Oh yes, 3D product development on a Mac. ‘Tis a glorious thing isn’t it? Although maybe not completely glorious, but sure, glorious enough to get a mob of Mac users riled up with spasmodic glee.
Autodesk just cracked open the Mac ‘Pandora’ box to provide More Options for Mac Users. AutoCAD, Inventor, 3ds Max and Revit are all getting support for virtualization via Parallels. This is, of course, in lieu of having actual, native support for Mac. SpaceClaim is another MCAD company that has divulged their support of virtualization.
We’ve shown how to get SolidWorks on a Mac using Bootcamp, but SolidWorks themselves do not support it, which some would consider odd. Maybe we won’t have to worry about OS this or that someday.
Anyway, virtualization is a very good alternative. So stay focused on that SolidSmack Feed. We’ll have an exclusive article coming up soon showing just how you can get any MCAD program on Linux, Mac, or Windows. Good stuff a’comin’!
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Not quite sure why they would choose to partner with a virtualization program. When you run Windows in OSX via VM or Parallels, OSX is going to split the system RAM 50/50 so even though your working in one environment, you will only be able to use half the system memory. On the MacBook Pro I recently bought I chose to use Bootcamp which comes with OSX and the only limitation is that I have to boot into one O/S or the other. But when I access Windows via Bootcamp, I have access to the full system resources. I went with Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit on Bootcamp and installed SolidWorks 209 SP4.1 on it. Everything runs just fine, the only draw back is I don't have Real View graphics because of the GeForce Graphics card. Otherwise SolidWorks runs great. I plan on doing a presentation at a user group meeting next week on advanced mates and I'm going to use the Mac.
geez Mike, how many at SW Corp now use Macs??
It a plus for Parallels mostly, as I see it. small benny for AutoDesk as the get to throw down the 'fully supported via…' tag, plus get the coverage. But yeah, Parallels wins in this one against bootcamp, vmware and others for the AutoDesk product user.
Have you tried the GeForce soft-mod to get your realview graphics? That will get them back for you.
I have the newest generation Macbook Pro that has a GeForce9600 in it, so I'm not sure the mod would even work. I'm fine living without the realview anyhow.
Interesting article and I too wonder why Parallels over BC? Seems to me that you would want all the resources you can grab. BUT…
…Apple's doing some real innovative work with the OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch- which are two new under-the-hood technologies that would be a huge benefit to computationally intense apps such as SolidWorks or any 3D CAD program. And of course 64 bit computing is standard.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/
Surely some 3D Mech CAD developer will see these benefits and introduce a native Mac OS X application.
I truly do hope it is SolidWorks.
-Jim
It´s nice to have some ID software for Mac. BTW there´s a WIP of Rhino for Mac, give it a try in:
http://community.irhino3d.com/
It´s nice to have some ID software for Mac. BTW there´s a WIP of Rhino for Mac, give it a try in:
http://community.irhino3d.com/
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