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Archive for December, 2009

Hey everyone, thank you for coming over and reading this blog throughout this year 2009, even if you came only once, or even if you just found out about it today. Just the same, thank you!

As this year comes to an end, I find myself reflecting on all that was accomplished and/or left undone, and feeling that I could’ve done so much better. I bet we have all felt that same way at some point or another.  The year 2009 wasn’t particularly bad for me and, believe me, I’m grateful for that. There were really great moments that left me with wonderful memories I’ll treasure for a lifetime, but aside from those moments, in many ways it was also what you’d call “blah”, without much growing, without much excitement going on in between those “peaks”, and not enough challenges. 

I guess I could simply make a list of resolutions that included adding all those elements that were missing this year into my life in 2010. Yeah, that would do, except that I’m so bad at keeping those resolutions that I don’t even bother making a list anymore. I mean, for several years “Getting organized and free of clutter” used to top the list, and then all the accumulated lists I made used to top the mountain of clutter, while my husband kept pointing out the fact that I was running out of room where to cram all my stuff and, I suspect, secretly throwing away part of my loot while I wasn’t looking.  

Anyway…  Strangely enough, my pastor was talking precisely about that at church today. No, not about clutter or the fact that I’m a packrat, he was talking about new year’s resolutions, yes, but under a very different light, and the message I left with was that my journey was actually in need of more freedom and just a bit more hope.  So, if anything, my only resolution for 2010 is to strive for those two elements in every single thing I do: hope and freedom.  No more than just that because then it becomes too complicated and a sure path to self-defeat.

Here’s wishing you a wonderful year 2010 and may all your troubles last as long as your new year’s resolutions! Happy Holidays!

We have a say in my country about “bargains”.  People often warn you that what you buy for cheap will often end up costing you a lot more, because it will break, it won’t last, or it simply won’t perform as it was supposed to, and you’ll end up spending more money on repairs or replacing the product altogether.  I believe here in US people say, “You get what you pay for.” And you know what? It’s true.

I had been curious for a while about Alibre’s aggressive marketing and extremely low prices. No one I knew had ever used or tried the software, and many even looked down on it, yet Alibre’s  salespeople advertised it pretty much implying that it could do everything SolidWorks does, but for a fraction of the price. I grew even more curious. Is this really so? Could it be that this software really does everything that SolidWorks can do but isn’t any more popular simply because bigger companies (Big Meanie SolidWorks) have made it hard for them spreading rumors that it’s not good?  I mean, after all, if you look at the description in their website, it looks like it does, right? It brings Algor into the mix for the Simulation, Hypershot for renderings; it can do sheetmetal, drawings, read files from other CAD software, print 3D pdfs, etc.

If you run a quick search for Alibre jobs, you’ll probably find only one or two in the whole country, yet their website mentions quite a few companies (some of them kind of famous) that use Alibre, and reading their forums you find people that say they bought Alibre and use it to do consulting. They bought it because that’s all they could afford, which is really understandable, or because they were coming from 2D software and this was their first experience with 3D modeling and they wanted something really low priced to begin with.  That is understandable too.  

Well, I’m one of those that can’t afford much and that would make this software look like a great bargain for me, right? Well, not quite. Unfortunately for me, I guess you can say that I have a champagne taste on a beer budget, and that can be really sad. I decided to try the software and see how it worked. My first trial expired and I never even installed the software, but the salesman called me quite a few times and even offered me a nice financing plan to buy their Alibre Expert in easy monthly payments over a whole year and without any interests. That’s a really mind-blowing offer, but I wish it had come from a different software reseller, if you know what I mean. I told the salesman that I wouldn’t buy software if I hadn’t tried it first and was convinced it could do all that I needed/wanted from it. I mentioned to him I specifically couldn’t live without surfacing tools similar to those in SolidWorks.  He stopped calling… I didn’t understand right away why he dropped me like a hot potato, but I think I just found out.

I managed to get myself a second chance to download and try their software.  I can say without being conceited in any way, that it’s OK, if OK is good enough for you, but it certainly can’t do what SolidWorks does. Certainly can’t do everything that SolidWorks does; if only perhaps a fraction, and very limited. This is only my opinion, you are allowed to have yours and you can certainly disagree with me, but I guess I much rather go without, and save my pennies for something else, even if it’s not SolidWorks.  I want to make it clear that I’m not a SolidWorks fanboy (fangirl?). If anything, I’m a fan of the functionality I’ve found in SolidWorks and that is not present in this other software.  Perhaps, with time they will include it, but right now it’s not there.

