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CATIA - any frequent users? Cost?

motion guru

Diamond
Joined
Dec 8, 2003
Location
Yacolt, WA
We are a SolidWorks house for mechanical design with 8 seats and probably need a couple more. We use ACAD Electrical for schematics. We are doing more work with companies that use CATIA and we are considering what it would take to get a CATIA seat.

Any Catia users here who can comment on learning curve / cost of a seat of Catia? We are hoping to take advantage of some existing designs completed by our customer that would allow us to integrate our systems and they said we could utilize their existing Catia models and drawings.

We have had this customer send us STEP files converted from their Catia models and found that this isn't an altogether smooth process. I.e. mates are hard to manage as some of the planes come in 0.000000001 degrees off of orthogonal and this can be really irritating.

thanks for any feedback . . .
 
IMO, Catia has nothing to offer a small shop that you cannot get with Solidworks. To the contrary, the dizzying complexity of Catia is a major turnoff if you don't need the advanced features.

Catia is a good solution if you need the following: Massive PLM (product lifecycle management) for huge assemblies with controlled access to hundreds of users, advanced surface modeling capabilities for stamped sheet metal or molded plastic parts, or explicit customer requirements to generate native Catia files.

Dassault Systems makes Catia, and also owns Solidworks. The solid modeling side of Catia is very much like Solidworks, and borrows most of it's features and interface. The surface modeling side of Catia is unique, and unlike other software I know of.

Last time I worked with Catia (about 7 years ago now), cost ranged from $10,000 to $20,000 per seat, depending on what package you want. Enovia PLM is an additional cost. Catia also has very advanced CAM and FEA, but that is an additional cost as well.

When I worked in the automotive industry, the OEM I worked for required most production suppliers to have Catia. That cost alone was a major barrier to many smaller shops. There were a handful of prototype shops we worked will who just could not swing it.
 
IMO, Catia has nothing to offer a small shop that you cannot get with Solidworks. To the contrary, the dizzying complexity of Catia is a major turnoff if you don't need the advanced features.

Catia is a good solution if you need the following: Massive PLM (product lifecycle management) for huge assemblies with controlled access to hundreds of users, advanced surface modeling capabilities for stamped sheet metal or molded plastic parts, or explicit customer requirements to generate native Catia files.

Dassault Systems makes Catia, and also owns Solidworks. The solid modeling side of Catia is very much like Solidworks, and borrows most of it's features and interface. The surface modeling side of Catia is unique, and unlike other software I know of.

Last time I worked with Catia (about 7 years ago now), cost ranged from $10,000 to $20,000 per seat, depending on what package you want. Enovia PLM is an additional cost. Catia also has very advanced CAM and FEA, but that is an additional cost as well.

When I worked in the automotive industry, the OEM I worked for required most production suppliers to have Catia. That cost alone was a major barrier to many smaller shops. There were a handful of prototype shops we worked will who just could not swing it.

Good feedback - thanks . . .

We are in the position where we are providing equipment to integrate into large test cells and assembly cells. We have typically had to add exceptions to the RFPs when they state "all drawings / models will be provided in CATIA format" . . . and even though we haven't been able to comply with this request, we have still gotten orders for quite a bit of equipment.

We are now bidding projects that are making this more of a hard requirement and we have another customer with Catia seats who will convert our models / drawings for us at their base engineering rate. If we continue to grow our capabilities here - we will need to step up our game at some point and become Catia capable. We are just trying to figure out the chicken/egg sequence . . . do we get enough business to support it first or do we get the CAD system first so that this becomes less of a sticking point when responding to RFPs and perhaps land more business more easily.
 
It wouldn't be so bad if everyone could agree on a platform. In this area, you basically have to have Pro-E/Creo/whatever they are calling it now to make Cat and John Deere happy. Automotive and aerospace seems about 50/50 between Catia and NX.

Nobody can afford to have all three, and people trained to use all three.
 
I don´t know on costs, but..
catia was the first system I learned 3d cad on.
At 16 years young. When it still ran on custom ibm hw at 60k a pop == 1984, so ==200k$ today.
At a university ws I had access to, with permission.

It was modular, huge nr of options for everything..
but very logical, steady, easy.

But I loved 3D and IT and PCs.
Wrote my own 3D cad system, bcpl on sinclair ql, 13.000 lines of code.

I have since used many systems, and still think catia is ok for std typical users making models- with my tryware seat on a high end PC workstation with nvidia industrial graphics/2x32" 2500 res. monitors.

Catia is relatively straight-forward to learn, imo.
I have no experience with the db linkages/production systems/collaborative/etc which are the most valuable part.
I "feel" catia is about 30% easier to learn than autocad et al, 20%-40% easier than solidworks, 20% harder than rhino 3d.
Solidworks is really easy for some stuff .. and devilish for others.
Catia is complex, but it mostly does not get in the way.

Rhino is fantastic for learning and using, but just does not do some extremely important stuff; linked-dimensions and easy dB integration are the important ones.
 
Learning Catia solid modeling is pretty easy. V5+ is basically just the same as Solidworks. I doubt anyone is still using V4 or older for new products.

The surface modeling is where things really get crazy. In solid modeling, features are built on top of each other. Every feature is a child of the feature above it in the tree. If you change something at the top, every feature below can be affected.

If surface modeling, every feature can have an infinite number of child/parent relationships. The order in which features are listed in the tree has no relevance other than to indicate the chronological order in which they were created. Altering the last feature in the tree could affect every feature above it. There is a whole navigation tool just to search through the thousands of parent/child relationships to find out why the model will not regenerate.

Once you learn surface modeling, there is basically nothing you cannot model. But, the learning curve is measured in years.
 
I heard from a knowledgeable source that east coast and west coast resellers can bid against each other. Seats of CAM can be very competitive with Mastercam for example, but the maintenance fees are a whole other ball of wax:eek:
 
I just got job in the R & D department of a large automotive OEM. They would like me to learn Catia. I have been working with it a bit for a week now. It seems a bit like Solid Works to me.
 
If this is aerospace, the hard and fast line as to whether everything needs to be in CATIA is whether it controls the configuration of the aircraft. So tooling, etc. had to be done in CATIA, but machinery could be in SW and we just gave them overall STEP and CGR files.

CATIA pros:
the big guys use it, and they're the ones writing the checks.
good for really big assemblies
DELMIA can be very, very useful. SW motion is nothing compared to it.

cons:
expensive
hard to use
slower for design
you need a license for everything - in addition to X number of MD2 mechanical design licenses, you'll need an ST1 license to import/export STEP files.
limited mating capabilities. This can make mechanism design difficult.

In short, if you can avoid CATIA, do. If you want to do tooling work for Boeing, you'll have to bite the bullet.
 








 
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