3DExperience Opinions

jaguar36 · Jun 13, 2022

We've historically been an NX house, but due to a number of issues with NX and Siemens recently we are being pushed to transition to 3DExperience. This is what used to be Catia, although I have no idea how much the CAM portion has changed as I never used it in Catia.

I just started trying it this week and it seems pretty clunky, but at first glance the toolpaths look ok and all the functionality seems to be there. I haven't actually run any parts with it yet though.

Because of its stupid name it makes searching for info on it difficult, but it doesn't appear that its very popular. Does anyone have any experience with it? Anything to watch out for or anything that is particularly handy?

John_B · Jun 13, 2022

Well I hope the version of the CAM that you would be looking at is different from the low end member gets. The Delmia Shop Floor Machining that comes with the cheap subscription is trash as far as I can determine. I can't get it to load a tool library, when I do get a tool created I can't get it associated to a toolpath - so that's all the farther I've gotten in several several days of working on it. Top it off is I can't find a manual and the online how to's are a joke as well.

precisiontorchll · Jun 13, 2022

When you find out more let me know as well, the shop I'm starting at uses this and gibbscam. I'm still trying to cross train this being as I've only used mastercam and some fusion 360

EmanuelGoldstein · Jun 13, 2022

jaguar36 said:
.... due to a number of issues with NX and Siemens recently we are being pushed to transition to 3DExperience. This is what used to be Catia

Catia ?!?! Could they make a worse decision ?

I'd start looking for a new job. Catia is awful. Worse than awful. It's the dregs.

jaguar36 · Jun 14, 2022

EmanuelGoldstein said:
Catia ?!?! Could they make a worse decision ?

I'd start looking for a new job. Catia is awful. Worse than awful. It's the dregs.

Do you have experience with it? CAD? CAM? What didn't you like about it? The user interface certainly seems terrible, but I guess folks get used to that. The CAD guys seem to love it though, particularly for doing lofts. Dunno anyone using it for CAM though.

riverside_eng · Jun 14, 2022

John_B said:
Well I hope the version of the CAM that you would be looking at is different from the low end member gets. The Delmia Shop Floor Machining that comes with the cheap subscription is trash as far as I can determine. I can't get it to load a tool library, when I do get a tool created I can't get it associated to a toolpath - so that's all the farther I've gotten in several several days of working on it. Top it off is I can't find a manual and the online how to's are a joke as well.

For what you are describing that behavior will be the same accross all levels of 3dExperience Delmia.

I found that 3dExperience you really need to do everything fully or it can easily go off the rails. Also, I recognize a lot of the issues of trying to intuit how to drive elements of 3dExperience. The intent is to have everything exist on its own in the ecosystem/cloud from what I see so creating it as a resource and then linking it is the rules of the game. I had a lot of issues untill I started following some of the steps/guides on the side of the screen religiously. Technically I have been using it for over a decade now so I have forgotten and relearned things as it has evolved.

jaguar36 said:
Do you have experience with it? CAD? CAM? What didn't you like about it? The user interface certainly seems terrible, but I guess folks get used to that. The CAD guys seem to love it though, particularly for doing lofts. Dunno anyone using it for CAM though.

CAM wise a lot of it is fairly similar to current V5 with the exception of a few tabs and I think overall mill/turn support is a bit improved from what I have heard. I know there are some large improvements on the NC simulation end but that is a smaller set of people using that type of functionality in 3dX. I have heard from a handful of people that said they much preferred 3dExperience to V5, but that might be heavily tied to having access to long awaited items.

EmanuelGoldstein · Jun 14, 2022

jaguar36 said:
Do you have experience with it? CAD? CAM? What didn't you like about it? The user interface certainly seems terrible, but I guess folks get used to that. The CAD guys seem to love it though, particularly for doing lofts. Dunno anyone using it for CAM though.

