WildFire Vs Inventor 9

[design3d]

I currently use Inventor R8 at work and I dislike it more every day. I was trained on Pro/E and while it is easy to get up to speed with Inventor, it has some serious limitations. It crashes often and has major problems with fillets. Surface modeling is non existent, you have to do some crazy stuff to make anything that looks relatively smooth.The program as mentioned crashes quite frequently as well.We don't do large assemblies at work, but I have been looking at doing some design work on the side, and after looking at all of the options, Solidworks, Solid Edge, and Inventor, I have found the best to offer still seems to be Wildfire. People complain about the annual maintenance and I guess it could get ridiculous if you have a lot of modules installed, but the maintenance for the FAP is like 1500.00, which is the same as Solidworks and Inventor, and I can tell you Inventors maintenace is only the updates, limited (or no?) support, and the updates they did while we had the maintenance were pretty lame. While they all have plusses, my vote would be stick with Pro/E.

 

[airion]

For tool making, I have heard great things about Cimatron. I haven't actually used it and I have no idea about the cost, maintanence, etc but you may want to look into it.

In my own experience, ProE is much better all around compared to solidworks and others. The price for the basic package is almost identical now, so buying SW because it's cheaper is no longer the case. And the learning curve for each should be close to even also. I think Wildfire 2 is so much better than version 2001. I also think it is easier to use and more intuitive than SW. I am a little biased having already used ProE since rev 2000i, but I beleive for a new user to CAD, ProE would be easier to learn since it walks you through the whole process of making a feature with the dashboard.

I recently had an issue going back and forth between ProE and SW using STEP files. Every export I made, I tested by importing back into ProE and had zero geometry checks and a solid model. When SW imported that same file it got geometry checks, which can fixed with its diagnostic tool. But after that, it said wasn't solid geometry and a cut on it could not be done. This was a complex brake caliper with lots of rounds and SW had trouble with it.

 

[Moroso]

airion,


We use Cimatron here along with Pro/E, Solidworks, Mastercam PowerMill & VX.


Cimatron looks like a really good package from what I see the guy next to me doing.


He only complainsthat the support sucks and the amount of memory it uses, alot more than Pro/E.
Edited by: Moroso

 

[jeff4136]

no one has yet mentioned what iv9 can do that pro-e can not. ...

I think I might have found something ...

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=12311 2&id=5549329&linkID=2475161

... if hijacking your co-workers' computers counts.