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Hi Community,
I have someone who is using Wildfire 4 and pro/mold inquiring what is new in terms of functionality and productivity enhancement. To those who are doing mold design day in and day out, what is your opinion on what is new and what is valuable?
Hi,
for me the value of Creo/Pro-e is the parametric engine, If you learn how to use it, it can be a great tool.
So, I think you can achieve the same result in both versions. But Creo may have some advantages and productivity gains, depending on the work you use to do.
Here are the points that I remember:
1 - "Edit references" interface - This is clearly my favorite.
Designing something fast is easy, but rarely the components stay that way, I have to make changes over changes, and changing references with the new GUI is much more easier, faster and clearer.
2 - "Untrim surfaces" - In Creo 3 you can copy a surface untrimming it. This is very important for creating parting surfaces. In the past we had big problems splitting volumes due to bad quality untrimmed/extended surfaces. We are having much better results now.
3 - Dynamic Sections - Starting in Creo 2, you can select a plane/panar surface and drag it dynamically. This is something that every low cost cad system has and was missing on Creo, You can live without it but I consider it very important.
4 - "Flexible Modeling" - This really depends on the parts you use to work. Most of the parts I receive are full of NURBS surfaces, FMX isn't very useful on these parts, but on imported parts with planar and revolved surfaces, FMX can be helpful to make fast changes.
I also found that the regeneration times for FMX can be huge, so I prefer to do them with "native" tools of Creo.
5 - "The ribbon" - The ribbon is clearly more user friendly than the menus on Wildfire. Some will argue that they work faster on wildfire and I believe on that, but...
Customizing the ribbon, using in-context right mouse button (RMB) and the new interface reduces largely the amount of mouse travel and click. This beats the old menu manager.
With the plus that new users require much less time to train now. The interface is more intuitive and logical, they explore the tool and advance, in the past they freezed.
6 - "Imported Geometry" - We have less problems with imported geometry now than we had in the past. Majority of parts come as closed solids or with little problems. I think the translators have been enhanced but I can't assure that, This is based on my experience.
7 - EMX features on RMB. EMX hasn't evolved much but selecting a EMX component and with RMB modify it or delete it is very handy.
This is all I remember.
Jose
I went from Wildfire 3 to Creo2 and for awhile thought they were very similar and then I went back to WF3 to test something and was like WOAH. I then realized I liked Creo2 a lot better. (in general). In terms of the mold splitting/creation tools. They are very similar (as far as I remember). Flexible modeling is awesome, they need to get it working a little better with Mold, and it looks like they are in Creo4. But it's great for removing rads, adding draft, but rads back on, or some cases just moving geometry to make things steel safe, etc.
And I have had some things fail a split in Creo2 (with no geom checks and everything looks fine), then I load it in Creo3 and it splits fine.