CJW I haven't used Solidworks but I believe it's close to Inventor which is the autodesk equivalent. Autodesk have actually started merging autocad & inventor, for instance they already have parametric design in Acad, so you can have the whole constraints menu from Inventor. I believe in a few years they are aiming to completely merge the products so inventor will just be a modified 3D workspace in acad.
The way I see it they essentially have endless money from 20 years of raping drafties the world over, so they can copy/absorb any decent competitor product or idea.
And yes r14 is terrible. There is a major company in bris that uses r13 to this day (for specific jobs only) it was designed for win 3.11 and has no mouse wheel or right click support or even double-click support. Want to edit that bit of text? type "DDEDIT" first. That's efficient!
Kiteboy, I know a local 'drafty' that uses a program called 'Generic Cad'...in DOS, on an 18yo PC! 1992 was his last upgrade before the software went to a Windows OS system, and has since been replaced by 'General Cad'. His argument is that his database setup in DOS is better than any other OS around. I worked for him for a couple of months, but spent many hours converting details & drawings from GCD to DWG so I could use it with Autocad. I have to admit though, he knew the workings of his PC, the speed of the software was impressive (no delays) and I never saw a crash...but was a nightmare for a guy like me who only has very little knowledge of programming!
You're right about the cost of these packages Kiteboy D...I really don't know where they get the balls to charge that sort of money, it's insane. I'd hate to see the money some of the big drafting or engineering firms pay in licence fees. If someone came into the market with a package that was compatible with everything, full feature, super slick and charged reasonable prices they'd clean up.
And yeah I agree with you RE autocad, I have seen it gradually morph closer and closer to a fully fledged 3D package year on year. Some of the stuff you can do in Solidworks is so far ahead of autocad for machine design it's not funny, likewise doing general civil/arch stuff in solidworks is painful, like you say they have inventor which is aimed at the 'solidworks market'. It makes sense for them to combine the two.
Autocad 3d...brrr, bad memories. 3 years ago whilst completing my dip. we (students) had to base our year's work on a BDAV competition (Building Designers Association of Vic student comp). A 3-storey commercial property on a difficult (real) site in Melb.
To cut a long story short, other schools had implemented BIM software into their curriculum, whilst we had 'Autocad 3d', and some ordinary teachers!!! It basically took 6 months to model a 3-storey building, all walls, floors, ceilings, windows (frames, glazing & hardware in each window) joinery, furniture, fittings (I even modeled the towels hanging on the rails in the amenity rooms). Once modeled, the rendering started. I remember the day leading up to presentation, setting the image to render and my alarm clock for every 3 hours (during the night). The school's PCs crashed continually, and it was hell! To cap it off, the next 3 months was spent creating the working drawings for the same building, so witnessed many PC crashes...aarrrgghh!
Side-note - the upside was that I won the comp & represented the school at the awards night, only to be smashed by a very talented young guy from another school that produced an extremely high level of architecture...he was also previously 'recruited' into one of Melb's best Architectural practices, (I would generally say well-done to the kid, but when a few of us went to shake his hand after the awards, he turned up his nose and said he "had to go for the photo shoot, so don't have time to talk" - prat!
