CAD Programmes

[Elliott Hopkins]

A recent interview has drawn to my attention my lack of CAD experience.

What is the industry standard program? What is the cheapest and easiest way to learn it?

Thanks.

Elliott.

[Stu]

Auto-Cad is widely used, easy to use for simple drafting, layouts, blah, blah.

There are many other products also, depends what your field is as to what else you would look at, especially if you are doing solids rather than just 2D stuff (allthough Autocat is a 3D).

[gps3300]

It depends what industry you're looking at. *Very* generally speaking, aerospace uses CATIA V5, the electronics industry tends to use PRO-Engineer & automotive was IDEAS but is now swinging towards CATIA. A professional course for any of these is going to be a week long and cost around £1K

[josh_smaxx]

Ive got the manual for an old auto-cad (release 8 IIRC) and its huge, like 1000's of pages read the first 40 odd and gave up, still got auto-cad 2000 though.

[LEGEND]

At the school i go to there is a program called 'Pro Desktop' where you can create all sorts e.g camera's, cars, wheels, nuts, bolts, computers. You can make almost anything you can think of. And it is very easy to use as-well.

[Stu]

Pro-desktop is a freeware program from the makers of Pro-engineer. It's a nice little thing for training and the makers promotion, but not really an industry standard.

[Chris Doughty]

I know nothing about what the industry uses.

but I really like solidworks, I have no CAD training at all but I am able to make some cool things in it. it feels quite similar to 3D graphics model/mesh making applications.

[Elliott Hopkins]

I hear solid works is quite good.

I may have to try Autocad. I think it's on a computer at work.

I may also give the freeware programme a go.

Thankyou guys.

Elliott.

[Chris Green]

I have used Solidworks regularly for the past 7 years now. The company I work for, has 7 licenses. I use it to model refrigeration systems, mainly sheet metal housings and pipework layouts.

I've also used Pro/Engineer, and Solid Edge. From what I can tell, Solidworks has really grown stronger and stronger over the past few years. I believe it is one of the more common systems nowadays, behind the high-end stuff like Catia.

Its kind of a mid range bit of software, not quite as powerful as Pro/Engineer, but it is soooo much more user friendly. That said, it is still about 4k for a license if I remember correctly. plus a £1k computer to run it, and your license will need renewing each year to get the latest release, at a cost of about a grand.

Catia is one of the most powerful packages out there, but it is very very expensive compared to Pro/Engineer, Solidwork, Solid Edge etc.

[elvo]

AutoCAD used to be the standard, long ago. It's coordinate-driven and uses mostly a command-line interface. Not too n00B-friendly... Inventor is from the same company, a lot better and relatively friendly.
Catia is the ultimate CAD software, but costs.... millions. You only really need it if you're designing a Boeing or military aircraft :-)
Pro/Engineer is.... very engineer-like. I think it used to be UNIX-based. Ver ytechnical.

SolidWorks is BY FAR the most intuitive to use, imho the best complete package. I'm quite sure it's what a large part of 'the industry' uses nowadays. Its tutorial is also the bees knees BTW. You'll like this one.

[Elliott Hopkins]

In general, the CAD programs are incredibly complicated programmes, that are very expensive?

Do they all share a certain common style of user interface and method of operation?

Elliott.

[Chris Green]

Most 3D systems use a similar interface, with a design tree down the one side of the screen, where you can view either assembly hierachy, or features of a modelled part.

If you got the hang of one system, you could pick up another fairly quickly really. I managed to pick up Pro/Engineer pretty quicky after only using solidworks.

[mark christopher]

i have full auto cad and solidworks, both blow my mind.................................need to find a good teacher or somin simpler

[Chris Green]

Hi Mark,

Have you tried the online tutorials within Solidworks? (Go to "Help" and then "Solidworks Tutorials" if using SW2007).

I have recently trained a couple of guys up in my department, and all the excercises they completed were from the tutorials.

It's quite surprising how quickly you can pick it up. One guy is almost fully competent, after using it for a few months, and he had no previous 2D or 3D cad experience.

If you get stuck on anything, feel free to give me a shout, I should be able to help.

[Chris Doughty]

I ran through the SW2004 tutorials, very good material to learn from.

[rich_cree]

I love Unigraphics

[Cooper]

http://users.pandora.be/231st/B4temp2.jpg






http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fusea...deoid=17047939

[Molgorain]

Originally Posted by elvo

AutoCAD used to be the standard, long ago. It's coordinate-driven and uses mostly a command-line interface. Not too n00B-friendly...

The commandline, was long time ago, its still there, but all commands has icons now. Been wokring with it for 8years now, still running Autocad2004, but I have been klooking a 2007 and the dynamic block-thing.

Its not cheap, but atleast in Sweden you can get a studentlicens, for a very good bargainprice.

Otherwise you have sketchup, very simple 3D-program. It has some very good video-tutorials online.

All depends on what kind of "computer-aid-drawing" you want to do, 2D or 3D?

[TRF_Tastic]

Auto-cad superb tool to use, but you need a lot of hands on time to become fully proficient.

Catia, absolutely fantastic piece of software but major overkill for most applications.

Of the 3d apps Solid works is the daddy, but I have been using Sketchup for over a year now and its great for making things up very quickly, also for the more involved excerises.

There are a load of other CAD apps out in the market place mostly for very specialist applications Allplan for Architectural work along with caddy. There are also specialist apps for Chip design like L-Edit.

I would choose the most popular application for the area you want to specialize in and just spend as much time as you can completing as many of the online tutorials and tasks as you can. There is no substitute for experience with CAD design.

[Chris Green]

Originally Posted by Cooper

http://users.pandora.be/231st/B4temp2.jpg



http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fusea...deoid=17047939

Cooper, what package was that modelled in? Fancy sharing your hard work?