Different strokes for different folks, or horses for courses as the British say. I liked CoCreate well enough and hated Pro/E. I much prefer SW to either. I have friends and colleagues who would much rather use CoCreate. I have others who wouldn’t be caught dead with anything other than Pro/E. It all comes down to what you are trying to do and how your mind works. The latter is strongly influenced by what you’ve done before.

Jerry

Different strokes for different folks, or horses for courses as the British say. I liked CoCreate well enough and hated Pro/E. I much prefer SW to either. I have friends and colleagues who would much rather use CoCreate. I have others who wouldn't be caught dead with anything other than Pro/E. It all comes down to what you are trying to do and how your mind works. The latter is strongly influenced by what you've done before.

Jerry

http://www.ugs.com/en_us/about_us/newsroom/press/press_release.cfm?Component=50161&ComponentTemplate=822

Turns out one of CoCreate’s flagship users jumped ship to NX - and I’m told primarily down to the direct modelling tools that UGS/Siemens put into the NX 5 release which pretty much mimics (and in many cases, improves upon) many of the basics of the CoCreate technology.

I think with the emerging markets there’s going to be a lot of potential in turning concept into engineering quickly. If think some of the best competition will materialize as a system that allows an open environment of conceptualization that can quickly make the conversion to engineering and manufacturing data. The tools out there aren’t there yet in my opinion, but if you have the largest user base, you can introduce and build it quickly.

Thanks again Al, great insight.

I think with the emerging markets there’s going to be a lot of potential in turning concept into engineering quickly. If think some of the best competition will materialize as a system that allows an open environment of conceptualization that can quickly make the conversion to engineering and manufacturing data. The tools out there aren’t there yet in my opinion, but if you have the largest user base, you can introduce and build it quickly.

Thanks again Al, great insight.

Yes, the history free tools are interesting - but they, as most do, work within very specific geometric and topological limitations - download the OneSpace modelling free edition and read the help files - its all documented and plain to see. and for many users, that’s ideal - because of the types of components they’re developing/editing. If I’m wrong - I’d be happy to hear it.

CoCreate has been hawking itself for sale for years. I had a chat with a pretty high-up exec at PTC last year and asked about someone acquiring CoCreate - his reply? “someone’s got to take one for the team.”

Some of those tools will appear in Pro/E undoubtedly, but they didn’t need to acquire the company solely to get that technology - Siemens/UGS/whatever, did a solid job of matching much of the fundamental in NX 5..

my tuppence..

Al

I guess I should have qualified my statement by saying that yes, I think non-history based modeling would be good for concepting.

The more I think about it though, a lot of components (at least at the places I’ve been) don’t every really graduate from concept to set-in-stone production parts; they’re ALWAYS being revised and modified. And the “collaboration” aspect of it, where different departments can provide feedback and make changes, seems to be another area that non-history based would come in handy, but it still seem SOMEWHERE along the lines you will still need the advantages of history based.

I’ve been using CoCreate for many years and am very happy with it. It took them a few years to transition from the old Unix interface to a modern Windows interface, but I find it fast and intuitive, and the 2D is fully linked to the models and has been for a long time. It’s not really fair to compare current tools with much older versions of CoCreate.

Undoubtedly a person’s initial impression will be tinted by past tools they’ve used. Myself and other CoCreate users I know have been far less than satisfied when moving to Solid Edge or SolidWorks.

I worry about CoCreate being picked apart by PTC, but find it somewhat unlikely considering the history that many big accounts have with CoCreate. I am very excited by the concept of a Pro/Create hybrid that gives the best the dynamic modeling and the history-based modeling, as I value various aspects of both styles.

The lack of history at the left side of screen -a bit disconcerting…

I guess I’m not a free thinker…yet.

Kutch

The big advantage to a non-history based modeler is that you never see “trees of blood” when you make a seemingly simple change early in your feature tree. No feature tree, no cherries!

If you do families of similar designs, if you like to plan ahead when you start a design, then stick with a history based modeler. If you do one offs, if you like to jump quickly into designs and modify them radically, then you might find non-history based modelers are more to your liking.

Jerry Steiger