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Monty, Are you SURE you’re not selling this
J
Well, lets just say that after 10+ years of
being used.......well......roughly by many other cad vendors, such that some of
Ernest's bio engineered Vaseline would have been a much welcome
relief.......
It's nice to have a company in the cad world
that doesn't bend you over every chance they get.
Catia...forget it. Think Reverse Polish
Sadomasochism with high voltage.
Alias- If you wear a black turtle neck, and
little round purple glasses and think a milling machine should look like a
butterfly, plus you don't mind spending multiple tens of thousands of
dollars for something Rhino can do.....this is for you.
Unigraphics- $24K just to get
started.....$3-5K/ year maintenance. $75K for a full license. Used to be really
good...now not so much.
ProE...not much better
Autoscam...an expensive joke..... The rainbow
water vac of the cad world. Autocad sales people are right in there with Amway..
(BobCad is about the same) I expect that bearded guy who screams a lot to start
selling these late at night on cable.
Solidworks....$4-6K..... better but still 1K
maintenance once a year ......a mean drunk that is nice when
sober.
Solid Edge...more of the
same
Plus these @#$$@## change everything around
every year....they don't actually make improvements mind you , they just move
everything around so you can't get anything done.....so they can sell you
training......I have another word for it, but that's what they call
it.
The good guys:
Rhino-Excellent surfacing package for a
reasonable price....solids suck however and non-parametric. for $1K reasonable
upgrades about every 2 years that actually improve the
software.
Alibre-Excellent solid modeling package with
assemblies and all the trimmings. Every upgrade is actually an upgrade and
reasonably priced.
I have a secret wish that everybody in the
experimental aviation world learn to use this stuff so we can share parts and
data...Think print a plane open source with everybody making continuous
improvements and upgrades.
Plus payback is a bitch. I hope all the
aforementioned thieves go the way of the Sun Workstation. I've paid them
enough to buy a very nice Bavarian auto over the years and gotten nothing but
grief.
As to the learning Curve. I can't give a
realistic estimate, because I've been doing this so long with so many different
packages that I can pick up anything in a couple hours (except for BobCad which
is so horribly clunky I gave up after 10 min). There are a lot of low time
people who have indicated that they found Alibre much easier to pick
up than some of the other packages.
I could possibly be persuaded to give a
workshop on this stuff at Tracy's. There are some logistics involved that could
be problematic. Like anybody who want's to participate has to bring a laptop
with the software already installed and know how to use a
mouse.
Monty
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