SW explained in few words.
100% this.
Admins tools are also so bugged I had to make mine.
This is where in Solid Edge you just select the Ordered features and say, “Move to Synchronous” and then make your change. Problem solved
Ok, I have been off the forum for too long, synch is a term I am unfamiliar with. What have I missed and what is this? Is this something with the Cloud version that we have avoided so far?
Ohhhh, ok, I’ll take it.
Synchronous Technology is a set of tools found in Solid Edge and NX, although it’s implemented differently in the two.
There are a lot of ways to describe it, but it is essentially a set of tools and techniques that allow you to edit solid models in the same way that you edit sketches - select and move. Or you can add/change dimensions or relationships.
So it’s NOT a history-based way of working, just like sketches aren’t history-based. There is no sketch driving the 3D geometry, you just edit the 3D directly.
Yes, it can technically be called a Direct Edit way of working.
The big advantages are:
- no feature tree/history
- no parent/child mess
- no cascading red feature failures in the tree
- no rebuild times
- you can edit faces without regard for how they were made
- feature order does not matter
- works with dimensions/relations, so it’s still parametric
- it allows you to edit imported data directly, even put dimensions and geometric relations directly on a part and make changes without the stupid hoops that you have to jump through in history-based software
- You can make this type of change inside assemblies - so select faces from two different parts and drag them to a reference point of another part.
A couple of weaknesses:
- things like extruded text are still better to handle with history-based features.
- in SE works best on prismatic stuff (not complex surfaces)
- most people don’t understand it even though it’s much simpler than history-based CAD
Essentially, if you are doing machine design, you are wasting a lot of time working with history-based CAD. You should probably be using Synchronous unless you work with complex shapes.
I have only really worked with the Solid Edge implementation. Somebody showed me Synchronous in NX, and it does a lot of stuff. I really don’t know if it’s super powerful or just overly complicated, or perhaps just too involved to describe easily.
I wrote a (big long) white paper on SE’s Synchronous if you are interested and want some of that style reading.
Thank you.
That explains what I was missing.
In Japan we have Fujitsu as the main competitor against SW for 3D CAD with their iCAD SX
It is basically a history free CAD, it claims to be very fast (well with no parametric modelling you can achieve the same with SW and imported parasolid data), but the big draw back is that is a chunky Japanese software that seems to be stuck in the 90s, it comes with like a 1000s pages manual for the basic operations and administration (a pure wall of text with little to no pictures) . NO API like SW, you can automate and customize it working with them
It uses their COLMINA PDM system, but their CAD format is basically used by Fujitsu alone and I am not aware of any third party tool able to open their native files.