Is Creo Easy To Learn

[Joseph]

But...if you learn one, the concepts of the other are easily obtained. If you learn Inventor or Creo you should be able to pick up the other on the fly or with a short learning curve by using training videos or reseller training. A lot of companies will look to your aptitude to learn instead of what you already know. Personally, I think you should look between SolidWorks and Inventor as they are the pack leaders. PTC has been too focused on their Data Management system Windchill to put the effort in Creo that they should. I will mention that a lot of gov't contracts still love PTC/Windchill as the design tool though.

In addition to @mflayler information.. Autodesk provides free software to individuals that are learning CAD products. Maybe another thing to consider when thinking about which product you want to learn..

Although new to the market and still in constant development, is Autodesk Fusion 360 which is a cloud based, next generation CAD/CAM application. Has the feel of Inventor but not the Inventor workflow aspect.

Well, you shouldn't be...you answered your own question. In your area, people use a variety of software so you should learn one and go from there. I would say learn Inventor because the interface is easy and then with that your concepts will apply to other CAD software programs as both myself and @Mark.Lancaster have mentioned.

If pencil and paper design is like walking, then Sketchup is a bike, and Rhino a car. Fusion 360 is cheap CAD akin to a railroad. Solidworks is the quintessential Cessna Citation (that PTC wants to be), and Pro/E (what used to be) is an F-15 - now evolved to CREO - metaphorically, a C-17.

I just made a 20 year jump from Pro/Engineer to Creo, and I'm genuinely disappointed. There are wonderful improvements, great new features (many at extra cost), and indeed, nice things which make it smoother and faster. But, software usability is inconsistent, overly modal, and slower - with fewer ways to accelerate. 20 years! "Wow" I said, "I can't believe they've wasted so much, and still fail to see."

Now I understand why people say learning Creo is so hard. It can feel mixed up and backward. The concepts are not hard, and the core is amazingly powerful. Yet PTC, in spite of market leadership they once enjoyed, has downgraded their F-15. That's how I see the Creo paradox.

SolidWorks started eating their lunch, and PTC forgot they were the leader. They confused activity for productivity and failed in the basics of UI. Understanding this, even if it makes no sense, is The First Paradigm in Learning Creo. Don't expect logic, because the UI is inconsistent, unnecessarily modal, and many powerful functions are hidden or convoluted.

Spoiler: While Creo is not easy to learn, after the learning curve, it offers greater productivity and functionality than the competitors. We are not beginners forever, so look ahead. For more, read the CAD system comparison in our Creo UI Article.

When I made the decision to buy Creo, I was excited and full of anticipation. I read too much of the PTC propaganda, so I expected really good things. I love Pro/E, so this must be tons better, Right? Believing the propaganda was the first mistake, so getting over the hurdle of unmet expectation is hard.

With 20 years of technology development, certainly it will have fantastic improvements? And, in many ways it has, but failures at the most basic level capture my attention. It's hard to enjoy the awesome when it is so frustrating trying to get to it. However, changing the mindset to expect less - to accept the UI failures - makes figuring out pathways to success easier. I suppose this is just one of the difficulties in learning Creo.

There are a bunch of different user interface paradigms that PTC has mixed in. I count 14 different UI's mixed in. The inconsistency on top of the overly modal behavior is, for me, the most frustrating. What works in one place won't work in another, very similar area. So, for learning something new in Creo, I must try several directions, then eventually find a path for success. This is The Second Paradigm in Learning Creo. Yes, it is slow, and it's hard to remember what to do in each situation, but eventually it sticks.

For me, recognizing flaws, and knowing where the user interface is inconsistent, definitely brings down the blood pressure. If you expect PTC thought about it, you'll be more frustrated. (1st Paradigm.) So, for learning Creo, keep these in mind:

I think a primary focus of PTC should be on those who use Creo everyday. Help customers be super productive and efficient, then company owners are happy and willing to buy again. Let the customers and business owners be the champions.

