could any body give a review of creo parametric 3.0?

[rohit_rajan]

would like to see a review of PTC Creo Parametric 3.0.

from the experts here who have used creo parametric 3.0 .

area's of interest :

part modelling

assembly

surfacing

drafting

sheetmetal

[TomD.inPDX]

Rohit; Creo 3.0 is Creo 2.0 with icon changes.

I have been using Creo 3.0 since about February on one contract hoping for better interoperability with SolidWorks.  I seem to have taken a step backwards in this regard.

I still use Creo 2.0 for my other clients... M040 as a matter of fact.

There are some really annoying things about Creo 3.0, particularly the assembly constraint windows are to short (shorter than Creo 2.0) so I am always scrolling for coincident, for instance.

Drafting is completely totaled!  The new text editor is impossible!  No longer can you just make a string with codes, you now have to push buttons.  And then, those buttons don't always work.  If you are use to adding [.3] to numeric values... forget it!  Dragging text around too is much less friendly.  overall, had they left annotation alone, I would have been much happier.

The install was good and picked up all my ribbon changes.  My config.pro and detail.dtl files converted nicely; and if you plan to run 2 versions, you have to segregate the ribbon UI files somehow.  I run Creo 2 and Creo 3 and I just don't make changes in the Creo 3 ribbon to avoid issues.

All the hype about the rendering update is just that, hype!  We have minimal use of high def graphics in environments, but overall, it is a miniscule upgrade from what Creo 2 had.  The only real plus is the real time bump mapping.  Here they did well to at least try to catch up to SolidWorks.  Overall, the environment and shade settings are still so-so.

I've also come up with some serious graphics issues where planes and axes are disappearing when zoomed in, and highlighting is getting lost when you use the separate window for assembling.  I think Creo 2 has similar issues but it is now much more prevalent.

Overall performance is on par with Creo 2.0.  I really do not see any reason to move to Creo 3.0.  They added things to sell more extensions, and in the process they messed up the core interoperability with SolidWorks files.  I have more export failures now than with Creo 2.0.

[DavorGranic]

Antonius is a bit harsh. Except on drafting.

Note editor is ok but creating dimensions by holding ctrl is anoying, There is no need to make us use 2 hands. When you look for example how Autocad 2016 is dealing with this and no ctrl needed.

Regarding sheetmetal our company had severe problems where our old and new assemblies would go into infinite loop while regenerating. It turned out  that config option

smt_mp_method was the  problem but it worked fine in Creo 2.0. This continued till M040.

Real time rendering is great. I dont have time to render just to get decent screenshot. Just when we swithched to 3.0 i started a project that required me to provide large sport arena views from certain positions with some new stuff installed. If I had to render evry time  i took real time render screenshot I would lose days.

Opening files from other softwares works nice. Creo remembers surface id so you can build your assembly around those parts without evrything blowing up when those pars are updated.

Oddly enough we had problems with exporting to Creo neutral format sometimes. Upon loading assembly gets messed up with some errors.

But by far best thing is that you can see those lost references as "ghosts".You come to apriciate these things when your big assembly blows up in your face.

[LawrenceS]

Antonius Dirriwachter‌,

First of all, are you saying that Drafting is totaled partially because you can no longer type in code, instead of just clicking on what you want, and bolding, italicizing and underline with industry standard shortcuts (ctrl+B, etc)?  Or is there something else?  I personally like this method because for people who don't use it every day syntax can be hard to remember and then they come ask me, taking both of our times!

Secondly, what build of Creo 3 are you using?  PTC quickly (and admirably) added back in the ability to use the old (OLD) text box so as not to disrupt some users workflow because of some real advantages of a separate editor box opening.  I think the buttons, inline typing, and keyboard shortcuts for formatting are really great.  Now I too would be frustrated if they don't work all the time, but I just tested some of the old format coding methods (such as @[-A-@] ) still work within that old box but not inline.  I really like how PTC made it an option (eventually).

I agree that I think it was a terrible idea to require the user to dimension using the 2 buttons instead of one.  It is just annoying to me, but I know users that hate using their left hand (and they really should NOT have to for something like this!).  I don't understand why they went through with doing this considering how many people hated them doing that in the model to the measuring tool!  Thankfully for us, most people at our company just display model dimensions and it is heavily discouraged using the dimension creation tool (except for when it occasionally is needed)...though there are situations were we are analyzing a model in a drawing and we need to create lots of temporary dimensions.

I am not sure about modeling yet, as I am still testing it.  but, , I am glad to hear you didn't have any problems with ribbon and config!  I likewise have not found issues there yet.

[TomD.inPDX]

I have not seen the new interface yet because I have no reason to go through the install.

