Pro/E vs SolidWorks

At Design Engine tonight we are doing a Pro/E vs Solidworks shootout where Im running solidworks. Except Im known as the Pro/E surfacing expert not the solidworks surfacing expert. In order to accurately evaluate the Modeling software of both Pro/ENGINEER and Solidworks each participant will have a team member in their corner of the ring. http://www.design-engine.com/feature.php?feature=96

I invited several from both Soldworks and PTC however only PTC AE's confirmed.

I pushed the crap out of Solidworks this week to prepare for the shootout so to do some impressive modifications like my one week surfacing students might do in Pro/E. There are a few connections that just fall apart and that frustrates the hell out of me. In SW I expect these connections to work and not like Rhino fall apart. That's frustrating.

Let me explain, that in my experience I have noticed industrial designers want to prove form when developing a product as opposed to simply capture form. I have noticed however many industrial designers are happy to just model a forum (capture form) hence their use of Rhino where they can't leverage strategic advantage of parametric controls nor participate in an intense study of parent child relationships. If we can leverage parent child relationships then we can make 20 modifications in five minutes like we teach ID'ers in my week long Pro/E surfacing intensive. Hence prove the forum in the light reflections.

My techniques for forcing solidworks to swallow twenty slight modifications in rapid fire all in less than four minutes is giving me a problem in a spot or two. Choking on one part and several of my beziar curves will not maintain their parent child relationships. Chris Thompson from Ohio an ME with significant product design experience will be here at three to sit in my corner running Solidworks and will help me through the issues.

My end goal is to make solidworks look great since after such development over the past three years is impressive then share surfacing workflow techniques with the audience. A workflow we at Design Engine are known to teach in our classes. One that I've stated on this forum that some may not have discovered yet.

On the Pro/E side I have two of my past surfacing students both in from Colorado's Karcher Corporation. They are taking a Surface edit workshop. http://www.proetools.com/courses/pro_surface/level8surfaceedit.htm Adam is an industrial designer with two plus years on Pro/E surfacing and in his corner he has Vaughn an engineer with significant product design experience also from Karcher. Vaughn is quite good at surfacing and sits on the surfacing technical committee at PTC on Pro/E. Vaughn is maybe more experienced than Adam who has also taken past surfacing courses. http://www.karcher-usa.com/ Karcher works on some interesting surfacing rotomolded products.

In my corner running Solidworks I have Chris Thomson an ME who is driving from Ohio today. He has significant product design experience using both Pro/E and Solidworks. We both have different modeling techniques and he has not seen the Design Engine workflow for proving form in Wildfire by modifying parts in rapid fire, he has looked at our Pro/E parts and we will have an hour before the event to work out our strategy together.