#TraditionalCADsucks

Ste_Wilson

john_mcclary said:

Fewer bugz lol that's cute.... 

  

john_mcclary

alnis_smidchens said:

I've been learning SolidWorks for university, and I must say, it's been a struggle.

An allegedly round filleted edge:


Another filleted edge in a "solid" model, not a surface model:


A cursed linkage assembly:



This is just the tip of the iceberg. Other issues I've had:
- UI elements zipping around in the viewport, completely of their own free will
- Random features are suppressed when re-opening a document when I am 100% sure I did a rebuild without anything suppressed before saving
- Can't select some of the entities onscreen
- Editing child features causes parent features to randomly change selections and break (entering and exiting the parent feature without doing anything fixes this)
- "Automatic Rebuild" in the configuration table does not always automatically rebuild (took me a while to figure that one out...)
- Appearance randomization
- View pings off into infinity sometimes (seems to be correlated with having infinite length lines in sketches)
- Onscreen gizmos for feature manipulation sometimes don't match what the model actually looks like
- Endless "unknown error" and "error while saving" pop up dialogs

Unfortunately, I can't reproduce many of these issues because there isn't a way to step back through each change in history like you can with Onshape.

I'm sure some of these issues are my fault, but it's still been quite a hassle to try to be productive.

I forgot to come back and talk about your issue, I was in a cellphone at the time

For the tessellation there are a couple of places to change settings to increase it.


and in every file they have their own graphic settings too.


As for the video of your broken assembly. That bug happens to us pretty often. Usually a restart of solidworks is enough to get the selection back. I can't remember what causes it off the top of my head, I always remember after it happens though. Very annoying! Especially when you start getting assemblies that take 10 minutes to save/open.

Also:
Whenever you restart SW you should get in the habit of killing all of the SW processes. When SW starts getting crazy like that a lot of times it won't close all of its processes and you will end up with a bunch of zombies processes that will still affect your next SW open.


There are a bunch of rebuild commands buried in there too, each does something slightly different.
Rebuild, Force Rebuild, and redraw I use the most

alnis

Thank you for all of the tips @john_mcclary! I'll be sure to apply all of them. They will definitely save me some time and frustration. Thank you!!

rod_muirhead943

I hear your pain.  Onshape is lacking in many areas.  They need to step up to the plate and mimic many features and commands from the main systems and players in the market today.  Not totally sold on Onshape yet!  We will see.

ilya_baran

@rod_muirhead943
Believe me, when we get around to implementing this functionality, we won't only have "Rebuild" and "Force rebuild", we'll leapfrog the competition by adding "Force force rebuild" and even maybe "Force force force rebuild"!

john_mcclary

Arg

Evan_Reese

ilya_baran said:

@rod_muirhead943
Believe me, when we get around to implementing this functionality, we won't only have "Rebuild" and "Force rebuild", we'll leapfrog the competition by adding "Force force rebuild" and even maybe "Force force force rebuild"!

Possibly an unbuild option too just in case

3dcad

ilya_baran said:

@rod_muirhead943
Believe me, when we get around to implementing this functionality, we won't only have "Rebuild" and "Force rebuild", we'll leapfrog the competition by adding "Force force rebuild" and even maybe "Force force force rebuild"!

I think we need 'Force rebuild all forces you almighty force of all rebuilds'

romeograham

..or just "the Force"

emagdalenaC2i

john_mcclary

You can always tell what days I run solidworks just by my hair... 

steve_shubin

john_mcclary said:

You can always tell what days I run solidworks just by my hair... 

LOL !!!

And by the look on your face too John

NO JOY

john_mcclary

well, I mean.. this is my life now I guess...

konstantin_shiriazdanov

You see how stable SW actually is? The same bugs and glitches for years! No any of those modern cloud CAD's can beat it.

john_mcclary

Upgrade day.

Great, still have the issue of settings not saving even after skipping a year...

john_mcclary

Solidworks is like a loaf of bread. It only gets worse with age...



Only had 2021 installed for a week, and we've all had bad experiences here so far.

I'm mean look at this mess..

billy2

3 year contract for SW! Those dassualt bastrads, they're on the run.

Don't do it, tell your boss and plead. This is their last ditch effort. 

shawn_crocker

I switched last fall to onshape but still use solidworks to create slight variations of designs that were already done in solidworks.  Usually I do this because I tell myself it will be "faster" to just do it in solidworks.  Everything is already there and it will be "simple" to just pack and go the project and make a few changes.  Every time I do this I am reminded what it feels like to want to punch yourself in the face.  I mean truly, deep down, feel a dark burning desire to literally punch my self so hard...  I put down some ground rules for myself and now just start fresh in onshape.  Chasing broken everything in solidworks is the worst.  Especially when you know the design was working perfect last time you checked.  When the application that starts after solidworks crashes to collect the crash data, crashes... its just a feeling that can't be described.

alnis

Only in the world of SolidWorks is 10 GB of memory a reasonable amount for a master geometry part with only about a dozen sketches and planes...


