What makes Creo awesome?

[nrollins]

Hi all,



This is almost repeat post from one I submitted on Sunday. I know that is a
bad time to send out a request here, so I am hoping that is the reason I got
ZERO responses. I am hoping that the reason isn't that there are no good
things in your mind... I changed the question a bit - the original referred
to Creo as a better product. I am limiting that a bit to allow for some
easier response.



----



The PTC Live Global event is coming up next month! This year they decided
to come to my neck of the woods. I really look forward to meeting some of
you. If you will be there and want to hook up at some point, please PM me.



I am a soloist with ~18 years of Pro/E experience and two years ago I bought
SWX and started using it. Drawing on the frustrations I experienced
learning a new CAD system, I will be presenting a seminar on transitioning
to Creo from another package. I would love it if you could give me your
opinion and share some of your experience.



Any and all comments are welcomed, but if you are experienced in Creo and
another CAD package, I have a question I am hoping you can answer for me:



"What features in Creo do you think are better than another CAD package?"



I look forward to all of the thoughts and comments this might generate.



Thanks a lot for your time!



-Nate






This thread is inactive and closed by the PTC Community Management Team. If you would like to provide a reply and re-open this thread, please notify the moderator and reference the thread. You may also use "Start a topic" button to ask a new question. Please be sure to include what version of the PTC product you are using so another community member knowledgeable about your version may be able to assist.

[ptc-1932745]

No flame war intended, I have used PTC products for 16 years, SWX for 19, CADDS, etc...

I don't have any area where my experiences with CREO are such that I would recommend it over any other CAD system due to some unique feature. My biggest gripe is with inconsistency of the UI and outdated documentation, at least up to CE/P 5 and CREO 1. I hope to see better things with CREO2/3 later this year.

I don't see anything in my area or experience (forge design, tooling design, cavities, machining fixtures and tooling, machining processes, linear static FEA, etc... that are unique and/or amazing in PTC vs. their competitors. This could just be due to the fact that these areas are expected to be good regardless of CAD system by today's standards.



Christopher F. Gosnell

FPD Company
124 Hidden Valley Road
McMurray, PA 15317

[dgschaefer]

I've had your original question waiting for me to have time to respond. Still no time, but I'm going to try to be brief.

I've been on Proe for 18 years, SW for 8-10 although not as consistently. The main thing that Proe has over SW is robust reference management. SW simply has little to no tools, at least that I've found, for managing what feature is tied to what other feature.

In Proe, I can find all kind of info on an entity (edge, vertex, surface, etc.), and it reveals some of that info every time I click on something. I get the feature number & name when I hover over a feature, selecting a feature and hovering over an entity, I get what type it is, what feature (number & name) it belongs to and it's ID. In the reference dialog of sketcher or other reference fields, I can see all this info as well. At every step along the way, I'm being told what I'm tying to what so I can build intelligently and capture my design intent.

In SW, it gives me feature names (maybe numbers, not sure), but almost no info on entities. In sketcher or other features all I see is "edge" or "surface" or "face". There's no way to tell what features I'm tying together other than looking at the screen and hoping I know what that belongs to.

In proe I can edit the references of a feature. Use this edge instead of that one. I can also take a given entity and take all of its children and assign them to another entity. When a feature fails due to a missing reference, I can simply replace it with a new one. I can't do any of that in SW.

Additionally, Proe gives me more flexibility. An extrude can be a solid, a thin sold, a surface, a surface cut a sold cut or a thin cut and I cans witch back and forth. SW can't. I can create an edge round or a surface round or a variable radius round and switch back and forth. SW can create all of those, but if you need to change it you have to delete and recreate.

SW has a much simpler and clear workflow. Features are easy to create and redefine which is good because, with the lack of robust reference management tools and less flexibility, you end up redefining and recreating things a lot. That may sound like a slam, but it's not (ok, maybe a little), because I think this is part of SW's philosophy. Make it fast and easy to make progress and don't worry too much about proper refs. If things are easy enough to build and rebuild, having it fail isn't as big of a problem.

I prefer Pro because it seems to put me in complete control of my model and gives me more tools to do that.

OK, that's more than I wanted to write, time to get back to work.

--

[DeanLong]

I would have written exactly whatMr. Doug Schaefer did. Same for me.

[iceblink1]

Using Creo only to do minor modelling as preparation for FEA models, I
can say that Creo shines in the way it creates STEP files. As far as i
know there is no other CAD software that creates STEP files as well as
Pro/E or Creo. I've even had occasions where I import some dead format
in Creo, export as STEP, and the STEP file was better than the original
dead format file.

Having said that, the options in Creo/Parametric to work with imported
dead format files (STEP, IGES, ...) is very poor. Nowadays I don't even
bother trying to repair models if they dont import properly, it's
quicker to just ask for a new file, or do the repairing within the FEA
tools.

(See, it would have been easier if you had asked for things that need
improving in Creo, I could easily do that!)

Best regards,
Patrick Asselman

[Chris3]

I don't know about creating, but I have actually had better luck using Solidworks to open Step files that won't open with Pro/E. I can then export from Solidworks and have it open in Pro/E successfully.

Christopher Rees – Mechanical Engineer – ISR Systems
UTC AEROSPACE SYSTEMS
100 Wooster Heights Rd, Danbury, CT 06810 U.S.A.

[wbowling]

Answering this question in a fashion that seems truthful is difficult. It's hard to talk about the wonders of Creo without giving the impression that one wants to overwhelm the reader with a sense that one's depth of knowledge is considerable. That is not my aim. I've been working with ProE/Creo since about 1993 and have explored its capabilities vigorously. I like it a bunch!