I suppose if you are coming from 2D software or no software at all, you won’t notice this as much, but if you got spoiled as I am, then it’s really painful to look for functionality (I’m not talking bells and whistles) that is not there or that is very limited compared to what you’re used to. Fillets are a great example of this because you don’t have as many options as in SolidWorks. This is true in general, for every single command you try, you’ll find limited options when compared to SolidWorks, but perhaps the worst, for me at least, was to find nothing for surfacing tools. You can trim a solid using a surface and thicken a surface to a solid, but I didn’t find any surfacing tools for creating the surfaces inside Alibre. You are supposed to bring those from another application, such as Rhinoceros, instead, meaning that you’ll have to invest more money and time into purchasing and learning a different application. You can move a face and delete it too, but only as long as a patch can be left on its place, meaning that you can’t go from surface to solid and solid to surface and do hybrid modeling like you do in SolidWorks. For instance, I extruded a square into a cube and then tried to delete one of its faces, but Alibre kept marking this as an error.  It didn’t even give me the best results when I tried importing a model from Rhinoceros into Alibre. The same model would open great in SolidWorks, even without attempting to heal any faces, but in Alibre it would open as a bunch of untrimmed surfaces intersecting each other.

Anyway, I’m not trying to bash anyone here, and I apologize if it looks like it. I just wanted to share this, for those that may be in a similar situation as I am, looking for something really good and affordable. It’s good to have information about the good and the bad, so you can make good choices.  Like I said, I will pass on this one and save for something else; you may decide it’s good enough for you… or not.

Just a few minutes ago, I followed a link to an interesting survey about SolidWorks packaging and pricing. I’m not sure how long this survey has been going on, to be honest, so I apologize if you have already seen it or heard about it before, but it was news for me. I had included a link to it, but they told me that was my personal link and I’ve already taken the survey. You can access this survey from the Customer Portal or through the task pane, in the SolidWorks Resources tab,  you’ll find a link among the news under Community.

Basically, the survey makes you choose among different combos of functionality for the three different seats currently available in SolidWorks: standard, professional and premium. First they show you descriptions of three options for each seat, including the “as is” option, and two others that include some extra functionality and/or take away some other goodies, like photo-realistic rendering in professional and premium, or Simulation capabilities. There’s also a description of a stand-alone solution for photo-realistic rendering and presentation, and some stand-alone solutions for simulation, that I guess you could buy separately or together with your seat of SolidWorks, if you choose.   A brief description of similar products offered by AutoDesk follows.

Next, they ask you to choose from a list of possible choices which one you would prefer the most and which one the least. The choices include options such as SolidWorks Professional #1 with photo realistic rendering option (the standalone) for “X” amount of money or AutoDesk Inventor Suite for “Y” amount of money, for instance.  This part is a little tricky, though, but at least you have the cheat sheet available to check again what was supposed to be offered with each option.  However, unless you are very familiar with AutoDesk products, you can’t be really sure from their super-brief description of what functionality is exactly offered and how the price would compare.  Also, I’m not sure these prices included maintenance fees. I don’t think they did. Some of them seemed a bit too expensive to me, considering all that had been taken off the original license.

Part of me really hopes this means there will be a more affordable way to purchase a license of SolidWorks in the not so distant future, although there’s also the other part of me, the realistic one, that thinks it’s better not to hold my breath on this one.  It would be cool, though. I can think of a few bells and whistles I could certainly do without, but only as long as it really helps the price go down substantially. If you are going to end up paying almost the same as for the “as is” version, then it’s not worth it. What would be really cool is if you could buy some basic, affordable seat and then grow it by modules as you need, instead of having to upgrade to something twice as expensive and full of functionality you may never really use. While I’m in dreamland, it would be nice if they lowered the maintenance fees too.  Well, dreaming is cheap, right? Waking up to reality, now that’s the hard part. J

Over the last few days, I’ve been following a thread on one of the LinkedIn SolidWorks groups I belong to with great interest. Some of you may be familiar with it. It’s about a new website, Cadooku.com, where SolidWorks users can upload and sell their models.  This is something new for me, you know? I had heard of similar places, but none that catered exclusively to SolidWorks users.  The site is still in Beta, but it’s fully functioning at this moment, and you can even see quite a few models for sale already.