Plus what's going on here with planes from the top part file (the one using 10 GB of RAM) appearing in the bottom part file as weird phantoms?? Some wires seem to have crossed internally! They are present there in 3D, but I can't select them (rebuilding with Ctrl Q doesn't do anything).

shawn_crocker

billy2 said:

3 year contract for SW! Those dassualt bastrads, they're on the run.

Don't do it, tell your boss and plead. This is their last ditch effort. 

My boss got hooked with that one.  He still went for onshape anyways.  The time savings that onshape configurations creates for us alone made it worth it.  So now we have three more years of solidworks upgrades that we will not use other than for visualize.  Amazing!  Its more economical for us to just not use solidworks even though we already paid for it!

homebrewdesign

We just ended our 3 year contract with SW. After we upgraded to 2021 one of my coworkers was getting corrupted files left and right. Took our IT guy over a month of back and forth trying to get PDM installed, but never quite got it working properly. We should be working only in Onshape within a couple of weeks. Eagerly waiting for proper weldments to get implemented and everything will be gravy.

john_mcclary

homebrewdesign said:

We just ended our 3 year contract with SW. After we upgraded to 2021 one of my coworkers was getting corrupted files left and right. Took our IT guy over a month of back and forth trying to get PDM installed, but never quite got it working properly. We should be working only in Onshape within a couple of weeks. Eagerly waiting for proper weldments to get implemented and everything will be gravy.

So it isn't just us that are having corruption issues more often eh?
Hell, just this last week I've had to restore the backup of files on 6 occasions already. It used to only be a few times a year.

john_mcclary

Apparently it can barely make step files too...

Got this from my customer over the weekend.


What sucks is it took an hour just to get the two pdf's and a step file to him


Guess I can get a nap in this morning while it exports again... 🥱😴


Edit:
Pffftt: Second attempt failed too...


Funny ONSHAPE OPENED THE STEP NO PROBELM! ... stupid F'ing SW

wayne_sauder

Has anyone else had trouble with e drawings? Recently the files I export out of Onshape as Solidworks parts files will not open in E drawings? It makes no difference to me as I only use Onshape however it would be nice for some of my vendors.

john_mcclary

@wayne_sauder
It looks like the version of SolidWorks Onshape in able to save parts in too old.



After opening the part and letting a newer version of solidworks update the file it works

wayne_sauder

Thanks, John 
Why would you not make your viewer open any version that your software is capable of creating is beyond me!  

john_mcclary

I think eDrawings may have came out after 98, eDrawings can't build a model from the feature tree like solidworks. So it needs a 3D solid stored separately in the sldprt file. This is why you get the "could be out of date" watermark. because that internal solid may not have been rebuilt during a save.

So the earlier versions of SW did not have this extra data for eDrawings to open.

What I find stupid is you can't open a newer version of solidworks parts with and older version of edrawings.
There hasn't been anything groundbreaking in eDrawings in years. So there can't be much in the way of incompatibility. . .

SolidWorks is well know for being version Nazis though. So it's par for the course.

john_mcclary

WOW... just WOW.

I have a pattern in SW, that defines the stroke of a drawer so I can see the open and closed position.

I went to put a stop block in position by mating to the detent arm. And just look at this garbage... 

The gif here shows the part is indeed patterned and fully defined. It even says so in the pop up tool tip.
But as soon as you move the stop block I was trying to position, The pattern is flexible.

I really don't know what to say, but Damn... That is BAAAAD

john_mcclary

Poor guy,

One of my guys just got back to work today from having covid, and to put salt on the wound 3 of his files were corrupt again.

alnis

@john_mcclary with the frequency that SolidWorks corrupts my work, I've found GrabCAD Workbench to be a great resource to help with version control. I think someone else also mentioned it in this thread. It also lets you sort of collaborate on SolidWorks models, showing who changed which files and it makes sure only changed files are uploaded/downloaded. Currently there's no charge/fee to use it, even for large commercial projects.

Not real time/Onshape-like and you still never want two people to edit the same file, but it's good for both small and large projects without the hassle of a full check in/check out system (but it does let you optionally lock files for edits if it's critical to check something out). We're using it at a couple of student groups at the UW with about ~50 active CAD users (~100 total users incl. viewers/passive users) working on a single project without too many problems.

Don't trust its web viewer though. While it does display models accurately, the measurements are somehow incorrect and it often fails to load models for viewing, particularly heavy ones.