Solidworks for Makers @ CAD30.00 per year

[Manfred]

Solidworks for makers special offer. 50% off until 25 July. $30.00 Canadian

Power the Maker Within

Choose from two comprehensive design packages from SOLIDWORKS for Makers, industry leading 3D CAD software for hobbyists and personal projects.

discover.solidworks.com

I have never used Solidworks but will take this as an opportunity to finally learn CAD/M.

NOTE: Set to auto-renew annually.

 

[David]

Word of warning. SolidWorks for Makers is a hot mess. The CAM is completely incomprehensible and the whole platform is very resource intensive. My i7 machine with 36 GB of RAM ran at a crawl.

I'd do yourself a favor and learn Fusion.

 

[PeterT]

I think the 3DExperience Solidworks for Makers (PC installation) is the one to (attempt to) get, presuming you can navigate through their swamp & it doesn't blow up on some future update. The CAD engine itself is great. But if there was an award for worst corporate software website ever, 3DE would be a perennial champion.

 

[Upnorth]

I would avoid getting hooked on solidworks. I used to use it before I switched to fusion 360. When doing the switch I found things to be backwards when using fusion. I had some ingrained habits that took a while to break. I can't remember exactly what the differences were. I have a lifetime fixed price deal from fusion so I'm pretty much locked in now. I seem to recall that last time I checked that a person could get 15 years of fusion for the price of solidworks.

 

[SightlessSeer]

Only two CAD softwares that I have used so far are Creo Parametric and OnShape. I found Creo to be very difficult, although part of that will be that it was also the first CAD package I'd ever used. OnShape on the other hand is fantastic. It runs in a browser with all the compute intensive stuff handled through cloud magic (which normally I'd be against, but in this case I'll take it) and so far it has done everything I've wanted. My only gripe is that their built in thread tool is pretty garbage. I've heard that somebody has made a plugin/extension, which provides much better thread modelling though. They have a free to use license level too, so it might be worth trying out if you haven't already

 

[Sqought]

I use Solidworks at work and Solidworks for makers at home and generally like it (I've used a variety of other CAD platforms in the past as well). I don't have performance issues on my home computer (ryzen 5 5600x w/ 32 gb RAM) but I also don't do all that much with it at home. Note that it needs an active internet connection and regularly forgets your login credentials (at least for me).

The built-in CAM is based on CAMWorks and is pretty well regarded. It's main "value add" is automatic feature recognition which will effectively generate the CAM for you straight from the model, but getting all the settings right feels much more unintuitive and "indirect" at least to me.

I'm currently in the process of learning SolidCAM (which has a free tier w/ a legit solidworks license) which so far feels somewhat more intuitive but is also very feature-rich (steep learning curve).

 

[Aarknoid]

I have just gotten back into solidworks (work got me a license) and have dug up the training manual and accompanying training files if anyone is interested i can post a link. it got me making some complex parts by lesson 3 and .. i stopped doing it as it told me enough to do what i needed at the time. but is decent

 

[PeterT]

Word of warning. SolidWorks for Makers is a hot mess

Just to clarify, did you go SW xDesign for Makers (entirely online?) or 3D Experience SW for Makers (local PC installation)? And why did you choose the red or blue pill?

 

[PeterT]

I would avoid getting hooked on solidworks. I used to use it before I switched to fusion 360. When doing the switch I found things to be backwards when using fusion. I had some ingrained habits

SW has been around since 1995, long before F360 arrived on the scene. Its workflow hasn't much changed from day-1, just more features (and fluff). But 'backwards'? That just seems relative to the order you personally switched packages. Lots has been written about F360 shortcomings from people who are forced to be fluent & experienced in both SW & F360 for whatever reason. If I had to pull a common thread from that discussion, its differences between SW & Inventor & F360 is not Inventor, or it would be 5K as well. Now when you factor CAM & cost & all those real world issues that affect us all, for sure there is a lot to be said for F360.

 

[David]

Just to clarify, did you go SW xDesign for Makers (entirely online?) or 3D Experience SW for Makers (local PC installation)? And why did you choose the red or blue pill?

I picked the local install because CAM isn't available in the cloud version.

 

[PeterT]

I picked the local install because CAM isn't available in the cloud version.

That is crazy why it would be running slow on an i7 machine with 36 GB of RAM, local install. I thought maybe it was the online flavor, but aside from occasional ID verification with Mothership, it should be running blazingly fast. I don't suppose tech support would have been a very fulfilling experience, but did you bounce it off any of the SW forums? A lot of performance issues I read about seem to be resolved with graphics board & settings. But it would have to be badly out of spec &/or settings to explain this.

I have a 4 year old PC, AMD Ryzen-7-5800, 32 GB RAM (all apps on SSD), Nvidea Quadro P2200 GC. SW runs very fast & quite often on significantly large assemblies.

CAD Community is back on line. And Reddit has a SW group. Can be a bit 'reddit-ish' at times but there are folks with high SW experience levels. A lot of the Maker issues are discussed there because high traffic of students coming off education version, hobbyists etc. For sure a common theme is how bad the 3DE website is, but yours should be a straightforward PC related issue I would think.

CADmunity

A community of CAD users

forum.cadmunity.com

 

[Aarknoid]

Aye I have to agree, I've run it on a i7 960 from 14 years ago, 25gb ram and it was good for single part projects of varying complexity. But that was a 2022 full install. Ymmv

 

[David]

The biggest issue I had was the interface. Even though it was a local install, you have to start the app from the 3D Experience web interface. There is no other way to access the software. So the bloated, UX-disaster web interface is running while SW is running.

 

[DumbStudent]

I would like to warn people against 3D experience. I've been using it for a student team and I'm almost wishing we didn't use it (pdm wasn't much better). Imo, it is garbage and should be avoided. It's not too bad at its main job, but it is a mess to navigate. I can't find it on browser because there is a 3DX link that just sends me nowhere and I can't get to the compass from there. Idk why the garbage link is easier for find than the useful one.

The biggest issue I've had with it is updates. It requires updates every few weeks/months or something, but you only need to update a few of the software things. The catch is that I never have any idea what needs to be updated. It says that I need to install an update, so I click update, and then it says to navigate through some Compass or something and find some specific package to update, but I can't find that package. They have a search bar but that doesn't work. Honestly I don't even remember how I eventually got my thing to update. I remember once, I updated like 3/4 things before it ended up saying it was updated, just because I couldn't figure out what it was asking for.

TLDR, it's a pain. Don't use it.