Pro/E vs. CATIA vs. NX

[JoeBobJenkins]

My company is switching from CATIA to NX. I personally am an Inventor user. I've avoided CATIA like the plague (hated using it) and am excited to be using NX. However those in charge of making the call seem to have completely excluded Pro/E from the decision making. Knowing virtually nothing about the two programs, other than they're both better than CATIA v4, I don't know what's the difference? I can easily read the website to find outh that they both can churn butter and cure cancer at the same time but I'd rather hear from a user.

A I was under the impression Pro/E was a high end program, comparable to those two. Am I wrong in this?

B. Does Pro/E have limitations ie. not able to handle massive quantities of data, no cable routing features, etc.

C. Is it "potaytoe" "potaghtoe"?

 

[mjcole]

All the systems basically have or can have the same capabilities the main 2 differences being cost and usability. I am a long time Pro/E user for 14 years and it is a truly great system but most new users hate it because of ease of use is lower than most other systems. Pro/E is very stable for the most part, I've used Catia v5 for a while but the major gripe I have is that it's poorly written and makes many simple tasks complex. Catia Implements poorly tested functionality while SolidWorks disables it and Pro/E hides it in config/system settings.

You should be excited about using NX as it is very powerful and easy to use learn. The only problem I had with it were most of the Parametric capabilities like Wave Linking are normally disabled by the options files as installed.

A.) You are correct in saying Pro/E is a high end system.

B.) ProE has a good Cable Routing option and handles large data sets well but your company should look into trying out the same example Assembly file in each and doing a comparison and rating importance of various capabilities.

C.) P.O.T.U.S. Toe

Ask to meet with the Sales and Technical contact handling the Sales Pitch and have them do an onsite demo and show the capabilities for a specific .model file you are using. Often the People making the decision do not know the correct relevant questions to ask and can most times be fooled by the Marketing Rhetoric. I've also heard nightmare stories about the people selling PTC's products. The decision may also be affected with companies you do businesses and the systems they use.

I wonder what the butter churn Add-in costs for installation.

See if you can get a few Engineers from your team together to pick through what requirements you have for a new system and thoughts any of you would have on switching and how much experience people have with each system. Some companies I have worked at would have regular Design Team meetings where we would discuss tips and tricks and general procedures so everyone used the same techniques and could understand each other's Parts Assemblies.

See who else is on-board with NX and for what reasons. Pro/E Wildfire5.0

Is your company in the Aerospace Industry because I know many companies that still use Catia v4 for Complex Surfacing that hasn't been dumbed down to a simpler less powerful interface.

I did like the trace sketch option in Catia's old sketcher but the lack of perpendicular relationships got annoying with all the 90° dimensions.
NX is most similar to Catia in terms of the Hide/Show space capabilities that let you model in either mode. NX also has great direct modeling capabilities that allow changes o geometry to be made without having to regenerate all the features.

It would be interesting to hear the top 5 reasons given by the teams selling you software to change to their system. If you could list those it might help. Also you can try posting in the UG-NX which I used for a while when learning UG v18 many years ago.

Michael

 

[REDesigner09]

Hi,

I haven't used Catia, but have used NX & ProE quite a bit. However, I have far more years on NX.

Regardless, I still think NX is far more "all-around" CAD package than ProE.

ProE Drafting is a pure pain in the A@@!!! to use. If you are not familiar with the drafting side, then it's best not to!!

Additionally, if using some type fo PDM PLM Application such as ProE's Windchill & NX Teamcenter - Teamcenter is still much better!!!

ProE, NX, Windchill & Teaamcenter may & do have a lot of the same capabilities, but when it comes to functionality & less "dicking around" I would pick NX & Teamcenter.

 

[JoeBobJenkins]

Thanks for the info. If Pro E is worse for drafting that's a non-starter.

 

[fighterpilot]

Pro/E drafting is far superior over NX in my opinion. The concept of shown dimensions has escaped UG code writers. If you design a model with design intent built in, showing those dimensions in Pro/E is easy. If you do the same in UG, you'll be manually creating dimensions in your drawing.

--
Fighter Pilot
Manufacturing Engineer

 

[looslib]

NX has improved in recent versions in that regard.

On the other hand, with NX you don't have a NC programmer scraping V-10 engine blocks at the machining operation because they decided to change the tolerance on a critical dimension. That company had been a UG customer, changed to Pro/E, scrapped the blocks and went back to UG.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[fighterpilot]

Ben,

You'll have to explain more on that situation to convince me. I'm on NX6 and I find the drafting painfully slow and unintuitive. My guess is UG focuses on 3D MBD and not drafting.

The ability to violate design intent in a UG drawing is enough to me to pass on it.

--
Fighter Pilot
Manufacturing Engineer

 

[JohnRBaker]

For what it's worth:

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/Images/9645_tcm1023-4581.pdf

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/Images/6139_tcm1023-56001.pdf

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[looslib]

I haven't been on NX since NX4, but from what I have heard drafting has become easier. Both NX and Wildfire are a pain for drafting compared to AutoCAD.

