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WildFire Vs Inventor 9

L

Lee74

New member
Help required!


We currently run WildFire and have used Pro since R17. Unfortunately, due to maintenance & support costs, my superiors have proposed a move to Inventor 9!?


I have seen numerous demos and heard all the blurb (from allegedly ex-PTC reps etc etc) praising the system, but have no 'hands-on' experience of IV9.


Can anybody, honestly outline the Pro's and Con's with repect to WildFire, before my company defects to AutoDesk??


Kind Regards.



Edited by: Lee74
 
I will say don'tgo for Inventor9.0. AutoDesk is trying to emulate Solidworks and Wildfire but it has the problem of kernel. Only the interface can't help.


I will suggest go for Solidworks if you can't afford Wildfire, even Solidedge is better but Inventor I don't think so. Inventor is actually a best alternate for Mechanical Desktop.


Israr
 
any ideas on what wf can do better than iv9?

we have also come accrosss this problem.



not being superficial or anything iv9 has a great rendering engine.
which is fantastic for showing off parts/assemblies/mechanisms.





ive not touched iv9. but be good to know about it.
 
My company has decided to switch from Pro/E 2001 to Inventor 9. I haveused Pro/E since version 18 and would say stay with Pro/E. Pro/E is much better for modeling and assembly. The only thing I will say for Inventor, It does have the UNDO button, which really comes in handy.
 
Inventor is so much easier and USER FREINDLY its a No brainer IMO...we have used inventor at my company since ver 4.0 And I have put together a complete Process machine used in semi-conductor Ind with Inventor...I still use it but we aquired a machine from another company and we use PRO-E for that project


the ONLY thing I like better about pro-e is theyre is a larger job market out there for me..
 
Small to medium size assemblies (up to several hundred or even a few thousand instances) of blocky, prismatic parts; you might like Inventor, but even pushing those limits expect slow. Don't expect Pro/E's range of top down design methods or it's robustness. They have a fairly active NG


http://discussion.autodesk.com/forum.jspa?forumID=78
news://discussion.autodesk.com/autodesk.inventor


spend some time browsing it. Search it for for corrupt, crash, can't open, etc.


I'm not sure what the going price for Inventor is (too much, I'd wager), but if I remember correctly annual maint (which buys nothing more than updates; no support, no knowledge base access, etc.) for AIP runs about 1500 / year; roughly the same as I'm paying for Foundation maint.


I, personally, can't see it being a good move for most uses considering the cost of migrating.


-- Inventor to Wildfire convert and it wasn't done lightly.
 
Puppet,


Thanks for your response. Myself and a colleague sneaked in to a IV9 user group meeting yesterday, with the aim of giving iV9 the benefit of the doubt. There's no doubt that it has come a long way, but unfortuantely I'm still not fully convinced.


I agree with you on the rendering issue. It's all good and well looking slick on the out side but if the internals aren't up to it...what's the point?
 
Hi Luis Matos,


The kind of work we do here is mainly Injection and rotational moulding. We also use surfacing, assemblies, mechanism rendering and Mechanica.


Regards


Lee74
 
Oh i see.

But what kind of surfaces or assemblie you use.....automobile parts?



I am part modeler and mold designer , and inventor is not god tool for me.

Even if you keep with old version of proe you still better than using inventor.



It
 
I've been using Pro-e for about 4 years. Tool design, simple components, medium size assemblies.


Currently I'm doing a IV9 course at a local college.


Firstly, the user interface is very easy to learn and it has a nice easy to use render. If you where moving to 3D modeling for the first time it would seem quite impresive.


But compared to Pro-e it just come across as second rate. The only downside on pro-e is the learning curve, but if you have already been there and done that, it makes no sense throwing all that away just for a nice render.
 
We looked at Inventor in the past because of some limitations that Mechanical Desktop had in one of our divisions. In a nutshell I think some of the important items were brought up, but our findings was that advanced features such as long helical sweeps Inventor did not like, we could do it in 30 seconds in ProE, it would take minutes. Also we found once you got into any large assemblys Inventor would churn compared to ProE.In the end we added ProE licenses for them and they were happy to get out of the Autodesk world.
If you already own ProE I cannot believe it would be cheaper to switch, take into consideration all of the files that you already have and would need to convert, plus a new learning curve. I love to hear that its easier to learn, consider the fact that you already know a package.
Thanks to Enron we cannot negotiate maintenance per company, otherwise PTC would drop considerably for a multi-year maintenace or the threat of switching software. I have gotten 40-50% off in the past, and this year all I was able to get was 25%. Mind you we are a decent size account.
 
Another area to consider is support. With PTC, if you pay maintenance, you get direct support when you run into problems. With AutoCAD, the only support is from your dealer which usually means no support after they cash your check. We also had Autodesk twice drop the platforms we were running on at the time (Apollo Domain and later HP-UX). And ask all the poor suckers who bought AutoSOLID what kind of upgrade path Autodesk gave them when that product was dropped.
 
Inventor is dreadful.


I have friends using this, Although in the beginning they raved about it.. Now they areregretting the decision.


Its modelling kernel apears to be its achillies heel. I have wasted many hours repairing numerous exported models from inventor with wildfire 2 and I seriously doubt its full 3D modelling / surfacing capabilities.


I would tend to look at Solidworks or solid edge.
 
same here,


I've used iv9 in college/projects in school, it's easy and nice if you start solid modeling... But I never had the feeling that is was a final release i was using..


Had more crashing in inventor then my old windows 98. With large assemblies this is. I've used inventor 7,8 and 9, but since i learnedpro/e at my work, never inventor anymore :p


We also use solidworks (2005), but that seems to have also some problems with advanced surface modeling. Also a lot of crashes when surfaces become too complex.
 
How about the fact that you already have many ProE files that need to be converted etc?
management always seems to overlook the details such as this and now you are creating 2 databases of files.
Heres what I would do, get the quote from Autodesk and call the PTC guys in and tell them heres what we are ready to do and this is the price what can you do for us. PTC will step up to the plate to keep a customer if the sales guy is decent, if the sale guy does not budge talk to the regional one.
 
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