Powershape, solidworks, or pro-e?

g-coder05 · Aug 5, 2014

Short story

Im go into our programming café to look at how thing are going and notice everyone that is modeling is either using Pro-e or Solid works. Now I have bought 13 seats of Powermill and Powershape, 3 seates of delcam tool maker, 1 seat of electrode and 2 sets of feturecam. We have 4 seats of pro-e and 2 seats of solidworks. Now on my PC I have Powermill, Shape, featurecam and solidworks. I use Solidworks and featurecam and have never even opened Powershape. As I am looking around the café I ask why no one is using powershape? The average response was it was "garbage for modeling".

So now I go and pull out the manual and start trying to teach myself this and wow, What a pain in the ass! Now this is only my second day into this and I am still only into 2d sketching and not so well at that. My question is, is anyone on here using PS on a daily basis that can provide a real opinion on if it is really worth learning?

gregormarwick · Aug 5, 2014

I used to use PS for a couple of years before switching to SW. It has it's pros and cons.

On the plus side it's a more robust modeller than SW. Some more tricky operations don't fail as much for no apparent reason. It's much better at surfaces than SW and it's direct modelling tools are much more mature and functional.

OTOH it is very clumsy for basic modelling as I think you're realising now! It gets much easier as you fall into the mindset, but everything is vectors and coordinates, rather than planes and dimensions.

The bottom line is this: Powershape is stronger when working with existing data. It has some nice tools for manipulating imported geometry for manufacturability. Solidworks runs circles around it for quickly modelling parts from scratch.

g-coder05 · Aug 5, 2014

Is there a parallel line feature in PS? I have looked in the training manual and google but I cant find anything on this at all.

dstryr · Aug 5, 2014

Before I bought NX I had an online demo of powershape and it looked awful tbh.

.

gregormarwick · Aug 6, 2014

g-coder05 said:
Is there a parallel line feature in PS? I have looked in the training manual and google but I cant find anything on this at all.

Yes, there is an offset tool IIRC, if that's what you mean. I haven't used it for two or three years and don't even have it installed anymore, so I'm not going to try and be more specific, sorry!

g-coder05 · Aug 6, 2014

gregormarwick said:
Yes, there is an offset tool IIRC, if that's what you mean. I haven't used it for two or three years and don't even have it installed anymore, so I'm not going to try and be more specific, sorry!

I see why you would uninstall it. 3 days and I can now only model a rectangle with a hole in the center. Im kind of pissed off now that I found none of my guys use it yet didn't bother to tell me every time I order a new seat of Powermill I just got the Powershape also.

SD&amp;M · Aug 7, 2014

Hi Guys:

We have Solidworks 2014 here and are pretty happy with it. We keep it around mostly for customer compatibility, as many of our customers use it. (We originally got started with SWX in 1998, and have kept current with maintenance).

We do all of our programming and some/most modeling with TopSolid (TopSolid: Specialist in integrated CAD/CAM/ERP software solution). I would be curious to hear from folks who are using UG NX to see what they think, but if I ever wanted to look for CAD/CAM software I wouldn't consider any of the stand-alone packages. It's really handy to have everything you need in one package, with associativity between design & machining, and related documentation.

For that matter, I'd like to hear from users of some of the CAM programs that run inside SWX...compatibility issues between releases, etc.

Cheers, ~B

5 axis Fidia guy · Aug 7, 2014

g-coder05 said:
Im kind of pissed off now that I found none of my guys use it yet didn't bother to tell me every time I order a new seat of Powermill I just got the Powershape also.