I like to think of the mixed and often confusing paradigms as a Stew, because the ingredients are so different. For most of it, each ingredient by itself is great, but mixed together, they become a stew. This is the soul of learning the Creo User Interface.

There has been a lot of discussion over the years about Action > Object vs. Object > Action. It's whether you select the Object then tell it what Action to take, or vise-versa. That's pretty irrelevant now because all CAD systems require both (depending on the situation). And indeed, mostly Creo will let you do either, which is nice. However, you need to think both ways, because Creo will force you one way in some situations, and the other way in different situations. Sometimes it is obvious, and sometimes you just can't tell what is going wrong - which is where the problems lay. The mixed paradigms - without direction - make this more difficult when learning Creo.

While I may be missing some, I count 14 different menu types, 8 different ways dialog boxes are used, a search function that works well for about three quarters of the functions, and 5 ways you can attempt to exit a mode (some work, some not, and some you can't tell if you're out until you try to do something else). This is part of the inconsistency we call Paradigm 2.

The human mind is pretty spectacular in repeating paths that are successful. After a while I find the mindless reflexes begin to compensate for the Paradigm Stew. The Creo User Interface does work, even if it is inconsistent and often clumsy. I'm reminded of just how bad it is, however, when I want to use a function I don't use often, or if I'm trying something new.

Well, that's enough for now. Hopefully knowing the paradigms of learning Creo can help reduce frustration. It's unfortunate that we can't really work around these paradigms - except to use automation and bypass them. Anyway, we'll get into more specifics of the details in future articles.

How often do you use Creo "Insert Mode"? Then, get really unpredictable or unexpected results on "Resume"? This seems to happen a lot when "Suppress" is mixed with "Insert Mode" because Creo confuses the interaction.

How well can available AI write a technical-ish article? With all the Buzz lately about AI writing papers for students, that question keeps popping through my head. I see AI written articles around on the web and I wonder just how complete

New bike? Yup, good day! Yet, both the path and result have things to think about. From the perspective of an engineer who does work in the bicycle industry, this is a review of both the bike, a Pivot 429 Trail, and the journey.

I feel like I need to vent a little, so I was hoping to get a discussion started as to why Creo has any advantage over the other popular 3D CAD modeling systems. I want to like this product, I really do, but right now, I feel like I am being forced to learn a dying system. Creo will not survive if they do not change the way things are done.

I am new to Creo (6 weeks), but I have used Inventor for the past 3 years. In my opinion, there is no comparison between the two. Inventor is significantly better than Creo in pretty much every single way I have been using the system.

Creo is completely unintuitive. For the novice trying to obtain a grasp on this program, it is next to impossible without a significant amount of training from PTC. This is probably part of their business plan because truthfully, their documentation and training programs are superior to the software itself. It seems like the designers of this software have had no personal experience using a system. The user interface is obviously a copy of what Autodesk has been doing - the Ribbon UI. However, they have failed at the ease and convenience that Inventor provides and it seems like their employees do not understand why they are programming their product in this way.

Right clicking for everything is a nuisance. The commands should be explicit. Once a command has been initialized, it should state what is needed to accomplish a successful feature. When I hover over some of the commands, it's as if the programmer just did not understand the point of what he/she was trying to create. For instance if you hover over swept blend, the information contained says "create a swept blend". Inventor shows a preview of what the function actually does in a quick movie if you hover over it, plus it provides a link to learn further information and even provides an exercise showing explicitly how to use the function and what must be defined for the function to work. PTC expects that you just know that you need to add certain references without actually telling you that you need it. For instance, the rotate feature needs a centerline (should be able to use any datum axis) which you then need to right click and define it as the rotational axis. If you try to do this through the message box, it will not work. There is no documentation in the help file saying this needs to be done. My anger continues to grow.

Also, patterning complex features is pretty much a null exercise, since it takes Creo 20 minutes to regenerate the model. I have never experienced this with Inventor. Their software updates automatically after a function is confirmed. There is no need to repaint/regenerate.

c80f0f1006