The first thing that excited me about the software is the same thing I like about it today. Creating a design is sort of like programming. While my degree is in Mechanical Engineering I really like the idea that almost every object in the CAD model can be accessed programmatically in terms of a tag-value pair.

The hierarchical structuring of assemblies, components analogous to features in a model, consistency in the rigorous treatment of parametricity (is that a word?), and the ability to access, understand, and modify associative pieces of the models all the way to the primitive geometries is just wonderful.

I've also been working with the API's for about 20 years and the power provided there is quite impressive.


W.C. (Bill) Bowling
Fellow-Engineering Design Process Development
Aerojet Rocketdyne
CAD Services

[efleischer]

I think Doug Schaefer and William Bowling gave great answers, and described a big part of what I DON'T like about Creo, and Windchill, for that matter. Yes, if you really, really know PTC offerings, and you have time to be really, really precise, PTC's stuff is there to enable you. However, you need to learn quickly andwork quickly, these are terrible tools. I can't even call them software. These are not finished products. I consistently feel thatmy company haspaid top dollar for a software package, but instead been given a development platform. Doug may be right that it is easier to be precise in Creo (once you understand what you are doing), but I was able to learn SolidWorks much faster, and produce more and better work.

Creo is my ninth CAD system. AutoCAD is best for 2D, SolidWorks is best for 3D, and both together cost far less and offer far more than PTC. So far, SolidWorks is the only parametric modeler I have used that is intuitive enough that I can think and "sketch" in 3D, and still have a logically built model I can manipulate into a finished design. I use PTC because of professional necessity, but wouldn't recommend it to any company, unless they are competing with me.

I don't want to be all negative so I'll throw PTC a bone: PTC is better than NX and Teamcenter.

[nrollins]

This has turned into a great discussion. Nothing really surprising. And
neither are there many things to add to my list - which is fine. I do have
a list.



I've been on Pro/E since rev 18 and watched SWX gain popularity over those
years. In some of the recent reading on this topic I have done, someone
mentioned that SWX was born out of PTC - as a team, a product and a better
UI and that SWX would not exist without the groundwork laid by PTC. PTC was
a little late jumping on the wagon of an intuitive, easy to learn UI. So it
is understandable that they are falling down so much, rushing to catch up.
There are good things about Creo2, but those are overshadowed by the
numerous embarrassments and our human tendency to highlight the bad things.



Eric, your coining Creo as a development platform rings so true in my mind.
I think they could have milked WF5 for another year and launched Creo as a
refined and redefined, fully tested and bullet proof product. Then there'd
be a story to tell, a product to sell and some nervous executives a few
towns over in Concord (or Waltham now.?) But the rush to market delivered a
product that definitely has the "unfinished" feel. Certainly not well
tested. Likely half or more of us reading this have some version of iOS on
their person. Apple can release a bullet-proof, complex software product,
so it is possible.



"they gave the measure tool to the interns to develop" ha!



Anyway, I am finding that the most difficult part of being a presenter at
this conference is keeping the spin positive. A few of you have certainly
aided me in that and I thank you. What I love(d) about Pro/E (was) the
ability to know the relationships of all of the elements of the model right
down to the vertices and edges. Those confounded orange circles

that signify a missing (but substituted) reference that do not warn you
unless you redefine the feature, and then don't tell you where they live.
that is infuriating and reminds me of the frustration I feel when I am
resolving a SolidWorks model. Please, PTC, don't copy EVERYTHING.



This forum keeps me sane. Thanks to all.



-Nate

[ptc-1932745]

Exactly my point.

I have also used many systems in the past 25+ years and no system is perfect. I remember a 2D sketching system in the mid '80s called 'Descartes' that I thought was really inventive because all of the commands were fully recursive. I liked CADDS because of the verb-noun syntax of the commands made it easy to go from the command line to the menu (or tablet menu) and back. I liked Intergraph (PDS ?) because of the tight graphical UI integration including context sensitive help and docs.

I agree with others about the 'unfinished' nature of most of what I experience in PTC products up to CE/P 5:

* When in sketcher, if picking tangent edges of rounds is bad and edge representations of faces is good, then why does the software not filter for this?

* Why when in drawing mode, even if I select 'no hidden' I can still attach created dimensions to picks on invisible entities?

* Why isn't the default display mode for sections set to 'no hidden'?

* Why when redefining failed features, don't I get any type of visual clues with regards to what the feature used to look like, or where the missing reference used to be?

* When using 'Edit references (reroute)' why are the ques for what is needed vague at best?

* Why does the software sometimes report the feature name, and at other times report the feature ID in dialogs, etc...?

* Why is it that when NC sequences can have failures on regen, the system shows no indication of failed sequences?

I have had a chance to work with such software lately as the Inventor 2014-2015 beta, and have used SWX since 1996. They are all converging to a similar goal, and as such, UI enhancements and intelligent workflows in competing packages show the warts on PTC products magnified.

I use CE/P 5 out of necessity. When PTC was first selected (at rev 3 or so) it was the only game in town for parametrics, familes of parts, etc... The rest of the industry has caught up. I started using it at about rev 18-19. It is a very capable system, but I feel it is like using Wordperfect in an MS Word world. BTW, I loved Wordperfect.

As Eric has said, PTC can allow you to be really precise, but for day to day stuff, other software helps you get stuff done with more confidence and faster. By faster I mean more time spent designing, and less time trying to figure out how to navigate the software.

Also, I have not used NX, but the interface in almost any version of Pro-E from the last 10 years or so is light years ahead of ENOVIA.

Again, no flame war intended. I'm hoping we can discuss these issues openly and help PTC to understand our difficulties.


Christopher F. Gosnell

FPD Company
124 Hidden Valley Road
McMurray, PA 15317