Who ever tells you this is an idiot. Powermill and Powershape are two completely different software programs, I rather doubt Delcam is giving you a seat for free, the persons informing you of this are talking about PS surfacing, this is not a full seat of Powershape. Getting that off my chest, I do use Powermill and Powershape daily, but as mentioned earlier, I only use it for quick fixes and changes, I don't ever start from scratch, however I easily could, just not as quickly as Solidworks. There many instances Powershape works better than Solidworks, on example is the new direct modeling and creating radius and fillets. I can fillet things in Powershape that pukes out Solidworks. Now that Delcam picked up the parasolid kernel, they have gotten much more powerful. If you already know Solidworks, there really is no need for Powershape in my opinion.

m98custom1212 · Aug 7, 2014

SD&M said:
Hi Guys:

We have Solidworks 2014 here and are pretty happy with it. We keep it around mostly for customer compatibility, as many of our customers use it. (We originally got started with SWX in 1998, and have kept current with maintenance).

We do all of our programming and some/most modeling with TopSolid (TopSolid: Specialist in integrated CAD/CAM/ERP software solution). I would be curious to hear from folks who are using UG NX to see what they think, but if I ever wanted to look for CAD/CAM software I wouldn't consider any of the stand-alone packages. It's really handy to have everything you need in one package, with associativity between design & machining, and related documentation.

For that matter, I'd like to hear from users of some of the CAM programs that run inside SWX...compatibility issues between releases, etc.

Cheers, ~B

I use NX/UG wouldn't want to use anything besides an all in one package. I like Top Solid just little over the budget (yes, more then NX)

g-coder05 · Aug 7, 2014

Who ever tells you this is an idiot. Powermill and Powershape are two completely different software programs, I rather doubt Delcam is giving you a seat for free, the persons informing you of this are talking about PS surfacing, this is not a full seat of Powershape. Getting that off my chest, I do use Powermill and Powershape daily, but as mentioned earlier, I only use it for quick fixes and changes, I don't ever start from scratch, however I easily could, just not as quickly as Solidworks. There many instances Powershape works better than Solidworks, on example is the new direct modeling and creating radius and fillets. I can fillet things in Powershape that pukes out Solidworks. Now that Delcam picked up the parasolid kernel, they have gotten much more powerful. If you already know Solidworks, there really is no need for Powershape in my opinion.

Oh no, we have to pay for the full seat of powershape and toolmaker. It just burns me up that I never realized and nobody here told me they where not even using it.

[ I would be curious to hear from folks who are using UG NX to see what they think, but if I ever wanted to look for CAD/CAM software I wouldn't consider any of the stand-alone packages./QUOTE]

I would love to have NX here since every resume I see has NX on it. That is the problem with China is they hack all the software here rather than pay the fee so Mastercam and NX are every where. The owner of our company has very good morals so we pay for every seat we get and IT makes a trip through the building once a month just to make sure no one installed a pirated copy on any of our systems.

This all being said, We pay a huge maint fee and when I started this thread I sent Glenn McMinn and Christian Biscoe from Delcam USA an email asking for our log in information (seems no one here remembers how it was set up) to the English site so I could get the help files and instruction manual tutorial files (not the tutorials on the public site) and in three days not one email back. I was hoping that when Autodesk bought them out customer service would get better but I guess that is just a thing of the past.

5 axis Fidia guy · Aug 8, 2014

That is insane you must purchase that part of the package, here in the states every program is a separate entity, you may purchase any parts you need, or in your case you don't need.

Zahnrad Kopf · Aug 8, 2014

SD&M said:
I would be curious to hear from folks who are using UG NX to see what they think, but if I ever wanted to look for CAD/CAM software I wouldn't consider any of the stand-alone packages.

Ironically, I've been in NX class all this week - again. My opinion is that NX is FAR more powerful than SolidWorks. Some things NX just simply does MUCH better than SW. But DOING them can be a real pain in the ass. Mostly finding ( knowing ) where the commandsare buried.

Having said that, my opinion is that PowerShape is much more like NX, actually. It's actually very, very good at manipulating surfaces and the more advanced tools to do so. But for 90% ( or more ) of typicaly "drafting" and extrudes/subtracts etc... SolidWorks is by FAR more intuitive and easier to work with.

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