If you don't mind me asking, what do you need from NX or Catia that SE doesn't do?
I looked at NX back when it was called UG, have been curious ever since about what I might be missing out on now.
Well first off I don't need Catia!
The big thing that NX brings to the table for me is speed. I can build a model much faster in NX and I can check a model
much faster in NX. That is a big deal here because every part that we make, we model for manufacture before we start and that model is used for everything from cam to cmm, so it has to be right and it has to be made right, quick. The sketcher in NX is much more intelligent and refined than in SW, so you get the finished sketch much quicker with less work. Then when you have finished the sketch the solid tools themselves are way more flexible in NX. I love that booleans are built in to the solid tools in NX vs a separate feature. I used to use intersect booleans a LOT in NX, and it's way more cumbersome in SW, because you have to construct two discrete solid bodies and then use the intersect tool, which is completely dumb and forces you to be extremely explicit about which regions you want. Like everything else, it's like 10x more mouse clicks in SW than in NX.
I
much prefer the vector driven workflow of NX over the plane driven workflow of SW/SE. It's more complex and I know that it's the reason a lot of people think that NX is more difficult to learn, but it allows you to construct geometry with
WAY less preparation work (planes, construction geometry, reference sketches etc.) compared to SW. This reinforces the speed difference.
All the model creation tools are just way more robust in NX. Things don't randomly fail the way they do in SW. In particular we make a lot of big steel parts for subsea that need to have organic shape/continuous curvature. Things like adding fillets to complex lofts fails more than it succeeds in SW and you can fight that shit for hours. It just works in NX, or on the rare occurrence that it doesn't, it will help you figure out why, which SW doesn't do at all.
The synchronous modelling in NX is on another level. I use synchronous/direct editing all the time on finished models to build a stock model. It's way more robust in NX than in SW, although I will say they are less prone to failure than they used to be in SW.
I know you directed your question
@lobust but i chimed in. For me its probably not SW being a shit program, It's the fact they really don't have good training. I got a few days run through but the instructor was just having us do the tutorials while he played on his MYspace page back then. Other than what people I have worked have shown me I'm pretty much self taught. Catia's flow is just smooth but needs a whopper of a PC to run.
What puzzles me is the fact they are both owned by Dassault yet SW has worse support and training than Bobcad, and Catia has the best in the industry. Sure, Catia is 5-10X the price but you would think with the Dassault name on it they would treat them as the same.
Man SW
is a shit program. It's one of the buggiest, flakiest programs I've ever used. It might be a good program in terms of functionality and ease of use, but it is right up there at Microsoft levels of shoddy quality and incompetent development.
