Geomagic Design vs The World

[Lew_Merrick]

Simon & Nate,

If the parts are to be drilled (etc.) at the part level, then the interdesign constraint approach is the best.

The assembly hole tool is really intended for those holes that will be match drilled (etc.) at the assembly level.

An example of this would be an assembly where one part has pilot holes drilled at the part level. At the assembly level, those holes will be finish drilled (etc.) from the pilot holes. Those holes should not appear in the parts until they reach the assembly level of process. Does this help?

 

[RocketNut]

Just wondering.

If you use the assembly hole function, does the hole appear in the drawings of the assembly?

Rocket Nut

 

[Lew_Merrick]

If you use the assembly hole function, does the hole appear in the drawings of the assembly?

Yes.

 

[RocketNut]

Thanks Lew

I guess I'm going start using the assembly hole function.

 

[bigseb]

... unless anyone can tell me otherwise ! :?

Global parameters

 

[Lew_Merrick]

Global parameters

Whereas I am a big fan of Global Parameter, their implementation at this point fall in the decent first-cut category. They will need a lot of improvement to reach their full potential!

 

[bigseb]

Global parameters

Whereas I am a big fan of Global Parameter, their implementation at this point fall in the decent first-cut category. They will need a lot of improvement to reach their full potential!

I agree with you however if you want to position holes through several parts in an assembly - and easily change the position of said holes - then global parameters is still the quickest way to do it.

FWIW, my biggest gripe with global parameters is that it doesn't update easily. I need to shut the part window, open up the parameter window, do the change, save, close the parameter window and reopen the part window. Want to make a change? Repeat process. Its very long-winded. :|

 

[Lew_Merrick]

FWIW, my biggest gripe with global parameters is that it doesn't update easily. I need to shut the part window, open up the parameter window, do the change, save, close the parameter window and reopen the part window. Want to make a change? Repeat process. Its very long-winded. :|

I shan't disagree with the operational sequence PITA condition, but the thing I constantly trip over is the way in which the AD_GLP does not automagically follow the rest of the assembly set when doing a Save As operation.

 

[bigseb]

FWIW, my biggest gripe with global parameters is that it doesn't update easily. I need to shut the part window, open up the parameter window, do the change, save, close the parameter window and reopen the part window. Want to make a change? Repeat process. Its very long-winded. :|

I shan't disagree with the operational sequence PITA condition, but the thing I constantly trip over is the way in which the AD_GLP does not automagically follow the rest of the assembly set when doing a Save As operation.

:shock: ... hadn't even noticed that...

 

[bigseb]

So here'ssomething interesting. I created a voronoi style bowl in GD/Meshlab saved it and exported it as stp file too. Then I tried to export it as an stl... GD couldn't do it. RAM was maxed out and the PC froze. However the previously exported stp file imported into Catia and exported as an stl within minutes... what gives? The same stp file brought Creo to its knees incidentally.

 

[bigseb]

Been busy designing a bonding jig the last few days... using Creo. It has been a nightmare. I know Geomagic Design isn't perfect but it is so much better than Creo.

Example: placing a dimension in a drawing
Geomagic Design: click on the 'dimension' button, select first entity, select second entity, done (one handed operation)
Creo Parametric 3: click on 'annotate' tab, click on 'dimension' button, left click on first entity, ctrl, left click on second entity, middle mouse button to place. (two handed operation)

Example: creating a section view
Geomagic Design: draw the geometry for the cut, select 'section' in the ribbon, select afore-mentioned geometry, place section view.
Creo Parametric 3: open the 3D model in a new window, create a plane or surface as cutting entity, select the 'view' tab, click the 'section' button, create a new section using the cutting entity, go to the layer tree and hide the cutting entity, save and close the part window. In the drawing window select your main view and create a projected view, select the projected view and right click, select properties, select the 'section' tab, select 2D section, click on '+' and select the section created in the part.

Seriously it goes on and on like this. I could give a ton more examples but I don't have the time right now. Surprisingly it is not very configurable either i.e. I can't tweak it to work smoother or work how I want. It is crippling my work flow.

Geomagic Design ftw!!

 

[bigseb]

... I could give a ton more examples but I don't have the time right now.

Ok here are some more anyway...

Example: The hole tool
Geomagic Design: select a plane/surface, select the hole tool, place your holes and dimension/constrain accordingly, set the parameters of the hole, done.
Creo Parametric 3: you can only create one hole at a time!!!. Then you can only pattern the rest. If your holes are irregularly spaced you need a create a new hole feature for each hole.

Also, deleting the pattern automatically deletes the hole feature too. Bonkers.

 

[bigseb]

Example: creating a detail view
Actually the process here is very similar for GD and Creo. Only difference is that in GD you can create your shaped geometry for the detail, thus possibly isolating/avoiding certain features. A GD detail view geometry can be round, elliptical, triangular, rectangular, etc. Creo can only do circles.

Only.

Circles.

Someone call Ripley's... :shock:

 

[Lew_Merrick]

Hey Sebastian,

What about CREO's design intent manager? I cannot tell you how many times after having put serious days of work into creating an assembly the design intent manager would override all my carefully constructed constraints and "reformulate" the assembly into the most amazing "construct."

Now, to say something nice about ProE/CREO, you can mate a flat-head screw to its countersunk hole.

