On June 30th in Chicago this year, a Solidworks 2010 vs. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 Shootout (see here) occurred for the purpose of comparing Design Engine’s “rapid fire” surface modeling technique as applied in each CAD system. Design Engine defines “Rapid Fire” as work flow constructing sketches & surface model features for sequential rapid modification. I was invited to be on the SolidWorks team with Bart Brejcha that was in competition with the Pro/Engineer team at this event.

Instead of posting the entire summary again, I would suggest reading Design Engine’s web page (see here) on the summary of the events. I thought the event went very well, and representatives from PTC (see here) were in attendance with SolidWorks (see here) abstaining from the event. I do not know the reasons why SW Corp. did not attend, although I suspect they anticipated the event to be biased which was not the case. Concerning SW surface modeling capabilities, it performed very well against Pro-E. With the exception of conics (see here) controlled by a rho value, and SW’s spline-on-surface not being as robust as Pro-E’s curve on surface or COS (requires additional ISDX module), SW basically matched Pro-E’s performance. We did not compare model size when saved as a part file, or regeneration / build time.

SW's Fill surface tool

A very useful tool in SolidWorks that does not have an exact Pro-E equivalent is the “Fill” tool. In this photo, a two-sided edge is patched using the SolidWorks Fill tool. Typically, this would be considered bad modeling practice to create a surface on a two or three part boundary due to the degenerate conditions where the boundaries meet. A four part boundary trimmed back is a better approach, but SW lets you create reasonably good geometry from bad modeling practices using the fill tool. It really is like a “magic wand” when you see the things it can accomplish.

I also mentioned some other favorite tools I like to use, such as the Indent and Deform (curve-to-curve) tool, and Boundary Surface has mostly replaced Loft as one of my favorite surfacing tools. However, there are situations where using a Loft or Sweep are simply the best tools for the task. We did not cover the “fill” tool to the detail as we would have wished for due to the competition centered on modeling a refrigerator handle and a water pitcher with dog ears. What do you think of Design Engine’s summary on the results? Comments can be posted on the MCAD Central forums (see here and here), Core77 forum (see here), or on this blog as long as it is not SPAM.

The last image contains the Bicycle seat modeled using four part boundaries, which is the best modeling method and is preferred among Pro-E users with surfacing experience. I hope this post was useful and informative.

Bicycle Seat using "Fill" tool

Bicycle Seat using "Boundary" tool (best)