Cadalyst - July 2008 - (Page 36)

mcadmodeling By Mike Hudspeth, IDSA The Current State of MCAD Progress in the MCAD industry brings optimism to a depressed economy. ach year, I like to take a look at our beloved 3D MCAD industry and assess what shape it’s in. I have to say that it has been a very long time since I’ve felt the way I do about the future. Gas prices are at all-time highs (which drives up the price of everything else). Myopic companies aren’t making high enough proﬁts to suit their goals (despite record performance), so they’re laying off skilled workers and sending their work overseas (thus losing their ability to do the real work themselves and weakening the country’s industrial capability). And the American worker is caught in the middle, all but helpless to do anything about it. But things aren’t all doom and gloom. There’s actually a lot to feel encouraged about. E Free Stuff It has never been easier to acquire MCAD software. Earlier this year, I wrote an entire article about low or no cost CAD (see “Low or No Cost CAD,” Cadalyst, January 2008, www.cadalyst.com/0108mcadmodeling). You can download programs that can put you on the right path to meeting your MCAD needs. You can explore different ways of doing things without spending too much. Say, for example, you need 2D CAD. Visit the Solid Edge Web site and check out its free 2D drafting product. Need 3D? Go to the Alibre Web site and try its product. It’s also free. Don’t like history-based modeling? Go see CoCreate or even SketchUp (figure 1). Some software companies even have license agreements that allow you to take a copy of their software home. Your choices are many — and very good. I can’t interpret the proliferaAlibre tion of free MCAD www.alibre.com software as being Google SketchUp anything but good http://sketchup.google.com for end users. It Kubotek tends to raise the www.kubotek.com bar on innovaPTC CoCreate tion and quality. www.cocreate.com If you can get the Siemens PLM Software basics for free, www.plm.automation.siemens.com/ then software en_us/products/nx/design/index.shtml companies are Solid Edge forced to come up www.solidedge.com with new and betSolidWorks ter ways of doing www.solidworks.com more stuff. Free 36 Figure 1. Google SketchUp, a favorite tool of architects, is earning attention in the manufacturing sector for its ease of use and great results. It’s one of several free modeling tools available for MCAD. (or nearly free) software is a win–win scenario for end users. You can take it home and use it for whatever hobby you want. (I am in the process of converting a motorcycle into a reverse trike. I am building the whole thing on my computer [figure 2] and will end up with detailed instructions.) Mid-Range? What Mid-Range? It used to be that there was a huge gap and a clearly visible boundary between productive (read high-end) software and what average users could afford. That’s not the case anymore. We can afford much more today — and much more is available to us. High-end capabilities trickle down to the mid and lower end. It’s just a natural progression. The socalled mid-range software of today has more capability than the high-end stuff did only a few years ago. That’s good news indeed. It tends to bring more modeling power into the hands of users. So if it’s getting harder to tell the difference between low-, mid-, and high-end software, then how do you do it? Mid-range software manufacturers used to sit back and let the high-end guys come up with innovative new features. Then they’d engineer their own version and charge less. As successful as that me-too strategy was, the software companies wanted more. I’d like to think they wanted the satisfaction of innovating on their own. In any case, the relative success of the mid-range software titles gave those companies enough money and confidence to step out on their own and give it a go. Now you can find some of the most cutting-edge technology coming out in the mid-range www.cadalyst.com cadalyst July 2008 http://www.cadalyst.com/0108mcadmodeling http://www.alibre.com http://sketchup.google.com http://www.kubotek.com http://www.cocreate.com http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/nx/design/index.shtml http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/nx/design/index.shtml http://www.solidedge.com http://www.solidworks.com http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - July 2008

Cadalyst - July 2008 Editor’s Window CAD Central FIRST Robotic Beasts Draw Students to Engineering Power! Speed! Action! — Mighty Mobile Workstations are Packed and Ready for Adventure! Vico Virtual Construction Suite 2008 AMD ATI FireGL V8600 and FireGL V8650 — 1-GB and 2-GB Graphics Cards Gaining Independence and Influence The Current State of MCAD Rewriting the Rules of PDM BIM Goes Residential CAD Cartoon Issue Indexes Pleasures of Customization

Cadalyst - July 2008

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