 

[bigseb]

Something else I don't like is Creo's file versioning:

How it works is this. Create a part/drawing/assembly/sheet metal part/etc and save as xxxxx.xxx. Creo saves it as xxxxx.1.xxx. Now every time you press or the software does an autosave it creates a new version i.e. xxxxx.2.xxx, xxxxx.3.xxx and so on. This allows you to roll back to a previous version if need be. Nice idea but extremely impractical in reality.

Here's why. I was given a folder containing an assembly with all its parts. Total folder size was 45Mb. My task was to create manufacturing drawings. Btw the time all drawings were done several days later the folder had grown to 1.1Gb! Once I purged the folder of all versions but the latest it was back at 48Mb. It is a huge resource hog without any real benefits and only adds extra process to my day.

 

[bigseb]

Oh yeah, something else. Some people here complain about stability issues with GD. I have these too but they are few and far between. Creo is terrible in this area. Creo 3.0 was released and it awful. I tell you the truth: Geomagic Design's beta release is more stable/less buggy than Creo's final release. We are currently on the 5th update of Creo 3.0 and it crashes and hangs constantly.

As someone that gets to compare GD to one of the so-called big daddies on a daily basis I honestly believe that Geomagic is way ahead of the competition. Working with Geomagic Design is a pleasure.

 

[Lew_Merrick]

As someone that gets to compare GD to one of the so-called big daddies on a daily basis I honestly believe that Geomagic is way ahead of the competition. Working with Geomagic Design is a pleasure.

As another person who "gets" to work with the so-called big daddies on a regular basis, I would not describe it as way ahead of the competition. Merely that most all the basic "groundwork" has been done that would allow it to leapfrog the competition and (with no small amount of work) establish a new & functional standard that everyone else would then have to catch up with...

 

[Palinvan]

2) Extruding to a concave face is not possible as demonstrated in the screenshot. This really needs to sorted out as it is, in my opinion

I might be missing what you mean here but you are able to extrude to a concave face by using the "To Next" option.
Of course it only works if the extruded feature is 100% within the boundaries of the concave surface. I've use the "To Next" option to extrude to some pretty complex surfaces

Oh yeah, something else. Some people here complain about stability issues with GD. I have these too but they are few and far between. Creo is terrible in this area. Creo 3.0 was released and it awful. I tell you the truth: Geomagic Design's beta release is more stable/less buggy than Creo's final release. We are currently on the 5th update of Creo 3.0 and it crashes and hangs constantly.

As someone that gets to compare GD to one of the so-called big daddies on a daily basis I honestly believe that Geomagic is way ahead of the competition. Working with Geomagic Design is a pleasure.

Couldn't agree with you more. While I only used Creo for a short period of time I used Pro/E for 15 years and it was never a very stable program in my opinion, especially when using WindChill with it. I have lost countless hours of work with that deadly duo. Solidworks used to be stable but the more they added on to it every update it just seemed to get worse and worse so I gave up on that about 5 years ago and been using GM ever since. My only real complaints with GM is it's poor handling of very large assemblies (could be limitations of my system) and the fairly basic sheetmetal options compared to Solidworks. Would be nice to have a feature like Solidworks' large assembly mode. But for the money it can't be beat.

Here's why. I was given a folder containing an assembly with all its parts. Total folder size was 45Mb. My task was to create manufacturing drawings. Btw the time all drawings were done several days later the folder had grown to 1.1Gb! Once I purged the folder of all versions but the latest it was back at 48Mb. It is a huge resource hog without any real benefits and only adds extra process to my day.

Not sure if you know this or not but there is a batch file that will clean that up. It is called purge.bat it used to be installed along with Pro/E and you just copy it into the folder you would want to run it in. Not sure if they still offer it with Creo but if not I'm sure it is available for download or the text for the batch file is somewhere out there. Having multiple subfolders like it sounds you do have is going to still be cumbersome but it beats manually deleting all the backup files.

 

[bigseb]

2) Extruding to a concave face is not possible as demonstrated in the screenshot. This really needs to sorted out as it is, in my opinion

I might be missing what you mean here but you are able to extrude to a concave face by using the "To Next" option.
Of course it only works if the extruded feature is 100% within the boundaries of the concave surface. I've use the "To Next" option to extrude to some pretty complex surfaces

See my 3rd post on the first page of this thread. I explain it there. Basically it extrudes in the wrong direction. This error is repeatable and has been confirmed by other users.

 

[bigseb]

Here's why. I was given a folder containing an assembly with all its parts. Total folder size was 45Mb. My task was to create manufacturing drawings. Btw the time all drawings were done several days later the folder had grown to 1.1Gb! Once I purged the folder of all versions but the latest it was back at 48Mb. It is a huge resource hog without any real benefits and only adds extra process to my day.

Not sure if you know this or not but there is a batch file that will clean that up. It is called purge.bat it used to be installed along with Pro/E and you just copy it into the folder you would want to run it in. Not sure if they still offer it with Creo but if not I'm sure it is available for download or the text for the batch file is somewhere out there. Having multiple subfolders like it sounds you do have is going to still be cumbersome but it beats manually deleting all the backup files.

Creo 3.0 is even worse. We have nine licenses for Creo 3.0, two for 3-axis machining and two for 5-axis machining and we have to purge every single day. At the end of the day purge we recover about 30Gb!!