Who's onWF4?

[msproe]

We have been running W4.0 for a couple months now and for the most part we
like it. We work with a lot of imported surfaces and the new Remove
function is great! The import data doctor has been improved. Surfacing
seems to be more stable. We have an issue with scaling parts sometimes
and I haven't quite figured it out yet as to the cause, it is rather
intermittent. The navigation has changed to some apparent
Vista-bread-crumb-thing-wonderful-idea. No real advantage there that I
can see. Shaded views in drawings and the 3d pdf export is pretty cool. I
have trouble with people getting freaked out with edrawings and the whole
shade and spin thing so I'm not sure the 3d pdf is going to go over right
away.

We jumped from W2 to W4 since I didn't see any real advantage to other
moving to W3. The only issue I had with loading W4 was that you need to
get a new license pack for it to work.

All in all I think it is a good move

Kim







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[proecad] - Who's onWF4?






Like it/hate it? I SHOULD have mine up and running this afternoon after
dealiong with the usual NightmareLink issues. Opinions?

Thanks!

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[JamesKasson]

WF4 M050

We mainly do sheetmetal here, so those are the things that spring to
mind.


Bend notes on drawing now display UP/DN based on viewing
direction, not driving surface. This obviates nearly all advance
planning for which side should be the driving surface.

The flange wall tool has been greatly improved; now extending
the wall beyond the end of the attachment edge does not result in two
separate surfaces, it is solid as it should be, and this makes the tool
finally usable.

The sheetmetal parameters file "Through Next by default" option
is finally working again; this is something that was broken with the
release of Wildfire.

The sheetmetal parameters file now includes a parameter for
material thickness that eliminates the thickness step when creating a
sheetmetal part.

The Offset Entity tool in sketcher now nearly always has the
offset arrow visible, regardless of how close you are zoomed in.

The Merge/Inheritance tool seems a bit more intuitive than WF3.

Assemblies and flat patterns open faster now.

The auto-round tool looks promising, but I've not messed with it
much.

It took me a bit to get used to the Vista style navigation, but
now I really like it. A bonus for those not using any PDM is a search
tool for the displayed directory that really works well.

One particularly irritating thing is that saving as a .dxf takes
much, much longer. Olaf's benchmark indicated this, but I didn't fully
appreciate how much worse it is. PTC are supposedly trying to resolve
it. We've downloaded M060, but have not installed it yet, nor have we
looked at the change log, but perhaps it will resolve this issue.

My overall impression is that WF4 is an improvement and worth
upgrading to.




James Kasson
Layout Manager
Steelhead Metal Corp.

[CM15]

Well, as much of a complete pain as I've personally had with our "upgrade" to NightmareLink, it's good to hear that WF4 is an improvement. The autoround looks interesting, but as always with rounds, we'll see about the robustness of the algorithyms when it comes to difficult intersections. I noted that the demo was pretty simple. I, honestly liked the ability to use both new and old-style rounds in the last version before WF (200I2?). Whatever it was, the surfacing commands before WF were far more robust, especially in surfs by boundary, which is almost completely useless now as I always get an error sayint that the boundaries don't form a closed loop.....when I know damn well they DO. So, if they've fixed that to be as robust as it USED to be, pre-WF, great. Also, I noticed the "curve thru intersection of 2 sketches" has some really weird results in WF3 as opposed to previous versions. As I do a lot of trajectories like that, that completely sucks. Now, if they'd only get rid of the confusing WF interface and go back to the way it was, and especially dump the "lead vs. follow workflow" garbage where you never know whether to pick "action/object" or "object/action"..........Argh!

Thanks for the info guys, keep it coming!

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Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

Dr. Seuss

[DamianCastillo]

We adopted WF4.0 rather quickly and have been using it successfully. We are very heavy on Surfacing and Complex shapes. WF4 seems to be very stable in this area and we have seen improvements in stability over WF3.0 to some extent.

Some of the Mechanica enhancements are really nice such as Independent mode functions are now integrated with improved analysis feedback.
The open dialog box and integrated file navigation have been greatly improved. Now there is no difference between using the dialog box vs. the integrated version. The Vista breadcrumbs are very useful and the new Quick Search feature is extremely powerful and quick. Makes me wonder how I ever lived without it.
Many enhancements can be seen as you work with it more, such as the shading of components you bring into an assembly and the focus enhancements to what you are actually working with. I could go on and on with other minor but great changes found in this release.
I normally adopt new versions of Pro/E within a 6 month window of it's release date. With WF4.0 I only waited 3 months and had no issues. I think I may do the same for WF5. It's already looking like another great release.

"Too many people walk around like Clark Kent, because they don't realize they can Fly like Superman"