04-30-2011, 08:25 PM
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| | | Join Date: Mar 2011 Location: united states
Posts: 53
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 retired engineer | |
I currently use rhino4 and REALLY like it. The cost was $775 from novedge.com. I used autocad 14 for years but the boolian operations were unreliable and my G-code program (meshcam3) had trouble with my output. Also autocad14 did not have a loft command. I tested autocad 2010 for a couple evenings at a computer lab and just couldn't buy a loft. Also there were so many menues of duplicate ways to enter a command that only 40% of the screen was available. As a long term user I was disappointed and looked elsewhere. I bought the manuals for catia5 and solidworks as well as autocad 2010 and read them. Theese three programs came with parametric modeling which I have to use a free plugin for on rhino.The rhino plug in also alows parts to be put in motion such as an aircraft retractable landing gear. This function is in the standard solidworks. The learning curve in rhino was about 2 evenings for 2D and 3 weeks for 3D . Solid works which was derrived from catia which was in turn a dassault revision of a program written by boeing is well developed and very capable. Unfortunately even without the FEA section it cost about 15,000 to buy with a yearly "maintenance fee" that is higher than rhino which has no such fee. Alibree professional also has maintenance fees. The thing that really put me off solidworks is that they use three separate files to store parts of a drawing which are accessed through a firewall. This allows updates across all server client computers necessary for a large engineering department but for my use the chronological index without the file names is useless. I tend to use folders with for instance the airframe for an experimental aircraft all in a folder. Then another folder for aluminum side housing designs for a mazda rotary engine. This makes it easy to back up a folder on a DVD to store in a different building. I didn't investigate pro engineer but have heard it is a good system. The best thing I did was get the manuals used off e-bay for about $30 each and the rhino manual can be downloaded free on the internet.I also read forums for the various systems on the internet to see what other users were experiencing. Pay particular attention to transferring files from one system to another. The sellers description always lists a lot of file extensions, however importing something and being able to measure or modify it are two different things. All the name programs have windows and mac versions, however the mac versions are not yet developed as well as the windows versions.
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