I was wondering how many people use Autodesk Inventor versus ProEngineer?
Put a Poll on there and I think one of these have already been made aka the thread. But to answer it:
-1. Solidworks
-2. Inventor
-3. Learning Pro.E
I personally prefer:
Inventor
Solidworks
PAD (Pencil-Aided Design)
Pro-E, which I once tried to learn. When I tried a second time, I was less successful. I might try again at some point.
I prefer proE for machining things because it has the CAM program built into the package, which is nice if your design tends to change alot. It’s harder to learn though, I’m sure I can only use about 10% of its real capability.
Inventor is much easier to use though, especially for students. I first learned to CAD with Inventor and I’m glad I started there, I would have gotten frustrated if I started with ProE.
As a 10+ year Pro/E user, I am biased towards Pro. I have played with Inventor a bit this year, and see some similarities, but many drawbacks. My company is a Pro/E company, so I don’t have much choice, but if I did, I’d stay with Pro.
Pro E is an unforgiving program while Inventor is quite the opposite. I have to learn Pro E for one of my design classes in college after using Inventor for almost three years and I want to punch the screen every time I use it. The only thing I have found so far that Pro E handles better than Inventor is the placement of datum/work planes. With that said Pro E will not work well unless you have a thorough understanding of setting up references within your drawings.
Inventor>Pro E
Actually, what you are describing is an advantage, not a disadvantage. In Pro, you must reference everything you model to a reference. You cannot have vague things floating in space. This is a good thing, since you always know exactly where things are.
By the way, it is best to speak of “models” instead of “drawings”. The draing is only a representation of the model.
I’ve got a decent amount of experience with all three (the most with inventor), and from the perspective of someone trying to design something with many parts, then manufacturing it, I would say I prefer SolidWorks the most.
It’s just the easiest and most intuitive to use, it also has a totally subjective more modern feel. I believe it’s interface for sketches is far superior.
As for Pro/E having CAM as an advantage, there are similar options for solidworks (no idea for inventor).
Just to be clear, Inventor was designed by ex-ProE programmers who wished to create a program that was easier to use than Pro and still did what they want.
Inventor was also created to be flexible in design and NOT be limited to having to constrain absolutely everything to a reference or define every dimension on a sketch. That type of constraint can interfere with the design process when you don’t know exactly what it is you wish to define or wish to create an adaptive design.
It is just two ways to approach CAD design. Think ProE as more structered, Inventor as less structured. They are both good packages.