removed from SW Professional (which I also have). For the work I do (opto-mechanical design), it's inherently more ...

Jim Elias

UDFs not being part of the core NX package is a travesty.....library features is a basic thing. There's a lot of "basic" stuff which isn't part of the bare-bones package. On the other hand, if the lowest tier was the Mach 1, it would be priced out-of-reach for many independents (including...

Jim Elias

NX user here. I think it's a great idea... there are times that I would really like to use things like WAVE control and the User-Defined Features module, but I wouldn't get enough added overall utility to justify buying them. Unfortunately, the NX lowest-end bundles such as I have, are not compatibl...

Jim Elias

I started transitioning from NX to SW in 2016 and I didn't notice any appreciable differences between the available sketch tools, but maybe going that direction I didn't realize what I was missing. They're very similar. What makes the NX sketcher rock for me is the "Edit" function, especi...

Jim Elias

Yes and no......stability is worse in some areas.....but functionality is much better. We started on 98 and I can think of so many things it was missing....no way I'd go back to it. NX, I'd love to get my hands on to see what they improved. I had little problem picking it up and feel its workflow i...

Jim Elias

Creo and NX are on another suite/cost level... imho, this is really about SE (SW should not be here imho). NX, (with my limited exposure is NOT that easy to use) for the skilled user it has many ways to go, it has an impressive tool set but still trying to catchup with todays UI's and out of reach ...

Jim Elias

I haven't use NX since NX4 but my experience with it wasn't as good. We had CAD workstations but assemblies in it were dog slow at times. Luckily we only had about 50 parts max in an assembly with the average being about 10 (medical company). Where as my current company runs SolidWorks with thousan...

Jim Elias

Agreed. I would dump SW tomorrow and switch to NX/TC, but I can't justify the added cost, which is significant. Understandable, and I doubt that I will actually ever go off SW maintenance, as tempting as it is every time that yearly invoice from my SW VAR shows up. (I like my VAR fine, no beefs the...

Jim Elias

At the core of the problem, IMO, it the companies philosophy. Siemens has prioritized stability and robustness. DSS has prioritized marketing and cramming in new features that don't work and very few people wanted in the first place. To be fair, NX is pretty merciless when it comes to costs. There ...

Jim Elias

I feel your pain. The first time I reached out to your IT department to spec me a new computer (I do my own now and just tell them what to order, but back then I didn't know any better) I specifically told them what I needed it for, foolishly thinking they'd research what I needed. They sent me the...

Jim Elias

Coming from using Solid Edge for a few years: - modeling (sldprt): I don't know that I notice a difference for most of our stuff. My complaints are still mostly around unlearning the SE UI. Configurations might be better than part families in SE, depending on usage. - assemblies: SW is slower for w...

Jim Elias

Again, I'm not defending the software, but I rarely have to wait on it when I'm working, and all my files are on a network drive. Is it possible that you're working on a network drive with a poor connection, or your computer could use more horsepower? And please understand that I'm trying to help, ...

Jim Elias

And I believe NX is in the process of a UI makeover to modernize, make it consistent, and align with the other Siemens products (guessing they didn't 100% complete it in 2306). yes, 2306 has some new icon arrangements, but it's still pretty far from a makeover. In any case, I don't think the UI nee...

Jim Elias

Oh and don't get me started on how generally left-behind-in-the-dust SW drafting is. Every so often I see a post saying something like "you can't beat SW drafting" and I am at a loss to understand why anyone would think so.

Jim Elias

A typical SW day for me is 3 crashes. I've never had the feeling that I was doing anything particularly complex CAD-wise when they happened. But the crashes aren't really the deal-breaker for me. The main thing that makes SW never my first choice is the lack of speed. SW is simply slow. I am not an ...

Jim Elias

DavidWS wrote: ↑Sun Jul 30, 2023 9:41 am
(snip)

... the plethora of bugs and instability ...

I am not a regular Inventor user, but when it comes to bugs and instability... the SW pot shouldn't be talking smack about anyone else's kettles.

Jim Elias

To me, the comparison comes down to this: Solidworks crashes on me daily, doing very simple things. NX almost never crashed on me. Yep to that. And I don't agree with some 95% of the criticisms levelled at NX by SW-centric users. Most of the time, they aren't using efficient NX practice because com...

Jim Elias

"When I was a small boy at school a lecturer used to come once a term and deliver excellent lectures on famous battles of the past, such as Blenheim, Austerlitz, etc. He was fond of quoting Napoleon’s maxim ‘An army marches on its stomach’, and at the end of his lecture he would suddenly turn t...

Jim Elias

Opto-mechanical designer here. I have NX and SW licenses NX just feels like a technologically superior product even for simple tasks. That's because it is. The notion that NX really only offers added value for industrial-designer "digital sculptors" is nonsense. I don't have those fancy-pa...

Jim Elias

Does anyone have any skinny as to why NX and SE interoperation-compatibilities now seem to be stuck? Creo-compatibility has apparently been keeping current (or at least SW says so, I'm not a regular Creo user), but NX has been at 1899 and SE has been at 2020 since SW2021, with no change in SW2022 an...

Jim Elias

zxys001 wrote: ↑Sat Oct 08, 2022 2:14 pm I have no idea but the search returns this..
https://caxa-exb-viewer.software.informer.com

Thanks for the tip -- unfortunately, it doesn't seem to want to run. Apparently there's something missing.

Jim Elias

does anyone know of a free (or low-fee) viewer for CAXA EXB files? Don't need to be able to measure anything, just need to be able to view. Unfortunately can't find anything on the internet.

