Solid Works

[joseph alexander]

Does anyone have any experience with this program. Our office tried out Revit and it fell very short of our expectations. It's a very good BIM program but a very poor parametric modeler. We often like to get into the nitty gritty of construction and Revit really didn't stack up to our expectations.

If anyone has a recomendation or experience with it I'd greatly apreciate.. or a listing of another forum where I can get input..

 

Thanks,

 

-joe

[Elliot]

Joseph

 

I have been casually using Solid Works for 10 years. It will be an OK product for 3D of small mechanical parts. It will not be good for any architectural application. I do a small amount of mechanical parts. Its parametric capabilities are good. With each new version the computer seems to slow down more and more. I continue up-grading the computer and still can’t catch up with the SW demand for more power.

 

Recently I had an opportunity of working with Inventor. It seems to me that Inventor is almost slightly ahead of SW. One thing for sure with Inventor, it is very simple to bring the models in and out to either AutoCAD or 3D Max. With SW I have to make the 3D models into an SAT file, then AutoCAD and then to 3D Max. If you have a circle or cylinder the 3D Max will show it as a round figure with many faces. When you bring a cylinder from Inventor to MAX it is only one process and the cylinder comes out perfectly round.

 

I am going to keep SW for a while but I will be cautiously transitioning to Inventor. For people that do both mechanical and architectural it seems that Inventor would be a better solution to the file exportation.

 

 

Regards

Elliot

[joseph alexander]

The people most interested in solid works are our Curtain Wall people who know that the fabricators use it. I'm still confused as to how they deal with such huge models. The buildings we have in the office right now are really big (2 million + SF) and they claim to have everything modeled down to the nuts and bolts needed for assembly in Solid Works..

If you're saying it gums up with a mechanical model I'm not sure how it handles the scale we typically deal with.

 

-joe

[Elliot]

Joe,

 

You are right on track. I have tried making the buildings on SW and it is almost impossible. I think there is a limitation of 64,000 polygons..... I am not sure about this limitation number. However, beyond that limit SW will not work very well.

 

I could be they have all their curtains for each of the rooms modeled on SW but each room is a different file. They could also be sharing parts. On SW the entire model is called an xxxx.sldasm file. This parent file is made of sub-component files called yyyy.sldprt. It could be they have a large model where they share the same parts over and over.

 

For 10 years I have tried to use the excellent modeling capabilities of a solid modeler and bring them on to a surface modeler for renderings. It is to complex. I still do a lot of mixing. If I have a complex part to model, requiring a lot of precision, it is no brainer.... it will on SW. I have wanted the modeling capabilities of either SW or Inventor to be incorporated on MAX. I use to drive crazy all the Discreet people in Montreal with my workflow from SW to Lightscape. That was even worst. The transition from a solid to a surface model would creat a lot of double faces. These faces will break up into many triangles and then the surfaces will not be alligned with the normal facing into one direction. I gave up on it many years ago. However, with Inventor (the last one "11"????) I was very surprised how easy is to go back and forth. Just like Photoshop and Image Ready.

 

SW has a rendering plugin called Photoworks II which is a Mental Ray renderer, it is not bad.... it is very primitive and clumsy when compared to what we have with MAX or Viz.

 

Regards

Elliot