Inventor or Creo?

[deheer_j]

Our school teaches Inventor as part of the STEM curriculum, so the team has elected to use that as our CAD tool. Last year we used Creo and struggled mightily with the learning curve. However, Windchill was fantastic for model integrity and storage. My personal preference is SolidWorks (with GrabCAD), but I struggle with what is best for the students. Is it better to support/augment what the school is already teaching them or is it better to use a tool that people are actually using in the mechanical design world? Don't get me wrong, I am an inventor fan-boy, but my industry experience as an engineering consultant proves that, in general, large, established companies use Creo, smaller, younger comapnies use SolidWorks, and a very small handful use Inventor.

As a side note, GrabCAD's support of Inventor 2015 is abysmal. It's effectively no better than GIT or Dropbox, imho. Which is another reason to switch to solid works, unless Autodesk could make a cloud version of Vault available (like Windchill) [HINT HINT].

SO with all that said... I am not looking to start a war and I apologize if I hijacked this thread, but in the spirit of the OP's initial question, is it better to support and use a software that the school teaches or is it better to use a more widely used software on our team?

Thanks for reading!

[Addison4300]

I only have experience in Inventor. It's a little complicated at first and a little difficult to get used to. Once you get used to it though it's a breeze!

[kgargiulo]

Originally Posted by deheer_j

Is it better to support/augment what the school is already teaching them or is it better to use a tool that people are actually using in the mechanical design world? Don't get me wrong, I am an inventor fan-boy, but my industry experience as an engineering consultant proves that, in general, large, established companies use Creo, smaller, younger comapnies use SolidWorks, and a very small handful use Inventor.

As a side note, GrabCAD's support of Inventor 2015 is abysmal. It's effectively no better than GIT or Dropbox, imho. Which is another reason to switch to solid works, unless Autodesk could make a cloud version of Vault available (like Windchill) [HINT HINT].

I think it is best to expose them to a wide variety of engineering tools and processes. If you can make a part on a mill or with a plasma cutter, why not learn both and understand the pros and cons of each approach. If they can learn Inventor and Creo and learn where there is a market for each skill set then they should learn both.

Why wait for Autodesk or D'Assault to duplicate Windchill or provide it to FIRST teams for free (I hope you are not holding your breath) when Windchill itself can handle all of that and has been available for free for years? Even if all you do is use Creo's native multi CAD funcatonality as a means of either converting or simply loading non-Creo CAD into Windchill you'd be far ahead.

Nothing out there touches Creo (particularly 3.0) in terms of being able to handle heterogeneous CAD source files in their native forms directly in Creo, with more or less full access to modeling features.

Creo 3 multi CAD features

[Cory]

Originally Posted by kgargiulo

Why wait for Autodesk or D'Assault to duplicate Windchill or provide it to FIRST teams for free (I hope you are not holding your breath) when Windchill itself can handle all of that and has been available for free for years? Even if all you do is use Creo's native multi CAD funcatonality as a means of either converting or simply loading non-Creo CAD into Windchill you'd be far ahead.

Dassault Systemes has provided PDMWorks for Solidworks for at least the last 5 years.

[kgargiulo]

Fair point. I should have inserted my breath holding comment after Autodesk which is what I was thinking in my head but didn't write.

The same comment I made about the benefits of having both Inventor and Creo experience applies across all CAD and data management software. The more experience the students get the more they form their own opinion and are better prepared for a STEM career.

I'm not an expert in PDMWorks, but I think it is a client/server application that the team has to install and maintain on each computer and the local vault, right? That would imply local hardware costs or at least the cost of the team's time to do installs and updates on every computer and the server. If it is web-based then this wouldn't apply, I'm just not sure.

We find our school's lockdown control over their computer systems means we stay away from as many installs as possible. Windchill is a website. No install, no maintenance, no local hardware costs, so it works great for us. That's my opinion, others may not have similar challenges to avoid.

Creo can import, open, change, etc. native SolidWorks (and many other CAD) files and manage them in Windchill too. So a single team could have some students using Inventor, Creo, and Solidworks, manage it all in Windchill, and have a top level assembly that puts all of that content together.

That is another example of good prep for real world. Sure, most companies standardize on one CAD or another. But companies have supply chains and customers and unless you have the weight of an Intel or Cat (both Creo) you can't dictate CAD format to your suppliers or customers (e.g. if you're building for the Army they're probably demanding Creo files and you can't negotiate that). In any engineering job you have to deal with some design content coming in formats other than your company's CAD standard, so it would be great if we exposed our FIRST teams to that as well.