Before streaming became so popular we had a lot of pirate dvd stores, so when we needed to settle on a program I tried several. This would have been Catia 5 but I hated it. Everything you did was like pulling teeth, the whole experience was excruciating. I-DEAS was my favorite but they were being shut down and there wasn't much bookage or online help, so decided on Wildfire. It was much nicer than Catia, if that tells you anything. (I'm kinda sooprised Wildfire isn't more popular, once you get used to the way it works it's pretty nice, and definitely capable.)

Personally, I think if it hadn't been for Boeing shoving it down peoples' throats, they'd have gone belly-up ages back.

If you want exact reasons I could try to find the notes but ....

empower · Jun 14, 2022

jaguar36 said:
We've historically been an NX house, but due to a number of issues with NX and Siemens recently we are being pushed to transition to 3DExperience. This is what used to be Catia, although I have no idea how much the CAM portion has changed as I never used it in Catia.

I just started trying it this week and it seems pretty clunky, but at first glance the toolpaths look ok and all the functionality seems to be there. I haven't actually run any parts with it yet though.

Because of its stupid name it makes searching for info on it difficult, but it doesn't appear that its very popular. Does anyone have any experience with it? Anything to watch out for or anything that is particularly handy?

what issues with NX if i may ask?

i havent programmed in CATIA, only did a little bit of CAD, and EG is 10000000000000000000% right. i'd rather get my teeth pulled every day than work in that godawful software.

triumph406 · Jun 14, 2022

jaguar36 said:
We've historically been an NX house, but due to a number of issues with NX and Siemens recently we are being pushed to transition to 3DExperience. This is what used to be Catia, although I have no idea how much the CAM portion has changed as I never used it in Catia.

I just started trying it this week and it seems pretty clunky, but at first glance the toolpaths look ok and all the functionality seems to be there. I haven't actually run any parts with it yet though.

Because of its stupid name it makes searching for info on it difficult, but it doesn't appear that its very popular. Does anyone have any experience with it? Anything to watch out for or anything that is particularly handy?

Must be serious issues for you to dump a program you already know to a program that is hard to find competant scope monkeys that can drive Catia, and when you do their going to want more than your willing to pay.

And now your going to spend 100's if not 1000's of hours to get up to speed only to likely find you had been better off staying with NX.

There is not one single thing in Catia that is logically laid out compared to NX

Who was the idiot who decided to change programs? Have them run 3DExperience for a while.

So did Siemens piss in somebodies Wheaties?

jaguar36 · Jun 14, 2022

empower said:
what issues with NX if i may ask?

i havent programmed in CATIA, only did a little bit of CAD, and EG is 10000000000000000000% right. i'd rather get my teeth pulled every day than work in that godawful software.

Unfortunately I don't know all of the details. We've been having some license server issues. Beyond that I've just heard rumors. It does sound like Siemens has not been very helpful at all though. I will say that there was as strong faction at another site that was pushing for us to use Catia before these issues though, seems like it came up every year or two.

triumph406 said:
Must be serious issues for you to dump a program you already know to a program that is hard to find competant scope monkeys that can drive Catia, and when you do their going to want more than your willing to pay.

And now your going to spend 100's if not 1000's of hours to get up to speed only to likely find you had been better off staying with NX.

There is not one single thing in Catia that is logically laid out compared to NX

Who was the idiot who decided to change programs? Have them run 3DExperience for a while.

So did Siemens piss in somebodies Wheaties?

It's coming from higher up, so yeah likely someone who has never run either before. And it really does sound just like someone at Siemens pissed off someone in purchasing... or Dassault did something...

From my brief time with it I'd certainly agree. It also seems buggy as all hell, although I've been told thats new with 3DX and Catia was fine. I wonder if once you get used to it, its better though.

triumph406 · Jun 14, 2022

I've worked at 3 places that had Catia, THE ONLY reason they had Catia was because it was a Boeing requirement. They wanted to send native Catia data, which we would then translate on the Catia seat to stp or igs.

