inventor
 

I personally learned to draw on mechanical desktop in school. Since then my school has switched to teaching inventor, and my experience with it has been good. I would have to say inventor, its just so easy to use without losing too much power. Every new release of inventor keeps making it more powerful, so I can only assume in a few years it will be much more powerful and even easier to use.

I admit it
 

Whoa there! Try not to use orange font. It hurts my eyes :)

.dwg to .ipt
 

have some old autocad files and an trying to convert them to inventor files and haven't been very successful. i was wondering if anyone knows how to do this.

Acad -> Inventor
 

Inventor 3 will not directly import 3d autocad files. You can however, open 2d autocad files and bring them into a model as a sketch. What I do is export the 3d Autocad file from Autocad as a .SAT file and then open this .SAT file in Inventor. This usually works fine as long as you keep those units of measure consistant.

I'm not sure if Inventor 5 acts differently. We just received our software yesterday and I haven't had a chance to play with it.

SolidWorks
 

I have not heard many people discussing SolidWorks, so I will share some history with everyone. When AutoCad (ACAD) first came out, it was a 2-D package for Architecture; but it was so versatile (at the time) that it became the most widely used CAD program. 3-D CAD came into the picture on Workstations (Sun, HP, etc.), but were very expensive. Programs like Unigraphics, Pro-E, SDRC-Ideas, and CATIA (Boeing & Chrysler) became very power tools used by most major companies. Delphi, Chrysler, Ford, GM, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing (just to name a few) all use (or used) these programs. Many smaller companies could not afford the very expensive programs and machines to run them. Some software companies tried to make PC based solid modeling work, but were unsuccessful. Then came SolidWorks....

Solidworks was the first PC based solid modeling program to actually appeal to many small companies and it was starting to take market share from the larger CAD companies. FANUC Robotics (the company I work for) used 2-D CAD software up until 1997. In 1997 we evaluated Mechanical Desktop (Inventor wasn't around yet), Solidworks, Pro-E, and SolidEdge. We had a 3 month evaluation process and generated a 150 page report comparing everything you can think of. SolidWorks was years ahead of both SolidEdge and Mechanical Desktop. We chose SolidWorks and use it in our mechanical product development division. Our System division uses autocad 2-D, but recently made the decision to switch to 3-D. Autocad came in with their inventor product at about 1/2 the price of SolidWorks, but its functionality was severely lacking. Our systems division is also going to use SolidWorks.

FANUC uses SW for all mechanical design from initial concepting all the way through detail design.

To be fair to SolidEdge, in 1997 when we looked at them they were far behind SolidWorks; now the gap has closed significantly and from what I have seen and read, SolidEdge is pretty close in functionality to SolidWorks.

Team 217 uses SolidWorks exclusively to design all robot components and our students just had a week long training seminar for SolidWorks 2001.

well, i have enver used the others excpet AutoCAD so that's why I chose that, if I learned some of the tohers, it may have swung me to either side

After last friday, my vote changed....Our team went to a delphi office and trained in Solid Edge, and I really like how it works, and some of the things you can do with it....so my vote is for Solid Edge

Definitely Solidworks.

For those touting Inventor, realize that it was Autodesk's "Oh $#@!" response to Solidworks and SolidEdge. I've officially learned Pro/E, Solidworks, and I-DEAS, and I've messed around with Catia and Inventor. SW is tops in my book.


Microsoft makes a controller very much like the Spaceball for strategy games, it's called the MS Strategic Commander. I've often thought of bringing mine to work to give it a shot with Solidworks. At about 1/10th the cost of the Spaceball, it might be a nice alternative solution.