A company to transition from Solidworks

john_mcclary

digtalcarbon said:

as for the above video on "Migration to Solid Edge"...yes, I see its value...but in my case the company drawings that I have been tasked with are in bad shape organizationally wise...drawings are poorly done and there is nothing I want to keep as is...& things are named poorly in the original Solidworks files...

Also I just found out that the BOM are kept in excel and are not part of the SW universe...so its a real mess.

So since this is going to be a slow slow process then I am ok with redrawing everything (as I go) and cleaning things up...this is going to force me to question why things are the way they are and see if I can refine anything.

That tends to by my opinion for most repeat projects too.
Every time I revisit an older job you tend to wonder how it even made it through release...
There are only a hand full of projects here that we can (with confidence) release just by updating the release date and printing.
For the most part we tend to re-draw most things from scratch even within the same CAD system.
So all this auto import stuff just never really sat right with me, as I know I would spend more time cleaning up garbage from an importer, when I could have made a more parametric model that is more intuitive to modify.

Although, that video was kind of a mind blow if I'm being honest... Way better than what SW has

3dcad

@digtalcarbon

Sounds like a lot more fun than running some boring migration tool over and over again

In general, I don't see a reason why Onshape would build a migration tool for say Solid works. Solid works is just one cad among many, it had it's moments and became popular. But it's not any sort of 'industry standard' that should be supported by others.
They all should have full support for Step AP 242 and use that for collaboration until Onshape drags others into cloud too and we need new Step Cloud Protocol.

I do agree that it would be nice if models/drawigns could be moved between systems maintaining history & other data, but I strongly disagree that format would be solid works file system. IMHO.

brucebartlett

3dcad said:

@digtalcarbon

They all should have full support for Step AP 242 and use that for collaboration until Onshape drags others into cloud too and we need new Step Cloud Protocol.

It would be great to see a standard that supports export of models and linked drawings if that is possible rather than just 3d models. I think this would be a better route than support one of the systems. However, then it would require systems to be programmed to support the standard for export which is only purely in place to swap systems so probably will never happen as it makes it easier for customers to move to an alternative system.

For me using the PDF of an old drawing and then redrawing when drawing needs to be updated has become the norm.