I do have to make this decision on a new computer that's already gathering dust for this very reason.

It seems like every upgrade is a few steps forward and some painful steps back.

I still use Creo 2 M040 because I know all it's quirks, I reported most of them, and in the last 2 years I have received a lot of "we won't be fixing that ever" solutions to the support cases filed.  And as Creo 2 was coming up, it became more buggy, not less.

So the answer for me was to stick with what I know.  Creo 2 is more functional in day to day world than Creo 3 or 4.  When 1/2 of your world is drafting, it is important that people are not forced to change their way of being efficient.  If it wasn't for this huge error on PTC's part, I might already be running a late version Creo 3 now looking forward to a stable C4.

BTW, the  other parts that they completely messed up, even back in C2, was the sizing of annotation elements.  Do this a few times with a single annotation element and then go look at the proper editor.  You will see the entire string delimited out the wazoo.  That is not allowed in my datasets.  Sorry but poor execution behind the scenes is what appeared to be covered up by PTC by removing the editor in Creo 3.  They knew they had a problem in Creo 2 that was patched (one of my support claims).  It is unprecedented that the users could actually force the editor feature back into the product.  This is a new one from PTC in years of involvement.

There are a few nice updates and features, but nothing that makes my day to day life any better... just worse.

[LawrenceS]

Antonius Dirriwachter Sadly enough, I completely agree with your statement:

...

It seems like every upgrade is a few steps forward and some painful steps back.

...

When we went from Wildfire 4 to Creo2 I was very frustrated at some of the functionality they removed ( List (and discussion) of features removed when going from ProE (WF1-WF4) to Creo(2) ), and especially how they destroyed the Show/Erase dialog and replaced it with the Show Annotations which no longer shows ALL annotations!

In order for any company to continuously improve, they will disrupt someone's workarounds.  I hope we can agree on that, even though we may feel very strongly that PTC has removed good functionality that was not based on broken workarounds (like the show/erase dialog which worked so well!).  The biggest problem is that if a company takes a long time to fix an issue, people have already created their own workarounds and gotten used to them and then don't want to change...even when it is (in itself) a positive change.  Again a double hats off to PTC for giving back the textbox dialog even though the new input method finally matches every other program in the world and can edit inline (without people asking me how to put a box override in or one of the other codes they forgot how to do).

A coworker sent me this cartoon a while back which I think summarizes software improvements and workflow issues, from the programmers perspective. I hope you enjoy!

[TomD.inPDX]

I do honestly believe they fixed the Creo 2 problem in Creo 3 by just covering it up.

And the proof is still there as the problem is still there as far as I know.

At the very least, people don't know their text is turning into scrambled eggs as they try to size their text string with the mouse,

...or someone has verified that this is still occurring in the latest release.

My only "workaround" as you call it is to not use the "feature" that doesn't function well, the auto-whateveryoucallstretchingandsquishingtext

is to not use it.

That means a flaky feature with the potential of gumming your annotation strings behind the scenes is an acceptable workaround FOR PTC! ... Not me!

And it is my choice to NEVER use it in Creo 2 or 3 and likely 4 if PTC doesn't solve this.

And no, most people working on "every other tool" doesn't need symbols and special characters at every other text element.

They also do not have different buttons to push in order to complete a basic string.

When I make drawings, inline control is not only needed, it is a critical tool for managing workflow, not just a workaround.

How do you go about finding the appropriate text symbol as you type using scientific notation?

You buy an interface that presents them in a simpler format than what Word allows.

The way Creo 3 worked out of the box, I might as well have to open the character map every time I needed a special symbol.

...when before the symbol was presented when I opened the dialog.

[LawrenceS]

Can you send an example of what you mean when you get jumbled text behind the scenes?  Also, what build of Creo3 did you use when you tried?

As mentioned previously we are not yet using Creo3 in production and have only done light testing so far, but I have not yet seen this issue yet so would really like to know when Creo scrambles the text/code behind the scenes.  Since Pictures are worth a thousand words, I threw a string together using the special characters/symbols below all inserted with the mouse to put them in so that it looks like this (ignore red box as that is the table cell boundary):

but when I go into the properties it correctly shows the old coding style:

And what symbols are you looking for that are in the old dialog box?  These are the ones that I see and they are the normal ones that I have used in the text editor:

The above string uses the same style superscript as in scientific notation.  Now I wish PTC would have added the keyboard shortcut used in word to make superscript and subscript (Ctrl+= and CTRL++, but that would make a good improvement on the other keyboard shortcuts they gave).

[TomD.inPDX]

Right, it does fine if you never auto-length the text string with the mouse.