I would do it in a non-build season project though. There's no need for artificial complexity, we all have enough going on in build season without inventing challenges even they are good lessons to teach.

Keith

[Sperkowsky]

We have used sketchup for the last few years..... Next year we intend to use solid works but we shall see.

[sanddrag]

If anyone from Autodesk is reading, PLEASE we need cloud-based Vault. We love vault currently, but some things are a real pain. It's a real love hate relationship.

We might be looking into using 360, but I'm not very familiar with it yet. Does it maintain similar functionality to Vault with revision history and check in and check out?

[inventor_phild]

Based on discussions with other teams I have posted this question to the Vault development team.

My guess is that the answer is A360.

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

If anyone from Autodesk is reading, PLEASE we need cloud-based Vault. We love vault currently, but some things are a real pain. It's a real love hate relationship.

We might be looking into using 360, but I'm not very familiar with it yet. Does it maintain similar functionality to Vault with revision history and check in and check out?

Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but can't Windchill handle non-Creo CAD systems? I've never used it myself, but that was my understanding when watching some videos about it.

[kgargiulo]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but can't Windchill handle non-Creo CAD systems? I've never used it myself, but that was my understanding when watching some videos about it.

Yes, Windchill can manage the CAD for anything that I've ever seen any FIRST team use and more.

Windchill Multi-CAD management

AutoCAD, Inventor, CATIA V5, SoildWorks, NX, FORAN, ECAD, and Cadence can all be managed in their native file format. For that matter, you can open (and change if you want) most (maybe all, I haven't checked recently) of them in their native format in Creo.

There is also a wide range of viewer support.

Using viewers so non-CAD team members can see the model in 3D without all the overhead of learning CAD is an underrated thing. This year our team permanently had a Creo View session running in the main fabrication shop. If someone's print wasn't clear they went to the model and measured directly off the model to clear up confusion - or to find out we had a design problem.

[deheer_j]

I would love to use Windchill with Inventor, but I could not find how to get the latest version of Windchill to talk with Inventor 2015.

below is what Windchill is saying I have available. In the old version of windchill, there was a plugin available for other software. Any idea how to install the plug for Inventor 2015?

Software Downloads

Document Management Windchill DTI Help
Install this application to access common Windchill actions with Microsoft Office and Windows Explorer.
- Windchill Desktop Integration (32-bit)
- Windchill Desktop Integration (64-bit)

Project Management Microsoft Project Plugin Help
Install this application to exchange plan information between Windchill ProjectLink and Microsoft Project.
- PTC Plug-in for Microsoft Project

Setup and Installation Setup and Installation Help
If your network does not allow Windchill applets to communicate with Windchill servers, this package will provide alternative means to do so. Please contact your IT department for assistance and to determine if this is necessary.
- Bootstrap Loader Installation

Visualization Visualization Help
Install this application to view, markup, review and collaborate on MCAD/ECAD product data and documents.
- Creo View Installation

[kgargiulo]

The word group manager software for Inventor is apparently not bundled with the free Windchill instance that gas been set up for FIRST teams. I am checking with PTC to see if that could change, but unless I post something to the contrary here that seems to be a restriction that is going to stay in place.

[MichaelBick]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

I have never been more fed up with SolidWorks...external references are handled pretty horribly and is extremely unforgiving when other people make changes and you need to update your model. I wish Dassault gave out licenses of CATIA, but I may have to switch to Creo. I don't want to do it, but SolidWorks kills me. I 'be always preferred top-down design and SolidWorks' implementation just isn't that good.

I completely agree with this. Solidworks was easy to learn and I have loved it for the past couple years. This year I started doing top down modeling using derived parts and it has given me so many problems. If somebody has a better method for top down design in Solidworks, I'd love to try it, but as of right now we will be looking into Creo for next year.

[MrRoboSteve]

Originally Posted by inventor_phild

Based on discussions with other teams I have posted this question to the Vault development team.

My guess is that the answer is A360.

3081 used A360 this year for multi user design and it generally worked well.

[Sperkowsky]

2869 has used sketchup for years. It's nice to organize thoughts quickly but thats all its good for.

This year we decided to learn inventor. I have a basic understanding already. We are making a off season bot so we will see if it's all worth it