Hi,
at my office we use both inventor and catia. there are often discussions and a general consensus from one side that catia is the king. with arguments like; all the car manufacturers use catia. Sometimes when a project gets big and slow in inventor it is often suggested to rebuild it in catia.
another consensus is that large assemblies are better handled in catia, and it doesn't slow down much.
I doubt this, and I am looking for the answer to why this is the general experience.
I think:
1. in catia they constrain everything to origin of assembly, and all the constraints update relative to this origin. (correct me if wrong, I am on the inventor-side, and know little in catia) IN inventor one can constrain parts to eachother, and this results in that the constraints are harder to calculate to eachother. True or false? comments?
2. one catiauser always says that in catia the camera rotates around the assembly, which is different to other cad programs in that the assembly rotates about the camera which is harder to calculate. I highly doubt th|i|s|. true or false?
3. in catia, functions to simplify the details,.like shrinkwrap is not needed according to the catia crew. true or false?
4. I think adaptivit y creates sluggishness between parts, like in 1, when the adaptivity is "impossible " to solve. when adaptivity is used, one has to remember how each sketch is built before doing changes to keep control of the outcome. comments?
5. default look/graphics in inventor is higher set, which makes things harder to run. parts in catia look simple and ugly. true?
6. if anyone can give an example of a known product which is massive, and built in inventor, I'd appreciate it.
7. I'd really love some examples of what catia can do that inventor can't.
Not sure if this helps with some performance settings or not? Cannot comment on the Catia side though.
http://www.synergis.com/uploads/2012-inv-performance.pdf
Regards,
Don
So far, to me, Inventor is the high-end application until I know what is better in catia.
Especially, useability, time in working through cutout files to acad, speed of production of drawings makes Inventor the better one for me. I'd like to know what makes catia the high-end app other than price. 🙂
Hello,
I agree with RobJV,
I had a chance to work in Catia long time ago and currently I am working in Inventor.
1.The two way editability in Catia V5 R14 was an interesting feature. (Drawing to model) it increases
the productivity of editing drawings/models at the same time.
2. The surfacing capability; undoubtedly makes Catia "King" in those areas of design
3. It is a high end software - As it can do ergonomic design/generative shape design/ Advanced surfacing- A class surfacing/ It think piping/electrical circuit design are also available modules.
4. Catia V6 onwards the dyanmic in place editing of the model for designing a product is also one of the great enhancement. Similar which Fusion is TRYING to offer
All this said it depends on where you want to use it. What is your product requirement, whether Catia/Inventor is the right fit. Both the software can do certain set of common things which are in most cases needed for product development.
Example : If you are primarily Autocad company and trying Inventor then yes you might eventually find some interopability between these two software as they are both the products of Autodesk. Autocad 2012 onwards Inventor models can be used in Autocad for drafting.
Hope that give a brief idea
I worked for Dassault Falcon Jet which of course uses Catia. I wanted to comment on the loading of large files. In Catia there are two kinds of files one is native files while the other is .cgr. The Native file is the full on model with every bit of detail and these are the files where you do the actual designs. When you load an assembly it loads all the parts in visualization mode. In order to edit or modify a part you then have to put it in design mode. When parts are in visualization mode it does not have everything loaded that went into the creation of the parts so that it is using less memory. When you put it into design mode it brings all of that information in so that you can work on the parts. The .cgr file is a light file that does not include all the information which uses less memory and you cannot edit the parts. This format was created so that you could load large amounts of models to review entire designs such as the entire aircraft and not bod down your system. I hope this helps.
One thing we noticed when we looked at the different software (we looked at all the mojor ones a year or so ago, had them come in and show us what they could do) was for the increase in some of the features performance and some shiny stuff it also cost more than all the tea in China. We almost vomited when we saw the price for only three people to use it.
Seemed like for a 10% possible increase in efficiency we would be stairing down a 175% increase in upfront cost and maintence fees. We could not justify the cost and stayed with Inventor.
Inventor is more or less a disaster when it comes to large assemblies.
The performance decreases quickly when you pass 500 parts.
Inventor crashes often with large assemblies. The evil TIRC (Typical Inventor Random Crash) will be there.
The advantage of the inventor is that it is easy to learn and easy to use.
A pretty nice interface make it even better.
Inventor suits those who do not use large assemblies.
Catia is a pain to use in my opinion. FWIW a lot of the automotive industry is moving to Siemens NX (deny this the Catia users will). The surface modeling of Alias is a close match to Catia. In Catia it's almost like skeleton modeling in Inventor with everything being adaptive, associative and very difficult to break the relationships. If one were to model everything grounded in place with no assembly constraints with Inventor it to would be more stable but it would not have the associative nature of Catia.
One more thing I just thought of. With Catia everything (and I mean everything) is a module. Yesterday I wanted to use Catia to open a SAT file version that Inventor did not support. Not so fast there buddy, you don't have that module, that will be another $$$ please.
Hello.
I want to learn Iventor ASAP. One on one is preferred and I will pay as asked. Pleas advice...thanks.
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