Solidworks and

[mrMikee]

I am working with another company that wants to use Solidworks (a parametric solid modeling program) to design bins, batchers, and support structures. While I do understand the advantages of 3D and solid modeling for machines and assemblies, I am reluctant the jump on board at this point in time for using it on buildings and building type structures, in particular when each job is significantly different. Does anyone have some experience with this and/or opinions?

Regards,
-Mike

 

[mrMikee]

The title of my post sould have been "Solidworks and building structures"

Sorry, hit the wrong key.

-Mike

 

[wes616]

Hi Mike,

One of my first jobs after graduation was working for a company that build traveling exhibits for trade shows and sets for film and television commercials. When I started everyone was hand drafting still (which is common practice in the entertainment industry STILL). After about 3 months a new dir of design came on board. He had a product design background (as opposed to an architectural bg which is common as well).

He wanted to use a parametric modeling program, which seemed silly to everyone (but the two of us who had come from ME). After a few months, everyone really began to enjoy working in 3D. It really helped vizualization. Cut down our Change Orders (especially when integrating structure with machinery.)

On another note. My wife is an architect, and has really jumped on the CATIA bandwagon for architecture (I suppose that is the influence of Ghery on Sothern California Architecture).

My thoughts on using this type of software for building is get a real understanding of how the "automation" features work, so you can simplify making structural members. And "walls" that have similar structures can be saved and brought into "assemblies".

Eventually the "Civil" world will turn to 3D. I don't necessarily believe it will be with Solidwork (or any of the other Mechanical Packages). Someone WILL come up with a parametric program geared to civil, and it will take hold (just like AutoCAD replaced the drafting machine... although it met great resistance at the beginning).

A note though. 3D modeling is one more step in between concept and production, so it will slow your development cycle accordingly (because you make the model then the drawing, instead of just the drawing). But it's not a linear relationship, because the "drawing" features are more automated (after you get the hang of it).



Wes C.
------------------------------
There are no engineers in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent engineer would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.

 

[wes616]

thread730-125216

Opinions...

Wes C.
------------------------------
There are no engineers in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent engineer would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.

 

[mrMikee]

Thanks wes616,

Your reply is very interesting and I appreciate your response. I can't really put my finger on what is making me leery about this except that I went through all this 15 years ago with 2D CAD, with software that really wasn't that good, at least at that point in time. I am suspicious that Pro-E and Solidworks aren't there yet either when it comes to building structures.

For example, you could design a house with Solidworks. Your model could contain every stud, cut piece of drywall, wire, wire nut, fixture, and so on. However, when you run the wiring through the walls you need holes in the studs creating another part number. Instead of having a pallet load of standard studs all the same, you have perhaps another 100 part numbers. Each part number (stud) would need to be drilled per a drawing, identified and deleivered to the point where it would be put in. My point is that in my experience a lot of what is done currently in structural steel and building construction is more like a schematic or a simplification rather that a detailed drawing. I'm not sure I want to do this with solid modeling software.

I know that my house example is an oversimplification, and I am not experienced with Solidworks specifically so I can't really make a judgment at this time. Just asking for input and comments if anyone is interested.

Thanks,
-Mike

 

[aggman]

Mike,
You probably know from my call sign and by talking with me through this forum that I work for a company in the U.S. that designs, fabricates and erects custom aggregate processing equipment. In 2001 we spent somewhere around $100,000 trying to implement Solidworks over a years time. If you are building custom equipment and dealing with large assemblies and layouts then it probably will not work. I am sure you have heard all about interference checking and intelligent modeling and bla-bla-bla. It’s all a bunch of B.S. Don't get me wrong, you can do all of those things and they are great but I am telling you when you try to model a whole system it will not work. Of course you can do it by modeling interaction features as a simplified shape, but what’s the point in that. By the way for anyone reading this who says "well he didn't have the computer horsepower or the right video card". Try custom built workstations spec'd out by the gurus at Solidworks themselves guaranteed to run anything we could throw at it at about 10 grand a pop. Guess what we had. Try waiting 3 minutes after you place one dimension on a bin and then trying to move across to the side view before you can work again. And crashes were as common as going to the bathroom.
Back to the issue at hand. Personally I think solid modeling is really cool and helpful. But personally I also think Solidworks and Inventor were designed with mechanical design at its roots. I am talking about molds and machine parts, etc. Not structural modeling. I would really like to give X-Steel a try and see what it’s like because it seems to be geared towards structural and may be better suited. As far as we are concerned AutoCAD will continue to be our main-line drafting program. With intelligent dimensions now we are saving a lot of time when something has to be stretched so it’s working for us now. In the future we will see, but not for at least another 5 years. When you design custom equipment every day the repetitive design intent and intelligent modeling will not gain any efficiencies. In fact they will likely slow you down. To be honest with you everyone always talks about using MathCAD or whatever doing design calculations with and calculators and design paper are not needed any more. Not around here. I do just fine with my trusty HP 33s and company letterhead design sheets. It’s hard to justify making drafting and engineering automated when you build custom engineered products all the time.
I think in the end it will depend on the type of company you are talking about. If it’s like us (custom equipment with interaction between other custom equipment) my vote is a definite no. If they build five different bin designs that all have different capacities then I would say probably yes it would be good. As far as buildings are concerned it won't be Solidworks but it will be some sort of 3D program some day that we are designing them in.