For some of us, the first question that comes to mind is, “Why the need for this kind of site?” A few users pointed out they can easily get models for free from the 3D Content Central. While this is true, you need to remember that the best models usually come from part suppliers and many of the models you find at the user’s library, could use a little improvement.  Phil Staunton, product designer and co-founder of Cadooku, had the following to say about this:   “Most models you get from Content Central are designed by manufacturers that upload components hoping for designers and engineers to use these components in new product assemblies as they are already modeled. The incentive is that the production team is likely to spec the same components and therefore the manufacturer will sell more real components.

This doesn’t provide any incentive to upload components that you don’t manufacture in the real world. And therefore these components tend to sit on all our hard-drives. Cadooku is designed to help increase the library of SW parts available by encouraging people to upload their models as they could create a passive income.

As an SW user myself I have regularly tried to hit a deadline by downloading models from free sites only to be disappointed at the quality of the download and worse, that it is simply imported surfaces that are hard to edit. By encouraging those who upload a model to give detailed, accurate descriptions and upload an image of their model tree, we hope to avoid this for users of our site.”

So, I guess this would mean that for most users knowing they’ll get paid for their model and that they are responsible for the model’s integrity is a good incentive to upload something of decent quality, as opposed to simply sharing whatever they model for free, errors and all.  Personally, I think it’s a great idea.  As much as I like sharing what I do, because I also learn in the process and my interest has always been to compare notes with other users that may take a look at my models and point out my mistakes or areas that need improvement, I do believe that great modeling work deserves compensation.  If someone out there spends several hours creating a great model and then some of us want that model and we plan to use it for commercial purposes, then I think we should compensate his/her effort. It’s only fair!

However, there are other implications in selling models this way that need to be understood, as well.  One of them is deciding how much a model is worth.  Regarding this, Phil adds, “Price is entirely determined by the seller.

We suggest during the upload process a price of $15-25 per hour of modeling time. The $15 an hour rate would be sensible for student or new modelers where as $25 an hour would better reflect a more experienced modeler’s expertise. This is because although they would be quicker at modeling, the model is likely to be modeled using better, more editable techniques and therefore would be worth more.

For example: I am a reasonably experienced modeler who builds robust, parametrically defined models. I have built a mountain bike in 3 hours and therefore I would probably charge $20 * 3 = $60. Of course I may choose to go for a lower price to sell more and undercut existing models or charge more on the basis I think I have done a great job and it is better than other, similar models on the site. The $60 just gives an approximate price to start from.

Price can be altered at a later stage if the seller chooses. However, if the price is reduced, this may be viewed as unfair by people who have bought the model at the higher price and therefore we discourage this.”

Other concerns  that come to mind are those about disclosure of proprietary information, as well as how to fight plagiarism and prevent people from taking a model from a free site, such as 3DCC, and then posting it in Cadooku  as their own.  Phil also had something to say about this, “I agree that 95% of content produced by designers is probably confidential client work. And yes we will probably never be as big as Turbosquid for example. But that’s ok because all we need is the 5% of models from lots of design consultancies to create a decent, useful library. The problem is going to be that if no-one uploads anything. To help encourage people to put models on the site we are currently offering great benefits (inc. free advertising for a month and zero commission until March 2010) for any model uploaded by December 1st. We are also offering to professionally render your main showcase image for any model uploaded before the end of the year. So take advantage and upload that 5%!!  …  If you post models from 3DCC as your own, you are breaking your agreement with 3DCC. We plan to police this and report these users to 3DCC and take their models off our site. We are also hoping our members will help with the policing. Any other suggestions to help with this would be appreciated!”

It certainly sounds like an interesting idea that may benefit quite a few users. What do you think? Do you think even those models you create during your down time are worth something or would you much rather share them for free? As a user, would you buy models or would you rather spend the extra time and effort and model everything yourself or hope to find something semi-decent for free?