3DExperience Opinions

gkoenig said:

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.

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empower said:

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

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This was the reason I didn't go with NX, I was told Perpetual licensing will eventually all disappear it's just a matter of when. Image attached of the email from a VAR.

gkoenig said:

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.

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I think its only a matter of time before we see a battle of lowering prices, similar to what the cell phone provider industry started doing. It became about multiplying the user base. IMO Fusion started the price increase for some that were losing customers, it was their way of recouping the loss and now its only a matter of time before they have to rethink their business model to attract customers rather than push them away. You can only be loyal to a product for so long before the price is just ridiculous and at the end of the day most shops and programmers can get from model to machine program using any software.

I negotiated a reasonable 3 year perpetual deal with my CAD/CAM VAR, I saved almost a full year by doing so. My thought is over the next 3-5 years a lot is going to change.

jaguar36 said:

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

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If you do get an answer on 3DX Catia and ITAR, please let us know. It would really suck to go all in on a new CAD program and then have to turn down work because you can't legally do it.

I'll also throw in my vote for Catia sucks to use and don't use it unless you're Boeing, on a complexity level on par with Boeing, or forced to do so by Boeing.

DanielG said:

If you do get an answer on 3DX Catia and ITAR, please let us know. It would really suck to go all in on a new CAD program and then have to turn down work because you can't legally do it.

I'll also throw in my vote for Catia sucks to use and don't use it unless you're Boeing, on a complexity level on par with Boeing, or forced to do so by Boeing.

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With 3dExperience I think the big question is "on premise" cloud vs. DS hosted cloud.

Do not know the details of 3DX and ITAR however I know it is (was) possible to have it all running on owned systems local to an office. However, that necessitates building and maintaining your own instance which is not as simple as just clicking install on a computer an saving files locally like CATIA v5.

Alright... I've been wrestling with 3DExperience for the sole purpose of Solidworks modeling and HSMWorks CAM.

What are my opinions?

Junk. Shit. Unequivocally overcomplicated for no other reason than to make your life miserable. The "3DExperience files" cause Solidworks to load painfully slow. You MUST have a solid internet connection to keep the license loaded. There's supposed to be a way to have a license offline, but the button disappeared at some point with an update. There's mandatory updates every week; I'm doing one right now. It's about a half hour in and an hour to go; time I don't get to use to do, y'know, work. There's this forum thing where you can ask whatever you want for questions which is absolutely impossible to navigate; they reinvented the forum, took all the things that work well and tossed them, then incorporated a bunch of features nobody asked for. There's a hundred different apps, most of which are pointless. There's a calculator app. Why the heck do I need a calculator app? What computer these days doesn't have a calculator you can't pin to the taskbar? Heck, you can use Solidworks as a calculator easier than going online, logging in, and finding said calculator...

If you're desperate (like me) and don't have the cash to pony up for a normal-person Solidworks license, go for it. If at all possible, avoid it. I came in to it hoping for a positive experience, and came out realizing they tried to replicate the success of Fusion360 cloud stuff but failed miserably enough to make me think Fusion isn't all that bad.

I agree totally. I signed up for the monthly to try it out rather that the whole year, and glad I did. I have fought with it so much my projects I was hoping to design at home are dormant and d*mn near dead now. I'll just do the design stuff at work during lunch and be a h*ll of a lot less frustrated!
It's odd to me though, as I really like SW and expected the interface of the 3DX and the Shop Floor Programming app to be pretty usable in the same fashion as SW. Must be totally different software developers creating that stuff.

John_B said:

I agree totally. I signed up for the monthly to try it out rather that the whole year, and glad I did. I have fought with it so much my projects I was hoping to design at home are dormant and d*mn near dead now. I'll just do the design stuff at work during lunch and be a h*ll of a lot less frustrated!
It's odd to me though, as I really like SW and expected the interface of the 3DX and the Shop Floor Programming app to be pretty usable in the same fashion as SW. Must be totally different software developers creating that stuff.

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Shop Floor Programmer is part of what was machining in CATIA in CATIA V5. For operations it is very similar to CATIA machining operations, just with a few more items added. A number of setup structures are new in 3dExperience but definately adapted from CATIA not inspired by Solidworks side from what I have seen.

Finally jumped ship, at least with 3Dexperience. Expensive too; went with a VAR subscription of plain old Solidworks. 3D experience got to a point where my web browser was blocking me from accessing my license; I clean wiped a computer just to make sure it wasn’t me. Not even the VAR wanted to touch it, but no one on the 3Dexperience platform had anything useful to say either.

I cut things on a plasma table once in a while, and for some time I thought I needed to find a solution that was inside Solidworks to be efficient. It is a royal pain to go from Solidworks into Fusion360 just because they haven’t moved over the cutting modules into HSMWorks. But y’know what? I’ll take that pain over learning yet another integrated CAM package, beating an HSMworks post into submission, or moving platforms altogether. It kinda sucks, but very seldom is something on the plasma table for a customer; just a quick way to turn out a plate for a fixture or whatnot.

Completely unrelated to the problem of file formats is being exposed to Fusion’s cloud. If 3Dexperience was as well oiled as Fusion’s cloud network, I’d be on board and singing praises. I’m not an expert in Fusion, and I don’t want to be, and yet I can navigate it enough to be functional with zero effort. Want the same out of 3Dexperience? Well you’d better get going on training. I hope you like the thrill of not knowing if something is a feature or a bug, because their own dev team doesn’t know.

Alright… back to it.

I am dreading the day of cloud based software only. Its coming. You won't own it, just subscribe to use it.

I have been saving all my complete downloads of solidworks, camworks and mastercam. Its seems with every update some of the simple stuff i need to do, gets harder.

I got some very old disk versions of mastercam still that I use just because it works better and is less clunky then any of the new versions. Run them on an old computer that never sees the internet for fear of an update, virus or something wrecking the computer or the software. And for some reason that old computer keeps working, and isn't slowing down.