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The Pro/E PARADIGM – 20 Years of Incompatibility Pro/E was released in 1988, it was the first CAD system to introduce the history based and parametric solid modeling. Its base cost was $9,500.00, but with modules the average seat cost was $14,000 to $20,000. This was and still is a very complicated program to use, with its constraint requirements, it has a learning curve of 3 months to get familiar and up to a year to get proficient.
History or Feature based Solid Model: Designing by creating features by sketching shapes and extruding, sweeping, spinning or lofting, in a feature tree.
Parametric modeling: Able to program the dimensions to be able to scale or set up relationships between parts.
Pro/E can not export its history tree to any program, this set up the industry for 20 years of incompatibility that is still in effect today. In the beginning Pro/E only exported IGES basically made up of surfaces, even though there was an IGES solid modeling translation that did not get wide use. STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product model data) was introduced in 1995 and was used to export dumb solid models.
Pro/E was a very non-user friendly and expensive package. In 1995 Solidworks was introduced. This was a much easier and less expensive program. Looking around how to market their product they copied Autodesk successful scheme of very lax copy protection, a serial number and password. Soon Solidworks was one of the more popular packages. But it was based on the Pro/E paradigm, and like Pro/E you could only work in Solidworks and could not export the history of the parts. But by this time we had a couple of solid modeling kernels in the market place. Solidworks was based on Parasolids, the other kernel being ACIS, and could export dumb models with ease. Today there are a couple of other midsized and low end products on the market that offer this paradigm and none can share their history. There have been a few unsuccessful attempts to share history.
The sad thing is that instead of developing a direct editing product, the large companies like Catia also decided on using the Pro/E paradigm. Before the release of Catia 5 in 1998, I was trying to sell more Cadkey solid modeling capabilities into a large NW aircraft company and they were not interested in anything unless it had history or feature based modeling. Using Catia 5 they are now not even compatible with the earlier the version of Catia 4, which is used on many of their earlier airplane programs. This incompatibility alone is costing the company millions in lost time and errors.
Another huge problem that is shared by these programs it that they have three files. Part, Assembly and Drawing, all of these files have to be kept tracked of, causing a PDM (Part Data Management) nightmare, if not maintained. This also causes problems when exporting assemblies and drawings.
INCOMPATIBILTY!!
None of these programs can talk to each other except in dumb models. This is causing huge problems. Pro/E, Solidworks, Solid Edge (more on this later), Autodesk Inventor, just to name a few can not read each others history trees and have no way of editing parts unless they are created in each of the programs. There is some direct face editing, but it is very weak and causes more problems than it is worth. Now all of the about except Solidworks have an external direct editing or explicit modeling module.
Now if you never need to use outside data, any one of these packages are quite capable of doing their job. This write up is not to say these programs are bad, just that they can not easily share data.
But if you are in a company that does large multiyear projects and has many vendors and suppliers and customers, you are in trouble. If you are a company that has lots of customers that use different systems you are in trouble. If you design for multiple companies, you are in trouble.
SOLUTION – INTEROPERABILITY
There are a new couple of programs that focus on direct face editing, which means they can work on any solid part no matter what program was used to create them. These are the programs of today and the future. Why buy a program that locks you into one format, when you can now have a program that can virtually use any parts or assemblies no matter what program they were originally created.
New products: Well they were new when this article was first written.
SpaceClaim ***: When this program came out, I said oh great another CAD program. It was founded by folks that were legends in the industry, from many other CAD companies and have delivered the next generation CAD product. It is like CoCreate a direct editing/explicit modeling program. I find that you really need both history and explicit modeling available to have a complete design package. IRONCAD/INOVATE have both of those paradigm integrated into one CAD package.
Solid Edge ST (Synchronous Technology): It offers similar capabilities to SpaceClaim but at a much higher price. I was a VAR for Solid Edge but decided to drop them as a product because of their focus on PLM, which most of my customers would never need.
Fusion* from Autodesk: I have used this product and it is very robust. Not as good as SpaceClaim but probably adequate to support Inventor
Older Products:
IRONCAD*: This is the best of both worlds, it offers a robust feature history tree but can also, at any time, work directly on the part. With its ability to use Booleans, you have an incredible amount of flexibility. You can import non-native parts and work both in direct editing or feature based history. With its drag and drop functionality it is by far the best conceptual design product on the market. IRONCAD/INOVATE are the only programs that have both parametric history/feature and direct editing/explicit modeling integrated in one system.
CoCreate *: Now part of PTC Creo. It is a fully functional standalone product, one of the older direct edit or explicit modelers. It is very mature and comparable to SpaceClaim.
* These product allow assembly design in one file. *** These products allow assembly design and drawings in one file.
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