Solidworks vs Pro/e

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CRX-YEM

CRX-YEM

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I know that there is a small base of engineers here and we are looking to migrate away from autocad t oa real 3d cad program. I've had a demo of solidworks 2007 pretty impressive, doesn't really look like there is a really large learing curve, just really keping your mind set on UCS and parametrics. The Cosmos integration is rather nice as well for doinf FEA's. So I'd like to here from some of you that have had experience with both systems. From what I gather they say Pro/e has a 1 year learning curve vs Sloidworks at a 6mos. A majority of our product are small single piece designs, we re getting more involved with multipiece assemblies, with that in mind what do you guys think ??
 
I've worked with both a little. ProE is definatly more powerful, but solidworks is very easy and intuitive to use if you don't have to do anything too complex. If you're designing a whole car or something you might want to go with ProE...if you're designing an a-arm, solidworks is fine. I work for 3M and we use solidworks for designing our plastic parts.
 
was it engineering desktop or was it inventor that was just this crazy ass learning curve that took 3 hours to make a part you could make in 15 minutes in autocad (not really that bad, but you get what im talking about). I havent used ProE but Solidworks is a good piece of software. as a novice designer (meaning i took 3 years of mechanical design in high school and 2 years in college) Solidworks was freakin cool.
 
In the High school classes I teach we use inventor but i have been trained on pro/e and have used solidworks. it is hard at first but when you catch on you can do some amazing shit.
 
Im not sure what the question is. But I say get used to changing between them. I cant tell if you're tyring to decide what to buy for a company or your spare time or whatever.

As far as I've seen though, CATIA we had at school looked pretty bad-ass for making single parts and then integrating them. Its entire file/gui/etc structure was set-up around that.
 
I prefer Pro/E, but they haven't updated their software package in years, and SolidWorks updates every year.

I've never sat down to use SolidWorks much, but let's just say that UT now teaches SolidWorks in the freshman CAD class alongside AutoCAD. Pro/E stays as an upper division and graduate level course.

My company experience:
Lockheed Martin uses a lot of Pro/E as does Ford
Halliburton uses a ton of SolidWorks
 
Solidworks/Catia are two amazing packages, but they do have their quirks in assembly mode, when you have a LOT of parts. We had 1000+ parts in our Solidworks aircraft design. ProE is nice, but I don't recall if there were any analysis tools integrated into it. I think it was a more expensive SW package than SolidWorks. I give SolidWorks a big two thumbs up after using it for about 2 years. If you are looking for options that are more closely related to CAD, Kubotech's KeyCreator is good also, and lets you do things more along the lines of AutoCad. There is a crapload of constraints in SolidWorks when you are creating parts, i.e. no free floating lines and whatnot, while KeyCreator will let you do just about anything, it's more like 3D drawing than the others, which are more solid in nature, obvious from the names. Catia is used by Boeing, and is probably considered the best package you can get, but it is expensive as hell.
 
Pro/E doesn't have the analysis tools integrated into it, but the tools that come as part of the whole PTC package (Pro/Mechanica etc) all plug into Pro/E and work to do pretty much anything you want.
 
We use SolidEdge at our work. It has a learning curve, but is a great databse type system, with great features.
 
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