Since the day AutoCAD Designer was announced, the most common question about it has been whether it is a baby Pro/Engineer. It's a fair question to ask, and the answers are straightforward.
Pro/Engineer is a high-end CAD system from Parametric Technology Corp. (Waltham, MA). Over the past several years, the software has gained a large share of the high-end CAD market, and rightfully so. It is an excellent modeler, with the kind of power that manufacturers need for designing and building complicated products. A typical suite of Pro/Engineer software sells for three to four times the price of a complete AutoCAD Designer setup. If Designer is able to provide a significant subset
of Pro/Engineer's capabilities at such a large price advantage, the folks at PTC may have something to worry about.
To see how Designer stacks up against Pro/Engineer, I spent an afternoon at the local PTC office in Phoenix. I went armed with a sketch pad and a few notes on how I wanted to construct my test model, an automotive connecting rod. Rather than starting with a drawing and seeing if the applications engineer could re-create it, I wanted to test Pro/Engineer's conceptual design abilities. The test machine was a Silicon Graphics Indy workstation, with extreme graphics and 32 MB of RAM.
As you might expect, Pro/Engineer had no major problems creating my test connecting rod. At the same time, however, it was not orders of magnitude faster than Designer, and it, too, ran into some design dead ends. Twice during the design process, the PTC applications engineer had to delete existing features because they prevented him from continuing. Once, he had to reorder some features to proceed.
As I noted, Designer had problems generating complex fillets on some of the test parts I built. Pro/Engineer had no such problems and was able to handle whatever wicked geometric tricks I threw at it.
An essential question for engineers is whether the tools they use can solve the problems they have. In short, it doesn't matter how good your hammer is if you really need a screwdriver. Designer can create a wide class of parts but not all parts. It is just not as robust as its higher-end competitors, such as Pro/Engineer. Even though Designer can do an acceptable job modeling a simple connecting rod, Pro/Engineer is capable of modeling not only the connecting rod but the entire engine as well.
For this article, I used Pro/Engineer as an example of a typical high-end CAD system; it is by no means the only example. Companies such as Structural Dynamics Research (Milford, OH), Computervision (Bedford, MA), and Intergraph (Huntsville, AL) offer workstation-based products with similar capabilities. A
lso, Manufacturing and Consulting Services (Scottsdale, AZ) offers a high-end package that runs under DOS using a 32-bit extender.
For the moment, the folks at PTC (and the other high-end CAD vendors) have nothing to worry about with Designer, other than the fact that some prospective customers might mistake it for a baby Pro/Engineer. That it clearly is not.
Is AutoCAD Designer a Baby Pro/Engineer?
