As a student, I just thought this was the way CAD was, and that it was my responsibility to shepherd and manage a temperamental feature tree that could fall over at any moment. You could spend hours just getting back to where you were before. And god forbid if you want to go back and make significant changes in the tree. Let's be honest, how much of your time in SW is spent fixing a broken feature tree? I would argue up to 20% of an entire project can be spent rebuilding and fixing broken features. And it's true, in SW this is important because if you don't, the whole tree can break randomly if a sketch becomes undefined and conflicts with future features. When being taught how to model in SW, my teachers went to great lengths to make sure we fully constrained every sketch. It's all about managing the feature tree and making sure it is efficient and well built. It's parametric solid modeling, capably done. Now to go into a bit more detail about what SW is good at, and what makes it unique. A lot of businesses use SW, so it's a useful tool to have under your belt, but at some point if you're serious about CAD work you're going to have to step up. I know this might sound like a diss, but it's not. Having said that, a HUGE swathe of mid and low-tier companies use SW. No self-respecting top-tier design company uses SW.
Off the top of my head, Apple, Dyson and Mercedes all use Alias and NX for different stages in the design process. To give you some perspective, none of the big serious design companies use SW. For that, you have to step up to Alias (for A-surface modeling), CATIA or NX. SW simply doesn't have the capability to design a car, or many other objects. If you don't know what those things are, I might cover them in more detail in another article, but for now - it's basically the difference between the surfacing seen on a poorly designed hair dryer versus the smooth, flawless curves on a Mercedes. It is not designed for class-A surfacing or critical curve control. It is designed to make simple, solid body objects and to make functional, highly controlled assemblies with those parts. The devil you know is better than the devil you don't.įrom an industry perspective, SW is an entry level CAD system. I think this is the default position of a lot of SW users. A lot of my peers complained about rebuild times and features that would fail for inexplicable reasons, but I often was able to find a way around these issues and would defend it often because I hadn't used anything else. This is the system I learnt CAD on, and when I was using it, I loved it. Not because it was good, but because of an entrenched user base and aggressive sales. 10 years ago, Solidworks cornered the education and small business markets.
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