I have been a user since the MiniCAD days. Over the last few years I have had less work that required me to perform my own design and drawing but now I am working on a new mechanical design project so I updated to VW 2009. The last version I had was 12.5 and that did not get much use. I was hoping that by now a lot of the usability issues and drawing issues in VW would have been resolved. I was particularly excited that VW switched to the parasolids engine because now I can exchange files with high end CAD systems.
Today was the first day that I really had to do 3D modeling and drawing creation and I ran into a number of what I consider serious problems. I would like to list these problems and get feedback from Nemetschek. If my problem is one of training, please tell me, otherwise consider this a list of bugs and feature enhancements.
1. The 3D hole and 3D tapped hole tools are almost useless. They create a hole in the ground plane which then needs to be moved and oriented in 3 dimensions to position it properly.
2. Extrudes do not work properly when your working plane is parallel to your ground plane. All extrudes are drawn starting in the ground plane even when you are set to work in the working plane.
3. The Create Multiple Views command sounds powerful but it is lacking a number of important capabilities. Because of these missing features the viewports are not useful.
a. If you create a viewport in a different scale from your drawing all of the dimensions tools are scaled also. In other words, if I use a 1/2 scale on my viewport and I have a 10" object the dimension tools report this is a 5" part. This by itself makes viewports totally useless for all objects other than those which can be drawn at 1:1 scale.
b. If you create associative dimensions on objects in the viewport and then change the original object and update the viewports the dimensions do not update. they need to be re-created.
4. Holes cannot be dimensioned for position or size in viewports or on 3D objects in general.
5. Fillet radii cannot be dimensioned on 3D objects.
I am sure I will run into other annoyances, these are only the ones I discovered on my first day of real 3D modeling use.