Quote:
Originally Posted by Gray Adams
Some people are recommending Solid Edge. I only have limited experience with it (half of one course designed to teach basic CAD...), but I hated that software with a passion. It felt very limited and clunky. Support for it was difficult to find and I've never even heard of it being used in industry. Others may disagree, but I see no reason to go with Solid Edge over Solidworks. Synchronous modeling isn't that important, especially for FRC applications.
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Depending on when you used Solid Edge, and what version you used, your experience could have been quite different from what is offered by Solid Edge ST7. Solid Edge has spent the last decade developing the Parasolid kernal, and even the people at Solid Edge will admit that this may have cost them some early market share. Personally I hadn't used Solid Edge until this summer when I had a chance to sit down for a day with a Solid Edge applications engineer as part of an article I was writing. I didn't think that Synchronous Technology would be that big of a deal either... but that was because I hadn't seen what it could do. He showed me enough of what Solid Edge could do that I came home and decided to learn more.
My experience was that it wasn't learning Solid Edge that was the challenge, so much as unlearning the limitations of Inventor. After about ten days, however, I started to get the hang of modelling in Synchronous mode and I found that for many projects it offered far more flexibility than Inventor. It had almost the same degree of flexibility as a 3D animation program, but with the added ability to lock down sizes and dimensions when I wanted to. I'm still a long way from mastering Solid Edge, but so far I'm impressed.
Anyway... there is a 45 day free trial available and the site license is free for high schools to use. That is not available for either Inventor or Solidworks... which offer individual licenses or team licenses, but not free licenses suitable for general classroom instruction (you could look into Creo as I know that Pro/E used to have a good high school license available). My only experience has been with Solid Edge ST7, which came out this summer, so users of previous releases may have had a different experience.... and yeah, if you're used to ordered modelling as the only way to model, then it will take a while to get your head wrapped around what Synchronous Technology can do... personally I have found it worthwhile, but I also had a bit of a head start having had a chance to sit down for a day with an expert on the topic.
I like Inventor and have used it for about a decade with FRC teams. I've organized classes to get teachers certified in Pro/E... now Creo... nothing against that software, although I found Inventor's learning curve easier. And I've got no complaints with Solidworks. They are all fine packages and you'd do well to learn using any of them. But I'm pretty impressed by what Solid Edge can do once you get your head wrapped around the fact that your model won't fall apart when you delete one of your early dimensions.
Jason