Originally Posted by NC Cams  I have this feeling that until/unless a person has to rely upon a CAD package for their livelihood, the "BEST" package will be the one that they have the most expertise and or training in.
I do not know of very many CAD designers who are proficient in a variety of disciplines. Surely, however there are some out there and they would have a better cross section of knowledge than any dedicated user of any particular package.
Most certainly, there are CAD packages that do a better job of this versus that. Perhaps it ultimately will evolve/devolve to a MAC/PC sort of discussion in that each will have its own supporters and/or detractors.
This was one reason why I shied away from learning a CAD program until I absolutely had to. I was in the industry about the time that mechanical drawing was dying and CAD was exploding. Almost every year, a new version was coming out and the old being replaced by the new. At that point, I found a simple program to do my simple drawing needs and worked with pros when it came to having CAD for the professional tasks.
Worst of all, there was a lot of backwards incompatibility as well as platform to platform incompatibility. It got so bad in the auto industry that the once accepted IGES insterchanges that at one time WERE acceptable, became intolerable. You got forced into having to buy or lease a specified package and work in parent language ONLY or else you got no chance of doing subcontract work for the OEM's.
Did it make for better parts or faster delivery? Not realy. It raised costs and forced suppliers to duplicate costs by buying or liscensing duplicitious CAD seats because there were no longer paper drawings issued - only parent language files and, if you didn't have the parent CAD you had to pay someone to print/interpret the drawing for your CAD system of choice - if you were lucky and/or smart, you had a CAD package that worked with your major customers and didn't have to buy a redundant system just to survive.
The purpose of a DRAWING at one time was to generate an unambiguous description of what you wanted in hard copy format. Now, you have to spend a fortune just to be able to translate the electronic data into something that a shop guy can lay out in front of him on the workbench in order to make the part.
Seems like something got lost in the translation from paper to paperless engineering drawings. |
I share the same facts and opinions as NC Cams. With the exception that I was in High School when the CAD Boom started. After two years (4 semesters of Mechanical-Drafting ) I was forced into CAD by my Teacher because of the new age of Drawing Communication. My first CAD was VersaCAD .02. Then AutoCAD by my Senior year.
CAM Nerd has the Facts of what one should look for in a CAD/CAM Software.
As things changed in the Engineering world CAM was now the new software to learn. You can guess what happened after that LOL.
Sorry for naming a few CAD Softwares.
Cheers!!!!!!