Last place we had an engineer come in, we were slow so they let him get upto speed on Catia. After about 9 months he was very profficient with Catia, he got a call from Porsche who used Catia (this was 10-12 years ago) and moved over there for a big raise in salary. After that there was a blanket ban on anybody training themselves on Catia

thunderskunk · Sep 16, 2022

Never used Catia. I signed up for both the start-up 3Dexperience program and the hobbyist $10/month, both fairly sweet deals if you just need access to Solidworks. Apparently these versions weren't compatible with non-cloud add-ons at some point, but at the moment I have HSM installed and functioning. Only disadvantage is not having plasma/EDM features in HSMworks, which will never happen. This was the only driver for me to look at the NC Shop Floor programmer module and... eh. It's not even integrated with Solidworks. A few years ago, I probably would have run it through it's paces like I did Camworks. Sure, the files are on cloud, but I already go back and forth from SW to Fusion and don't feel it's difficult enough to warrant learning a new bit of software.

len_1962 · Sep 18, 2022

Just bought the 3DExperience SolidWorks Student for $30 for a year, usually $60 to try it out. as of right now not sure....

I did this because Stratasys is killing off GrabCAD Workbench so now we need I collaborative tool that has a cloud based storage and communication functions that keep all team members and our machine shop up to date so all can see the current revisions to finish their projects on time to meet the instructors due date.

We are waiting for more info and some training for the SW VAR to see if this will be a solution, if not I guess Dropbox is what we'll use, not Ideal has it's issues.

@thunderskunk we also use HSMWorks, Fusion360, FeatureCAM and our lonely 2 seats of SURFCAM (when those others cannot do what's needed). We could setup SWCAM but not until HSMWorks is killed off by AD.

fingers crossed 3DExperience SolidWorks "WORKS" :scratchchin:

thunderskunk · Oct 16, 2022

Yea, if they kill off HSMWorks, I’m at the point that I’ll probably just convert to Inventor. Which is exactly what autodesk wants to hear…

gkoenig · Oct 17, 2022

thunderskunk said:
Yea, if they kill off HSMWorks, I’m at the point that I’ll probably just convert to Inventor. Which is exactly what autodesk wants to hear…

That would be a jump from one dead ship to another.

gkoenig · Oct 17, 2022

jaguar36 said:
It's coming from higher up, so yeah likely someone who has never run either before. And it really does sound just like someone at Siemens pissed off someone in purchasing... or Dassault did something...

My current problem with Siemens is that NX is getting so god damn expensive, when software in literally every other field is getting less expensive.

I'm working with a startup that needed CAM, and the choice came down to Esprit vs. NX. The NX VAR pitched them a subscription with a nice 5 year startup discount, Esprit was in the $30k range and 10% annual maintenance. At 5 years, the costs broke even - but at year 6, NX cost 150% of Esprit and every year after was just a total punch in the gut. Like you could buy a new Esprit seat every 18 months at NX's subscription pricing. Insane.

Oh, you want to make relatively minor changes to your post processor with NX's new Post Configurator? Pony up $4k for a 3 year subscription or pay a consultancy $200/hr to tweak your coolant handling. Want to play with the new (very cool actually) NX Algorithmic Modeling? $25k.

NX pricing is so bad that I know folks on teams at Siemens who don't use NX because even the internal costs are insane. No matter how big the business, every internal team has their own budget, and I know a few F100 scale machine shops where the rest of the enterprise is on NX, but they aren't going to eat negatives on their group's P&L statement buy running NX if the CIO team doesn't put a gun to their heads to do so.

The rest of the software world figured out years ago that when you have a zero marginal cost product, you can make more money by lowering the price, killing bullshit distributors, and multiplying the user base by a literal order of magnitude or more. Siemens could have the dominant CAD/CAM platform on their hands, but the business model is so arrogant and run by the kind of Management Bozos only the finest MBA programs can vomit out that they would rather shrink market and squeeze an F500 user base by the nuts.

empower · Oct 17, 2022

gkoenig said:
My current problem with Siemens is that NX is getting so god damn expensive, when software in literally every other field is getting less expensive.

