I have been a designer for several years of mechanical design and drafting experience. Starting on the board drawing as a foundation, proceeding into the world of computer aided design, becoming highly skilled in Alias Surface, CATIA, Pro/E ISDX, and UG NX constructing G1-G3 Class-A surfacing.
There are a lot of comments of surfacing and cad packages, none of which I ever seen reveals a good diagnostic of Cad packages and there ability to produce a good surface.
I have been surfacing for years, and I can achieve about every shape imaginable in practically every package listed. No program can give the designer the ability to surface. That comes as a gift, what a program can do is produce a good quality surface or a poor quality. I’ll start with a list of the packages and what there abilities are
Pro/Engineer: I’ll start with Pro/E Surface and it’s ISDX extension. I have designed for industries the use this package. It can surface, but the quality is limited it takes a considerable amount of tweaking to get a complex surface to look good, and then it still bubbles in places which is real problematic, but it can get most jobs done. Its drafting along faces is almost non existent and very poor and that is problematic for mold injection. Sketcher is awful and has not advanced or improved since pre-wildfire days and fights you at every call, a real drag for a designer not at all user friendly, its still better than Solidworks as a surfacing only because of the ISDX but that is changing fast. But Solidworks is better for sketching its user friendly. Pro/E does have power in Curve by equation which I like and that works pretty well.
Siemens NX: It is far better in the surfacing field than Pro/E it has a huge advantage and a verity of surfacing tools that can give the designer several options to generate surfaces in several ways, this is very good it allows for different approaches to a surface that may not easily cooperate. Its complex curves are not good yet they don’t constrain well and a surface is dependent on the curves to be dead on. There copy and offset are horrible too, this part is worse than Pro/E’s because a offset curve in Pro/E stays parametric and is driven by a dimension, NX is not.
Alias Surface: Chews up Pro/E, Solidworks, Siemens NX, and is nicer than CATIA’s base surfaces and is only surpassed by ICEM. Is if fantastic for complex shapes. NX does have a few more surfacing tools but still can’t generate a surface like Alias. But Alias still has problems with its curves. A it’s not parametric, and most of the curvature lacks the ability to constrain to a desired position. And dead bones accuracy is very important in surfacing. It needs more curves like tangent to tangent arcs, circles, and not to scale a circle but constrain it point to point, this is a real problem, there sketch tools haven’t changed either for years, They need to work on major improvements in that area. Also don’t mistake Alias Design with Alias Surface or Auto, Alias design doesn’t give you the advanced surfacing tools. You must be aware of this when considering a platform. Alias surface will run you about 21K and ICEM 35K.
CATIA: You get what you pay for. There is a reason so many aerospace and auto industries are using this platform, and now that they are integrated with ICEM it is such a nice surface package. If you can at all afford it get CATIA with ICEM, if you can’t afford it with ICEM get Alias Surface with a preferred parametric package.
Inventor: Watch out, when Autodesk purchased Alias this gives them the potential to build the best modeling package in the future if they play their hands right. If they can intergrade Alias fully with inventor, watch out. They could be one of the best packages available. It really imports the surfaces from Alias very well now as if it was done in Inventor itself. Price for price its great.
Cad Surface Modeling 