Thanks,
Jim

Jim Elias

That does sound nice. Most of what I've heard about NX is that most of the features/behavior is polished to a nice finish vs "If it kinda functions ship it." mentality. The only time I remember crashing NX was in the Nastran simulation. The modelling side was VERY robust (circa 2016). Tha...

Jim Elias

Sounds like Solid Edge and Inventor are closer in these behaviors. Drawings in SW feel like a big step backwards for us coming from SE. Concerning seeing the built model while editing an earlier sketch, unless the software does an excellent job of automatic selection filters so that downstream geom...

Jim Elias

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-forum/bd-p/78 Here is mostly SW users from the old SW forum. Of course there are mostly SW post. If you use post counts here, we're more about Joke then SW >< https://www.cadforum.net/viewforum.php?f=30 No surprise there... humor is, after all, a universal la...

Jim Elias

(snip) And yes, modify sketch in IV will hide everything after it. You can show the sketch and change dimensions without editing the sketch. thought so, that's a pity that IV also works that way. off-topic: now what I really like about IV is how painless it is to re-attach dangling drawing dimensio...

Jim Elias

Have you visit AutoDesk Inventor forum? SW forum got so much activity because people need to complain about SolidDoesn'tWork I was talking about here on this site. SW posts are in the five-figures, Inventor hasn't even broken 100 posts Inventor is a good program. But I get maybe 0.5 gigs per year t...

Jim Elias

Did that in IV. I think I did that in SW. Master Sketch and SSP Last IV job I did was 2016. I don't recall IV working the same way, but there might be the option. SW always rolls back on activating sketch edit. I tried that master sketch / ssp stuff and never warmed to it, it always seemed to me li...

Jim Elias

both of those last posts talk about editing sketch dimensions without rollback, which you can do in SW as well. what I didn't see in the SE video (though I may have missed it): NX allows you to fully open a sketch and change all its content without model rollback. You see the model at its (later) st...

Jim Elias

I don't love SW, even though it was indeed the first 3D system I worked with and I've made a good living with it. Anyway, 25 years down the line, there's another system which I prefer to use when I can. Now that said: unless you're already set with an until-retirement job at some industrial behemoth...

Jim Elias

Not only that, you can combine methods. What I don't get is how much people complain about the downside of history-based modeling, and yet defend it as if their lives depend on it when you mention a system that doesn't use history. Getting out from under history is a great thing for simple models. ...

Jim Elias

Hard to say. I am used to the NX method but the SW paradigm of having all feature info visible and available for double-clicking in the tree, irrespective of what level of the assembly is currently active, also has its advantages. Often kinda wish that NX had this also. For me, what makes NX way mor...

Jim Elias

<snip> Very confusing to identify the important major releases, ... Under the new paradigm, there seems to be somewhat less change than there used to be, when going from one "major" to the next (not surprising with the increased release frequency). Maybe this new numbering system with les...

Jim Elias

the Siemens synchronous palette is fantastic, but I will beg to differ on the whole history-vs-amnesia thing... all us NXers can't just be a bunch of Neanderthals.

Jim Elias

My problem with the reviewer's approach is that it's very much centered around "how much time do I need to model this isolated, relatively-simple blocky thing that already exists and I've already had XXX amount of time to practice at." It doesn't take the whole design process into account,...

Jim Elias

My point of view came from doing support for customers who would install Toolbox with all of its defaults, and then eventually someone opened up an assembly where all the screws reverted to the largest configuration available because they didn't have the same configs in their model that everybody e...

Jim Elias

What you're describing is, in my opinion, still part of the design process. "What fits the function" must always include price and that decision should be made at the design phase and not by purchasing or manufacturing. We likely work in very different company-structural worlds. I have no...

Jim Elias

The IV vs SW discussion is like the Ford vs Chevy discussion. Any rational person would say that both are good tools to get the job done. Both have pro's and Cons. The unwavering "Fanboys" that insist one is far superior to the other...well generally have never used one or the other or si...

Jim Elias

I'm just not a believer that somehow prints are "Suggestions" and that the true need for the part is determined by purchasing and manufacturing. I think this is simply the lazy mentality created by a severe lack of talented designers that have a solid grasp on tolerances and manufacturing...

Jim Elias

1.00" +0.010" -0.000" is certainly not the same as 1.005" +-0.005 From a machinist point of view it is. If you give me a dimensions of 1.00 +/.01 or 1.005 +/-.005, I'm going to shoot for 1.005 in both cases. There are some exceptions to this, say dies where if this was a hole th...

Jim Elias

How would the designer know how the process varies from nominal? What you're saying means that the designer needs to know that the process varies symmetrically. How would one convey design intent that says I want 1.00", can go over but do not go under? 1.00" +0.010" -0.000" is c...

Jim Elias

That's an excellent start! One thing I would add right off the top of my head is to dimension your model to the mean of the tolerance. Most CAM programmers who use the model, create their toolpaths right on the model. If the dimension is 1.000 +.010 / -.000, model it at 1.005. When you model it to ...

Jim Elias

It's a vicious cycle. One problem with CAM becoming so accessible is that you now have too many *machinists* these days who don't really understand much beyond programming, the same way you now have too many QC techs who can program a CMM, but have never acquired the ability to judge workmanship jus...

Jim Elias

I talked to a startup owner about Onshape as a possible money-saver. She didn't go for it because sooner or later, her business was going to need ISO or similar certification and not being able to have a native data archive was too risky... auditors are very picky about traceability. She also felt t...

Search found 59 matches