 

[mrMikee]

And here's another thread that gets into something new called BIM.

thread507-126839

-Mike

 

[aggman]

Mike your house is a perfect example of one of the many problems doing structural design in Solidworks. Say for instance you are detailing a channel with holes. Say its a C5" x 6.7#. Say their are 3 with holes in the end for bolting a handrail post to and 12 that have no holes. All are 8' long. Looking in the BOM of the cad drawing you see pc 5, qty (15), etc. In the detail notes you see the added note. (3 with holes as shown, 12 without) In Solidworks they are two totally different parts. Still probably sounds like a small thing but try 10 different parts on the drawing where you used to only have 4. Believe me when I say that we had some assemblies drawings that looked like G.A. drawings for a whole structure by the time it was done. Sometimes things can just get to complicated.

 

[mrMikee]

Hi aggman,

The first time I encountered Solidworks used for bins and batch plants was with a company replacing it and going back to 2D CAD. Their experience was pretty much the same as your company.

Thanks,
-Mike

 

[wes616]

Guys, Lets be clear. Solidworks is probablly not the program to use for large structures and systems. More appropriate programs for building large structures and systems (a residential/commercial/public works/etc/etc building is a system). There are more appropriate programs for this type of work.. Like CATIA and Unigraphics. Solidworks is a (imho) componet design program. It is inexpensive and user friendly, but not capible of this amount of information that goes into designing a building, or an airplane or a ship (things that are along the lines of being called megastructures).

Mr. Mike. There are ways of dealing with the issues you brought up w/o making new "parts" for each stud. It is actually quite simple in SW to do this.

I think we call all agree that eventually (maybe 40 years but eventually) 3D will be the common practice in the building industry. The only way that these software companies are going to start to build a good product with tools for all you civil/structurals out there.



Wes C.
------------------------------
There are no engineers in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent engineer would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.

 

[ewh]

While I agree that it may be a while before CAD becomes mainstream in the building industry, I do see much potential there.
As for MrMikee's point about needing new part numbers everytime a hole is drilled, this is false. With many programs you add the holes (or other details) at the assembly level, with no part number changes. In the example of drilling holes in a standard stud, the database will still know that the part number of the stud didn't change, only that an operation has been done to it at the assembly level. The BOM will not change because of operations of this type.
You can integrate all of the items involved in a structure so that changes (such as lengthening a room) become automatic with only a key dimensional change.
Look how far AutoCad has come in the industry since it's inception. I am confident that the industry will begin to rely more on 3D CAD than on board drawings as the software continues to meet the needs of the industry. To handle this type of file structure though, I strongly agree with wes616 that a higher end system than AutoCad or SolidWorks will be required.

 

[mrMikee]

wes616,

Where could I find out more about the part number "trick" you talked about?

-Mike

 

[wes616]

Mr. Mike... ewh pointed it out. In Solidworks, it's called an "ASSEMBLY FEATURE".

Wes C.
------------------------------
There are no engineers in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent engineer would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.

 

[mrMikee]

ewh,

I'm not a Solidworks user so I can't comment on how it can be used for part identification. In general though, if I understand what you are saying, the idea of calling out different individual parts for an assembly versus using standards parts and modifying in an assembly has been around for a while, and works well in weldments for example. In my limited experience with Solidsworks techs is that they want to make a new part and drawing of everything.

-Mike

 

[smcadman]

There are specific parametric programs for the 3D side of architectural work, such as Architectural Desktop:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=2956700

However, if you are building only parts of a structure, then Solidworks could work for you. If you want to build the entire building from the ground up, then you would want to look elsewhere because Solidworks starts bogging down on huge files.

