Re: Constraints
I don't work with SW, but I do on occassion work with Catia V5, and their constraint system is about the same as Alibres, just named differently. In place of Align, they have Coincidence, for Mate, it's Contact, etc., etc. for a total of five different types? There are only so many ways to constrain parts (no matter what the naming scheme is), and as far as being able to apply multiple constraints simutaneously in V5, I haven't tried it, but I'll check it out and see. From my experience with V5, you still need to tweak parts (rotate, move, etc.) in order to get the exact constraint results you're after. Alibre is the best value in 3D parametric solid modeling CAD applications in existance (.) period. Every application has its own set of idiosyncracies, but for all the time I've spent on other systems, Alibre has been by far the easiest to learn, and use, and its can do anything the high end apps can do - yesterday I watched a designer spend 4 hours creating and constaining a simple angle bracket in V5 that should have taken about ten minutes to do, and all because the system is so difficult to learn. It seems to me that if an app costs five or ten times as much as Alibre, it should be five or ten tims as fast, easy to learn, etc. -ha! The opposite is the reality - that's why it takes over two weeks of training to get people up and running in V5, and then they're not really productive for another two-six months. My money is on Alibre.
