Re: Catia V5 Download Utorrent For 11
Garcia Miller
i would like the opinion of some Catia V5 surfacing guru. I just had a conversation with a master of class A surfacing on Catia V5 and his assessment was that Rhino to Catia in STP ( forget IGES it s crap we all know that ) the rhino surfaces are not that great. Work needs to be redone in some instances.
From my experience I didn t find it horrible. I was pretty satisfied ( maybe I m not as perfectionist as others or I m completely missing something) But are there any Catia V5 surfacing guru who sees that working with Rhino surfaces is not ideal ? and why exactly ?
Yeah i Guess you guys are right. I also had in the past had to clean up catia surfaces before sending it to a cnc. Too many gaps. I guess i m a bit paranoid. But one thing i noticed is that exported rhino surfaces are broken in multiple surfaces in Catia, whereas Alias surfaces come out really nice in Catia. Yet they re all Nurbs surfaces.
Agreed, i d like to look at the surfaces. I m surprised to hear that some experts in Catia say they need to rework rhino surfaces but are happy with Alias surfaces. They say rhino surfaces are broken down into much smaller ones in Catia.
We used Icem previously moving away from it due to the yearly maintenance costs, instead we purchased the Rhino plugins called VSR before they were purchased by Autodesk. We are also users of Catia, Unigraphics, Ideas and Creo.
The good point on Rhino is the direct and easy modification of a NURBS surface like in Blender and the easy transformation of a curve or surface from one degree to an other.
The good point on Catia was/is the easy analyse of the curveture by a section through the surface. But in those time Catia had problem generate or keep a closed a highlevel non-uniform surface pipe with a kink or without a kink. Every time it broke up the pipe by an Iso-line.
To add even more confusion I found that if I used code to generate my CATIA surfaces they sometimes seemed to be of higher quality with fewer IGES export issues that the same surface made the traditional way.
I remember wHen i imported Catia V 4 to rhino v3 and then rhino v4 it was a nightmare. I would import surfaces broken down into tiny tiny ones and hundreds to clean up as well. Catia v5 improved because it was working on windows platform wHereas catia V4 was Unix based. Airbus had huge problems with the a380 design because the french were using v5 and germans were on v4. I wonder how Alias does it. Never heard people complain when importing in CatiaV 5.
Does anyone have a preference of one over the other? We have a couple open seats of CATIA V5 and the company offers to pay for training, so I was curious of anyones opinion of what advantages one has over the other as far as the CAM side of it goes.
I can only base what I know on the people that have worked here, and none of them had experience with BOTH softwares...so generally discussions turned into "Yeah...well CATIA can do THIS" "But Mastercam can do THIS"
The CAD side of CATIA just blows Mastercam away - as it should. CATIA is ENGINEERING software. MC and CATIA are not even in the same league on the CAD side. So in essence we're comparing apples to oranges. It is fully parametric, constraint based drawing. You drive part features via dimensions. You want a loonger and wider part, you click the dimension and make the change. BAM it's done as soon as you click OK. Am I bashing MC? NO, absolutely not. MC stands for MasterCAM not MasterCAD.
The Programming side of CATIA, now, that's a behemoth. It's cumbersome for many taskes that can be done with Mastercam in a few clicks. For example, I want to face a rectangle, (we'll assume it's already drawn) but you have no Machine Def in place (that makes it a somewhat fair comparison)... In Mastercam you would select yout MD, right click in the Ops Manager, Mill Toolpaths, Facing, Select or create a tool....
You know what, I'll get back to this. I have to get my son to Football practice. I'll be back I promise. I'll take you step by step through each for a facing toolpath, and a 5-Axis swarf toolpath then you can accurately compare complexity.
Thanks James, I look forward to the explanation. I've been poking around in V5 Sketcher and I would have to agree with you about the power of V5. I'm still faster in Mastercam when I'm building fixtures and such, but that is only assuming I do everything right the first time and don't have to change anything. Big assumption there.
The market here is incredible now because programmers are in high demand and there aren't enough to go around. While it is nice to know I can walk out the door and have a job the same day(just with MCAM experience)It won't last. The Aerospace industry is on it's up to peak cycle right now and this city is dependant upon that.
The problem establishing a standard salary around here is the comparison of large companies like Cessna and Spirit(formerly Boeing) to the smaller shops. While the small shops may have a base salary of 40k/year, the larger ones may be upwards of 75k/year...and this is with a fairly low cost of living I beleive.
We are suposedly one of the best Catia training centers in the US. I have taken many of the courses offered including machining. I have used been using MC since V6. Quite alot of the jobs we get are in Catia so I do lots of Catia to MC converting of CAD files. That in itself is quite an art since our tests have shown the Catia to MCX converter to be worthless to us.
I would love to do design in Catia but would machine using any MC version back to V6 before I would use Catia's machining module. I design in MCX just because MC works so much better when the design is from MC's own design pkg.
But if there is free training involved take the offer. I've heard stories of customers specifing that their parts be machined in Catia and even wanted the NC code used to make them when the job ships. Catia machining could be worth knowing if came to losing work over it.
That's odd. It's been on the exceptional side for me. The biggest issue I've found though is when converting V4 files that are/have Dittos. Those are a PITA because what you end up with is basically a CGR file that has been converted to a solid, which in plain terms, is a solid generated from an STL file. Faceted, and nasty looking. That's not the converter's fault because when I convert that same V4 file in CATIA V5, I end up with the same result, a faceted POS model. I've tried both conversion methods, File, Open, and Tools, Macros, V4 to V5 Convertyer. Same results either way...
James, if you're having trouble with V4 dittos, the best option, if available, is to go into V4 and explode the dittos. This will convert them into whatever geometry is in the detail that the dittos come from.
As for cost of living here, it depends on what you are comparing it to. Against California, cost of living is low; against Texas, I think Texas gets the edge, since there is no state income tax. You can get somewhat comparable housing, it just depends on how far you want to drive. I'm from Kansas, but I've lived in several larger metro areas. I have to say, my favorite is Dallas.
I've been down this road, not with catia, the only problem with getting trained on another software is that they will expect you to (at some point in the not too distant future) be efficient with it. And that is frustrating when all the tools you were used to having at your disposal are no longer there. Or it's there but it takes you 10 minutes to do something that used to take you 1, etc... It is always good/fun/educational to learn new things, I don't regret the learning part, only the using...
Support, support, support. Look at the link above. The CATIA forum I've been going into is fair. It's NOTHING compared to this place. This Mastercam forum is the BEHEMOTH of online user groups. I don't know of a more active, more knowledgable technical forum on the net. Sure there are NG's, and some other Mfg. Forums but they seriously pale in comparison to this place.
the new catia is very much like solid works we just purchased 2 new seats and the cad side is nice to use. I think that catia people will be easier to get since the transition from solidworks to catia is so close now.
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