I currently use Solidworks, but at a previous company I used Mechanical Desktop which is another parametric modeler. We built mezzanines, stairways, helical (spiral) stairways, handrails, and a few other structures that are more architectural than mechanical. But we had a sheet metal package add-on that made it perfect for what we did.

Solidworks has sheet metal built into the program, as well as a structural steel library, so it would work perfectly for architural sheet metal also. I just wouldn't use it for complete buildings.

Flores

 

[MadMango]

I have architectural design experience on the board and with AutoCAD r10, and mechanism design with AutoCAD r13 and SolidWorks (9 yrs). I think it’s safe to say that you shouldn’t try to do any detailed architectural designs with MCAD software, be it SolidWorks, Inventor, Pro-E, etc.

But for general layout, it would work perfectly.

[green]"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."[/green]
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[ewh]

mrMikee,
I am not too familiar with SolidWorks either, as I have been using UG for many years. I agree that most of the time in mechanical work, we like the parts to be as complete as they can be when they are detailed. However, there are situations where changes have to be made at the assembly level. What UG does in that situation is extract a copy of the part that will change, while keeping any information associated with the parent part. So if you have a standard stud, you can extract it, add holes to it, cut slots out of it, etc, and the bill of material will still recognize the parent part (and it doesn't have to clutter the database). I don't want to make it sound simpler than it is, but it is a very powerful design tool which could be used in the building industry.
Entire aircraft (including rivets) have been modeled in UG, but you must have a workable configuration system in place or you could end up with huge files that you have no hope of being able to open, much less use.

 

[mrMikee]

aggman,

I started at a company a few years ago just as it was finishing its last project with Solidworks, which was a structure supporting two large bins. The model for this plant contained everything except the electrical. When it was decided to enclose the structure they added every bracket, girt, nut, bolt, and piece of siding to the model. It became extremely difficult to get the file loaded and get some prints out. It was very similar to your experience with the crashing and slow performance. They went back to their old software.

I'm not necessarily against solid modeling and Solidworks, but I'm not sure it is there yet as a all purpose tool for building type structures. That said it might be ready for certain tasks under the right management.

Regards,
-Mike


Regards,
-Mike

 

[zcp]

mrMikee,
I have a consulting business where pretty much every job is a custom job. I use 3d solids (solidedge, solidworks, and alibre) on structural and architectural jobs quite often with great success. Bill of materials, dimensionally correct cross section views, iso views at the push of a button, exploded views to show assembly steps, assembly level operations, etc. etc. have really made a difference for my clients.

Now that they are seeing the power of 3d and what it can do for them, they are abandoning their 2d autocad ways and hiring me to model their structures, do repeat jobs, etc. It takes time and you really have to have a robust, step by step modeling method, but it can be done. I have done everything from 1000 part structures (not counting all the hardware) to residential homes to architectural canopies to industrial machines.

Just like anything, the trick is in modeling only what you need. For the case of the house, you don't need every hole and nail. For a process application, sometimes you just need paths, not every pipe coupling. And you have to learn how to drive your software to get it to run efficiently (deactivating parts, subassemblies, patterns, etc.). But the first time you show the client a 3d interference problem or a 3d multicurve intersection or the effect on the structure load path of just 'moving that member over a little", you will thank your lucky stars you aren't using 2d autocad (or the t-square for some of us). 3d presentations on a computer projector also make one heck of an impressive design review.

ZCP

http://www.phoenix-engineer.com

 

[aggman]

My point to everyone, since my issue about part instances can be easily disproved, is that any of the mechanical 3D packages are great for modeling smaller one piece items or any one assembly items. But mrMikee works in the same general industry as I do. It is simply not feasible with the technology at hand to do layout and plant design in a parametric modeling package. Many of the systems we put together have 50 - 100 major assemblies in them, spread out over 20 acres of land, and each assembly can have anywhere from five to a thousand parts in it. Sure I can model the one assembly, even if it does slow things down as it gets larger, but it is not feasible when you are trying to tie the whole system together. Do I have a bad taste in my mouth because of the money and time we lost trying to make the switch? YES! It still does not change the outcome though. I think it will be something to do some day. Just not now. To me I think any company getting ready to go down the transition road from 2D - 3D needs to seriously consider the cost involved with making the change. We get caught up with good sales pitches and dreams of making millions because we can do things twice as fast as before. In the end (right now) I think if you’re lucky you will break even on the time spent on projects and your transition cost will be lost. That’s just one persons opinion though.