SolidWorks and CATIA — I love both!
CATIA and SolidWorks…Which one is good? I get asked this question many times. Well, basically they are CAD software packages. Engineering industries use them to make create and test products digitally before making a prototype. Depending on the robustness and reliability of the product, companies decide upon one of these packages. Aerospace and automotive sectors are higher end industry segments where the axis of scale and complexity are always pushing the envelope. They thus, make very heavy use of engineering software, including mechanical CAD and simulation. They have specific standards. Designing with ease becomes the main criteria.
Choice of CAD package depends on the type of geometry kernel and associated other pieces of the software stack: constraint manager, GUI, Programming and Customization API, and the many specialized, process oriented bits of code in play.
CATIA and SolidWorks are both developed by Dassault Systèmes. This technically does not make them head-on competitors; they are targeted at different industry segments. After referring to their quotes CATIA states: Virtual Product and SolidWorks states: 3D Design.
SolidWorks User Interface
Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about SolidWorks:
“SolidWorks Corporation was founded in December 1993 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate Jon Hirschtick. Hirschtick used $1 million he had made while a member of the MIT Blackjack Team to set up the company. Initially based in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, Hirschtick recruited a team of engineers with the goal of building 3D CAD software that was easy-to-use, affordable, and available on the Windows desktop. Operating later from Concord, Massachusetts, SolidWorks released its first product SolidWorks 95, in 1995. In 1997 Dassault, best known for its CATIA CAD software, acquired SolidWorks for $310 million in stock.”
If you are interested in knowing how Jon made $1 million playing Blackjack, I suggest you to watch 2008 American heist drama film 21
SolidWorks at present employs the Parasolid geometry kernel and is typically referred to as a mid-range solid modeling software package. SolidWorks has lots of quick functions that can streamline tasks for engineering, but it lacks robust hybrid modeling capabilities, technical data visualization and input. Still, it has a larger market share mainly because it is rather user-friendly and has a shallow learning curve. Marketing plays an important part too in making SolidWorks so popular. In short, SolidWorks is all about making solid models and not so much CAD in the abstract sense. This difference is notable because the creation of solid models is only one of the many tasks engineers and designers use CAD systems for.
CATIA User Interface
CATIA is a beast. CATIA incorporates specialized design software for disciplines such as wiring, sheet metal, and composite materials for aircraft. CATIA incorporates four separate products for designing electrical raceways, conduits, and wave guides. In the field of car design, CATIA has a specialized application for so-called class A surfaces that enables workers to start with points digitized from clay models and produce smooth mathematical surfaces for production of tools and inspection of finished parts. CATIA also offers shape-modeling capabilities beyond those of SolidWorks. Generative Surface Design (GSD) product enables designers to sweep, revolve, and loft surfaces as can be done with solid models. It also enables designers to do things that can’t be done with parametric solids alone. For example, a designer can draw lines or curves in space and fit surfaces between them. Surfaces created in this way can be intersected, trimmed to the intersection curve, and blended with fillets. GSD also enables engineers to add surfaces that blend between non-intersecting surfaces.
I have this fiction of my own — SolidWorks is just more advanced Part-modeling spin-off among one of CATIA’s many awesome workbenches. Dassault just decided to make some extra pocket-money with SolidWorks. So they released it as new software.
I personally enjoy working in SolidWorks. It has really fantastic product rendering capability. The material textures, lighting, background, shadow. Everything is just superb and extremely easy to do. Final rendering in SolidWorks is just mind blowing.
It boils down to the backbone capabilities of the software. CATIA is aimed at the high-end CAD market, where you can not only create a car, but a factory in which it will be produced, the machining processes required, and even you can simulate ergonomics studies as well, like whether the current layout of a plant will be comfortable for workers to work or not. Thus we can simulate the whole thing within a virtual reality, including, and of course, rendering. There are some functionality differences such as Surface modeling and the ease with which you can create complex structures and assemblies.
Animation/rendering engines are quite different, as well as structural analysis packages. Standard Part Libraries that are offered with the software are different, as well as workflow management/automation. For a beginner CAD user however, both should offer about the same functionality, with slightly different learning curves. Only after you start getting into more complex or specialized CAD work will you notice the differences between the software packages.
Also, price matters CATIA is almost five times costlier than SolidWorks. Sophistication comes at a price. The arbitrary rules and procedures of the many CATIA application are not intuitive to learn or use. For example, to zoom in and out with the mouse, one must first press the second of three mouse buttons, then the first, then release the first mouse button while keeping the second pressed. By contrast to CATIA, SolidWorks provides fewer functions and makes them easier to use. SolidWorks is less costly than CATIA because it is a simpler product. It contains fewer lines of code, and installation is simpler, reducing the need for on-site application engineers. Complex products that need to be optimized for weight and performance can benefit from the advanced engineering software integrated with CATIA.
Finally as I read it somewhere — Create an aircraft in CATIA, but create the engine in SolidWorks
I loved putting up a lot of images in this post, they look great on Medium and for first time readers who have never seen SolidWorks or CATIA, they can get an eyeful of these CAD applications. Do watch and enjoy the below video. It’s made by Mark Biasotti who is a top surface modeler. He made the car model using SolidWorks 2003. Really, only our imagination can limit us with what we can do with CAD.
Source: All Images are from Google search results.