I'm working with a startup that needed CAM, and the choice came down to Esprit vs. NX. The NX VAR pitched them a subscription with a nice 5 year startup discount, Esprit was in the $30k range and 10% annual maintenance. At 5 years, the costs broke even - but at year 6, NX cost 150% of Esprit and every year after was just a total punch in the gut. Like you could buy a new Esprit seat every 18 months at NX's subscription pricing. Insane.

Oh, you want to make relatively minor changes to your post processor with NX's new Post Configurator? Pony up $4k for a 3 year subscription or pay a consultancy $200/hr to tweak your coolant handling. Want to play with the new (very cool actually) NX Algorithmic Modeling? $25k.

NX pricing is so bad that I know folks on teams at Siemens who don't use NX because even the internal costs are insane. No matter how big the business, every internal team has their own budget, and I know a few F100 scale machine shops where the rest of the enterprise is on NX, but they aren't going to eat negatives on their group's P&L statement buy running NX if the CIO team doesn't put a gun to their heads to do so.

The rest of the software world figured out years ago that when you have a zero marginal cost product, you can make more money by lowering the price, killing bullshit distributors, and multiplying the user base by a literal order of magnitude or more. Siemens could have the dominant CAD/CAM platform on their hands, but the business model is so arrogant and run by the kind of Management Bozos only the finest MBA programs can vomit out that they would rather shrink market and squeeze an F500 user base by the nuts.

why buy at subscription? buying a persistent license of NX is in the ballpark of mastercam/hypermill/espirit pricing.

DanielG · Oct 17, 2022

I know there are ITAR issues with 3DExperience on the solidworks side. As in, if you do ITAR work you can't use it.

gkoenig · Oct 17, 2022

empower said:
why buy at subscription? buying a persistent license of NX is in the ballpark of mastercam/hypermill/espirit pricing.

Perpetual licenses are still a thing at NX, but the VARs are pushing everyone towards subscription, despite the horrific pricing dynamics on the subscription side. They aren't saying perpetual is going away, but there is lots of implication that it is only a matter of time.

I am sure the F500 CEOs the Siemens PLM team executives play golf with will love subscriptions like this, but the pricing is so bad, they may as well take their small/medium business market share behind the clubhouse and shoot it.

jaguar36 · Oct 18, 2022

gkoenig said:
My current problem with Siemens is that NX is getting so god damn expensive, when software in literally every other field is getting less expensive.

I'm working with a startup that needed CAM, and the choice came down to Esprit vs. NX. The NX VAR pitched them a subscription with a nice 5 year startup discount, Esprit was in the $30k range and 10% annual maintenance. At 5 years, the costs broke even - but at year 6, NX cost 150% of Esprit and every year after was just a total punch in the gut. Like you could buy a new Esprit seat every 18 months at NX's subscription pricing. Insane.

Oh, you want to make relatively minor changes to your post processor with NX's new Post Configurator? Pony up $4k for a 3 year subscription or pay a consultancy $200/hr to tweak your coolant handling. Want to play with the new (very cool actually) NX Algorithmic Modeling? $25k.

Maybe this is the real reason we are being forced to 3DX. Fortunately that seems to have been pushed back for now. I imagine it will still come later.

gkoenig said:
I am sure the F500 CEOs the Siemens PLM team executives play golf with will love subscriptions like this, but the pricing is so bad, they may as well take their small/medium business market share behind the clubhouse and shoot it.

Does NX even have a significant market share in the small/medium business world? I thought they were primarily used by the big OEMs (GE, Boeing, GM, JCB).

Just a note, I'm talking about the Catia version of 3DX, not the solidworks version.

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