SolidDesigner Training!!

[rishimad]

Hello all!!

I am part of an organisation in India that is the lead distributor for CoCreate's products here,and we also give training,tech support to our clients.

I am given the task of providing training on soliddesigner to one of our customers.Can any one of you please give me tips on how to go about providing training,especially,when people at the other end have already worked on s/ws such as Pro/E,Catia,etc.,which are different from SD.

Tips regarding the order of training that i should follow...

Any replies to this will be appreciated!!!

Thanks in advance!!
Rishi

[frosendo]

One tip for you would be to put the experienced CAD users in a separate class from the newbies if there are any at the location.

You might need to understand how they "worked" before and help them understand exactly what is changing. We had a handful of experienced SolidWorks users switch to OSDM. A the time we really had to help them move away from the history based model and also get them used to the rougher GUI of OSDM. In the Base class material it helped that I removed or passed through quickly basic topics. These people understood 3D modeling, they just needed to know how to piolt OSDM not learn from zero.

[rishimad]

Thank You Frosendo!!

But u know what.....I have seen,it's pretty difficult for experienced CAD users (who've been working on history-based s/ws),to change their mindset completely...it's easier for them to switch between 2 softwares of the same kind,but not in this case.....what i would like to avoid,is comparisons..which are inevitable.But i would still like to do this training in an objective manner.

Any more tips please?

Regards
Rishi

[Steve]

Well, I came to work at this company, which uses Solid Designer, from other companies that used Unigraphics and Pro-Engineer, both history-based, parametric (or hybrid-parametric, in the case of UG) systems.

I can understand the frustration of any user coming from Pro-E or Unigraphics and moving to Solid Designer. Once a designer gets used to the power available from such systems, it is difficult to step down to a boolean or "playdough" modeler like Solid Designer.

I found the transition "down" to Solid Designer somewhat easy, because I was a Unigraphics user since version 9, before they incorporated parametrics into the software. At that time, UG was a "dumb" solid modeler just like Solid Designer is today. This was 11 years ago. Thus the idea of "stretch-it, squash-it" dumb solid geometry manipulation was not foreign to me.

Pro-Engineer users are going to be very frustrated by the lack of ability to define associative geometric relationships, such as symmetry, colinearity, etc. And although the optional Solid Designer parametrics module does, very weakly, allow you to somewhat parameterize a model, it pales in comparison to a ground-up parametric based system. As I've explained it to others, "The Solid Designer Parametrics module does not a parametrics modeler make."

The one thing about Solid Designer that Pro-E users will understand immediately is the fact that all geometry is the consequence of a 2D sketch. This is exactly the same way geometry is made in Pro-E. The difference (and it's a biggie, of course) is that once the geometry has been extracted from the sketch the Solid Designer geometry "forgets" that it ever came from a 2D sketch. Pro-E users (and UG users for that matter) are used to being able to access that sketch later on and alter it, consequently altering the geometry. They are also used to imbedding intelligence (design intent, via geometric constraints and/or dimensional parameters) into the sketch. Neither applies with SD.

From my own perspective and other ex-Pro-E users I have spoken with, I don't think any Pro-E user is ever going to be happy using Solid Designer. In my opinion, Solid Designer is just not as sophisticated a modeler, and the drafting package (Annotation) does not "feel" very tightly integrated with the modeling side.

You can help and cajole people with the transition as best you can, but in the end you with some people you just have to say, "Look, this is the tool we are using. You don't have to like it, but you do have to use it if you want to work here."

Steve