Problem is, a lot of times when you grab the annotation, it sizes instead of moves.

You just created your first extra delimiter in the field without even knowing it.

This is true in Creo 2 and 3.

It is the note properties where everything gets tangled.  It presents fine.

If you play with a complete note set long enough, you will get character style formats delimiters just about every other character.

That is WAY TO MUCH OVERHEAD for Creo drawings.  You can no longer select continuous text strings from the face of the drawing.

you will start getting unexpected results from editing your text style.

In all, it was a real boneheaded function that was added and it has been a problem ever since.

And this is not original Pro|Engineer functionality.  This is PTC trying to add something to the core drafting set way after the original code.

That is why sometimes it is better to leave things alone rather than trying to keep up with the Jones'.

As stated earlier, I have no use for updating Creo 3.

I think I am at M010.  Certainly not F000.

[LawrenceS]

I tried breaking this in my version and I have not been able too.  I created a drawing note with special text both created using the buttons as well as manual code and could not find anything that it did badly.  It wraps and resizes just like it does in Creo2 and in WF4.  If anything, I like it more now than I did before.

So I am thinking that either PTC did a great job fixing a bug 9 software builds later (I am using M100 and you ~M010), or we have very different workflows in our company and I am not reproducing your situation (Or I missed something and it is going to come back and haunt me later! 🙂  ).  For us I think the vast majority of our users will see this specific issue as a significant improvement, while being thankful that we can still edit inside the note dialog box.  If I have missed something on this specific, by all means point it out to me/us. 🙂

As for other changes in Creo 3 over Creo 2, requiring extra keyboard taps and clicks to create dims was a bad idea and a step backwards, and their may be other similar steps backward.  If the were coming out with Creo 2 I think PTC's marketing dept would have a hay day in promoting that the users no longer have to hold the keyboard in order to create a dim (or have to hold the keyboard to override that stupid ribbon context specific requirement in order to select something or...etc)

[STEVEG]

It sounds like Antonius needs to update to a newer build code.

[Kevin]

Not sure if this is what Antonius is referring to but I can see what he means if it is. If you type a regular text string and then resize the text box on-screen the text properties dialog shows the text as it was originally typed with no delimiters for new lines; the text editor shows the delimiters for new lines. If you start to add other formatting to the text string you get more delimiters and some that don't get added for a regular text string. For instance a box around text that has been wrapped onto two or more lines will show the new line delimiter where it doesn't show for regular text wrapped onto two or more lines. The Editor which displays the note in NotePad by default shows all the delimiters. The other thing that happens is the delimiters placed in a text string by resizing the text box by dragging to cause the text to wrap are ignored when imported but are present when saved as a note.txt file. Text Styles which also show delimiters are also ignored.

To select a grouping of text that has formatted you use to be able to hover the mouse pointer over it, have it highlight, and select it for editing. Now, at least in M120 of Creo 3 you have to set the selection filter to Individual Text in order to select it.

[LawrenceS]

Kevin,

I think I understand now.  As I understand it the complaint is that wrapping in Creo Stinks.  However, what I don't quite get is that as far back as I can remember it was always bad and never really behaved how I wanted it too. We pretty much just wrap manually (line by line) to avoid problems, and only rarely use notes from files. Although this seems like a separate issue from how Creo3 does text, I would definitely vote for improved wrapping and auto wrapping functionality.

[TomD.inPDX]

They won't fix it, they already reported that in my Creo 2 support case.

[TomD.inPDX]

Correct.  And in Creo 2, moving text doesn't trigger the text box that constantly sizes rather than moves.

In Creo 3, moving text was much more problematic.  It would grab a size drag handle all too often.

Again, I know the quirks of Creo 2 M040.  Otherwise it is highly reliable.

Biggest issue in M040... patterns - 0.2% of ,my workflow; drawings (manipulating annotation) - 33% of my workflow.

Do the math.

[LawrenceS]

It is interesting that you find Creo 2 M040 acceptable.  We never experienced that high reliability.  We had problems with below M090 (graphics cards as well as other issues).  Then we found M120 to be a good release for us, and now I am happily on M200 which has had the least problems (which is to be expected!).  We are big enough that we cannot afford to go to early releases of any version of Creo other than for testing purposes.  There are just too many problems in the early version and then you multiply that times the number of users...yikes!. 

[TomD.inPDX]

I tested early Creo 2.0 extensively.

And I've kept up with problems as releases going forward.

I also follow Brian's recommendations for NASA.

Not sure where they landed early, IIRC something like M090.

Even up to M220, Brian was still not comfortable.

I am convinced that something very bad happened to Creo 2.0 during development.