Pro/E has its own problems with drafting, but I would rather have problems with creating a drawing than scrap parts on an NC machine by a NC programmer making changes.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[cobaltred]

Catia,PTC,NX,Alias,ICEM surf?
Specifically I am talking about class A surfacing in these programs.
I am confused,Are all these programs essentially equal in there abilty to handle any complex surfacing situation and are we just talking preference?I understand that people seem to naturally
gravitate towards the program they learned in or were raised with
and I understand that people have differnt needs such as drawings
machining and so forth.
I watched some videos by the cadjunkie on NX and Adam made a reference to Autodesk Alias and stated that even Alias did not
have as powerful a set of surfacing tools as NX.
In short I would like to concentrate my learning time on a program that will give me the tools to handle even the most complex surfacing situations above all, even if some programs go about it in a cumbersome way.For instance I hate Catia's navigation with the mouse such as rotate the model, as apposed to say NX,night and day for me,however if Catia is the stronger program to handle the complex situations I would overlook "not agree"some of these preferences.
Right now I use Rhino and Mastercam for my everyday work.
Thanks, just looking to hopefully clear some of the fog.
Buddy.

 

[mjcole]

Catia is bulky and often gets in it's own way by making the way it does things slow and unstable I did however like the Mouse interface because Zoom Pan Rotate could all be done with Middle and Right Mouse button.

Hold Middle > Pans
Hold Middle & Right > Spins
Hold Middle & Tap Right > Zooms

Unigraphics had great surfacing tools but they were expensive as hell. Also most of the useful options were off by default in the settings files.

UGNX used to have the Part and Drawing in the same file with a Part and Drafting interface. So did Catia but that was in v4 and I remember the Drafting Standards being a nightmare to customize for sizes on dims and centerlines.

The way you have to assemble the Part file into the drawing file just to go to the Drafting Application was annoying. The other annoying thing was all the Purple Dimensions on the drafting document which were unattached to their correct references. Using NX2 I had to use some pretty gangster workarounds to get what I wanted from Ordinates off an angular face could only be created by Expanding the view Rotating it and adding them as horizontal it also seemed that the views were just copies of the model at a particular instant and would not update if parent view was moved. I did like the Hide/Show model space in both Catia and UG that allowed you to work on hidden parts and swap back to visible space.

They can all do the same things it's just the little differences that put some ahead of others. SolidWorks doesn't allow dimensions to be hidden when working in a sketch you either see you also can't move multiple features together in the part Tree UGNX was excellent at this with a simple right click you could see where in the tree you were able to move items before and after and it color coded Parent and Child Features.

UG was a nightmare in the v18 days where I modeled a Jet Fan Blade as my first project when I hadn't used it before. This forum was a great help to me in learning the User Interface coming from a Pro/E background.

My thanks to John Baker and Ben Loosli for helping me out when I was a newbie posting here.

here's a few of my first threads both answered by Looslib

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=45663

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=50182

Michael

 

[acciardi]

I've used Pro/E for about 17 years, NX for 3-4 years (and UG from versions 1 thru 10 before it), and Solidworks for about 5 years. No Catia experience, so I can't comment on it.

I found that NX was buggy in V4, but by V5 and V6 it became somewhat amazing. Seimens' acquistion of the product seemed to breathe a lot of new life and money into it. The user interface has become brilliant.

If I had to write a pitch for each, it would go like this:

Pro/E - very very powerful, somewhat difficult to pick up unless you have prior parametric training. Creo has added some very interesting direct editing capabilities like NX, so PTC is taking this seriously. The new Creo interface is very Solidworks-like, so should be easier to learn, but they still haven't flushed out the old Pro/e cascading menus 100%. Pro is an outstanding system for traditional machine design - casting, weldments, plastic parts, etc. Windchill is an amazing PDM system but pricey.

NX - The DNA in NX goes way back, so you can still model using any methodolgy ever devised by man. It's unrivaled for creating complex surfaces. I used it the exact same way I used Pro/E and had good success with it. The drafting is simple and intuitive, but as one poster mentioned, it's geared more for creating drawing dimensions as opposed to just 'showing' the dimensions embedded in the model. This wasn't a huge deal for me, since I usually make geometry edits from the model, not the drawing. This is absolutely industrial strength CAD, and people design space stations and automobiles with it, so you can be sure it will work for your application. Assemblies of hundreds or thousands of components are child's play. TeamcenterENG - meh, never cared for it very much.

Solidworks - fun, easy to use, great part modeler. Gets awkward with large assemblies. They're moving away from the Parasolid kernal at some point and will be using the Catia kernal. The medical device industry uses it extensively (probably because most of the companies are small startups).

One thing to consider is how easy it will be to get support for common hurdles. If you're an advanced user, tech support can be somewhat useless and you'll need to talk to real expert users. This forum is a great place to learn, and in the case of NX, John Baker has been an advocate/architect of this product for over 30 years. If you have a question, post it here and John will get you an answer very quickly. There's also some very knowledgable Pro/E people here and on MCADCENTRAL.com.

Having said all that, my personal preference is still Pro/E, mostly because I've been using it so for long and I know it forwards and backwards. It can be a bit rigid at times, but you will get rock solid models that never break. In all the years I've used it, I've never lost a single bit of work due to crashes or data corruption.

Sometimes I wish that all these companies would just merge so that we could get a unified system, like MS-Windows.

 

[weroberts]

Catia is a good package, but they will nickle and dime you to death. At my last job we looked at getting a .step translator for Catia V5 (Thats right it's not included) and it was more then a seat of SolidWorks. So we bought SolidWorks.
I personally never saw a difference between SolidWorks and Catia unless you were working with huge assemblies. The surfacing capabilities in SolidWorks seem rougly comparable. Drafting SolidWorks is easier in my opinion.
Catia is a little harder to pick up as well.
Never ran NX (aside from I-deas NX)