Structural

Subject: Structural Sat Nov 03, 2007 10:27 am

PTC Pro Engineer Wildfire v3.0

Structural I3

The newest version of PTC's flagship design application, Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3, was a bit long in coming—shipping about 18 months after the previous version instead of the usual 12 months—but the result is worth the wait (figure 1). Instead of just piling on a zillion new features and capabilities, PTC (like some of its competitors) chose to improve Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3 in other ways that matter to most customers, namely, software stability, better consistency across modeling functions and promotion of more efficient workflows. Although these areas of enhancement may lack wow factor, they will definitely be beneficial to most users in terms of productivity.

At the bottom of the screen is the Dashboard, introduced in the first version of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire. It replaced the antiquated Menu Manager in pre-Wildfire versions of Pro/ENGINEER. The Dashboard is used for one of two modeling approaches in Pro/E and guides you through the process with menus and dialog boxes. With the Dashboard approach, you execute an action first and then select references where the action will be applied. For more advanced users, a second design approach, known as direct modeling, lets you work on a model directly by selecting references first and then applying an action (figure 2). Most users with some experience will probably prefer the direct-modeling approach over the Dashboard because it's a lot quicker. However, you can combine and use either approach to best suit your needs.

Structural I4

35 PTC Pro Engineer Wildfire v3.0

The newest version of PTC's flagship design application, Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3, was a bit long in coming—shipping about 18 months after the previous version instead of the usual 12 months—but the result is worth the wait (figure 1). Instead of just piling on a zillion new features and capabilities, PTC (like some of its competitors) chose to improve Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3 in other ways that matter to most customers, namely, software stability, better consistency across modeling functions and promotion of more efficient workflows. Although these areas of enhancement may lack wow factor, they will definitely be beneficial to most users in terms of productivity.

At the bottom of the screen is the Dashboard, introduced in the first version of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire. It replaced the antiquated Menu Manager in pre-Wildfire versions of Pro/ENGINEER. The Dashboard is used for one of two modeling approaches in Pro/E and guides you through the process with menus and dialog boxes. With the Dashboard approach, you execute an action first and then select references where the action will be applied. For more advanced users, a second design approach, known as direct modeling, lets you work on a model directly by selecting references first and then applying an action (figure 2). Most users with some experience will probably prefer the direct-modeling approach over the Dashboard because it's a lot quicker. However, you can combine and use either approach to best suit your needs.

As is the case with virtually all mechanical CAD applications, you start out in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3 with a 2D layout sketch, add basic geometric entities and dimension and constrain the geometry (figure 3). You build a 3D parametric part from the 2D sketch by adding features such as extrusions and holes. In some instances, creating a feature-based, parametric part in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire takes a few more steps than in some other MCAD packages, but the end result is basically the same. Unlike some other CAD packages, Pro/ENGINEER doesn't use the right mouse button as much as I'd like, and this means some design tasks take a little longer, at least for me.

Although the part-modeling environment offers several enhancements, most improve the productivity of capabilities that were already in the product. However, new curved patterns are a Curve option on the Pattern Dashboard. The Curve option lets you create instances of a patterned feature along a sketched curve. You can control the spacing of the features and specify the start point and direction of the curve.

Some of the most significant enhancements for modeling parts are found in new sheet-metal capabilities and the associated user interfaces (figure 4). The good news here is that the sheet-metal interface now conforms more closely to the general Pro/ENGINEER interface, something that PTC worked hard to make more consistent throughout the application. It still has a way to go as far as total interface consistency goes, but definite progress takes place with each release.

Structural I5