Issues that were once fixed were again being reported.

We all use the system differently.

I could work with Pro|E again and be perfectly happy and productive.

Therefore stability is of much greater importance than cool stuff.

I went to Creo 3 to give it a chance.  I specifically choose a heavy modeling project to do this with.

Hardly any drafting requirements, and I could really pull out all the stops on mechanism constraints.

For that, even Creo 3.0 M010 is perfectly reliable for this.

Same quirks from Creo 2.  So in a way, the bugs in Creo 3 are similar to my version of Creo 2.

There really is no use in questioning engineering choices for specific functions.

If comprehensive pattering was my primary need, or I had manufacturing routines that fail due to bugs; different story.

But I am a designer using very basic routes.  Setting up an efficient drafting routing is critical to my function.

If they mess that up, then I wouldn't even consider remaining with PTC.

Paperless; build-in GD&T, driving dimension rules, and much more simply does not apply to me.

I've already wrote off SW as a usable drafting tool.  It is about 5 years behind PTC in functionality.

[Inoram]

I will say Creo2 M240 has never crashed on my since release.... never....Now I have had some WACKY regen issues where I have had to get creative with the forced regens, but at least I have not lost any work.

[psobejko]

Good point about the new CTRL+ method is forcing the users into "showing" the model dimensions.

And in the cases where you want to "sketch-in" a lot of dimensions the CTRL method is better (at least in the case of a common baseline)

Overall, I'd rate Creo 3 (annotating and detailing) as improved but I'd have been happy to stay at Creo 2.0 (we were using M230 before the Creo 3 change was mandated).  Some things are just baffling as to why they implemented it:

1) new (non-optional) print-preview - for those who defined the PCF files, this is just a hurdle...

2) the way feature and model notes are created - it gives you a small dialog box, into which you invariably type in a part of your note just to create it, then then go back and use the old "full-featured" editor to give the note the proper symbols, name, attachment, etc...   IMO, this quick entry box should have a button that turns it into the old one, and they should come up with a config.pro option to skip using it altogether.

3) Drawing note can be composed using multiple fonts, but only of one color?

4) If a model parameter is buried within a drawing note, or table cell, it is confusing as to what you are actually picking and often you end up overwriting the &code with dumb text.

To finish on a positive note, these "must haves" come to mind:

- in general, failed features are easier to fix because the original references are shown graphically

- copying and pasting features is easier as again, the original references are easier to identify.  Also, once you pick the new reference, the software moves on to the next one in the list - this one saves a lot of mouse movements.

[LawrenceS]

Paul Sobejko‌, I am not sure what is missing from the new text entry.  In Creo 3 M100, I just tried adding a note and (not using the old note dialog box) I was able to put in attributes such as &description, a symbol using &sym(symbol_name), &d17, and I even could put in a Unicode symbol (e.g. ALT+0177 for the plus/minus symbol ±).  I can do all of this while easily seeign the location of the curser on my all black background.  What can you not do from this new inline note?

I will mention that some of this stuff did not work so well in earlier builds of Creo 3, but from what I can see this stuff is all pretty easy and can all be done from the new inline notes without the "full featured" dialog box.  What am I missing?

Thanks for the heads up on the improvements.  I have not done much model testing so far and am excited about the improved functionality you mentioned for failed geometry and copying/pasting.  Since PTC did such a nice job on replacing components with their auto associated geometry feature I have been hoping for them to do similar and apply this intelligent programming to other areas.  Nice!

[psobejko]

At least as of Creo 3 M120, I don't mind the "WYSIWYG" style of entering in the notes in drawing mode.  I even think it does a decent job of handling the text when you resize the size of the note and have the wrap turned on.

But I was referring to this dialog box:

which pops up in modeling mode if you right-click on a feature and select "Create a Note" -> Feature (BTW, why make the user go through that flyout submenu - there is only one choice there    ???).  Anyway, this is how the old one looks like:

[LawrenceS]

Paul Sobejko‌,  Ahh, I see what you mean.  Thanks for the screenshots and clarifications!  Yes, I do not understand why they make you go back into that note to place it.  That is confusing.  Additionally when I went back into it I had actually forgot which component I did it on (in an asm) as it was no longer highlighted so it added even more time and clicks to find it and edit the model note definition.

It looks like that flyout is there whether it is a component or an asm.  In the asm there are 2 options in the fly out (part, component).  I guess the good news to that is it helps keep the RMB menu consistent across different types of models...

[Mattjcghjghjgjg]

Stay with Creo 2. The drafting in 3 is terrible. RIP notation and dimensions.

[STEVEG]

Well this is disappointing!