Vectorworks compared to Solidworks

[Patrick Gilbert]

I'm curious how these two compare any thoughts?

Thanks

Patrick

[Matthew Giampapa]

Well the basic SolidWorks package costs what? $3,995?

Since the basic VectorWorks package is $895.00. I think you will probably get more with Solidworks, but I think that using the functionality that you do have is a lot easier in VectorWorks.

The real question you need to ask is how will you use / learn either package to be more productive. In this respect I think VectorWorks wins hands down. Solidworks is not nearly as easy to use IMHO.

[Patrick Gilbert]

Matthew Thanks for the response

A couple of questios if I may

I'm assuming Vw is a true solidmodeler?,is Vw boundry based or Parametric or both?

Does Vw have associative Drawings and parts?

I have been using Sw for about 5yr its not that tough to learn, Im interested in Vw as Im interested in Interior Cad which at first glance looks very impressive

Thanks

Pat

[Matthew Giampapa]

Prior to version 9 I believe VectorWorks was using it's own in house solids modeler for CSG solids. This got the job done but was fairly limited, (If you want to get the history of version 8 straight Andrew Bell would be the best person to ask. You can frequently find him on the mailing list)

When version 9 came out, a change was made to use the very powerful SMLIB ( www.smlib.com) library because of it's excellent NURBS support.

However, a lot of the features and functionality of SMLIB were not used in the initial release of 9.0 due to time constraints. Users were first able to reap the benefits of SMLIB when the 3D PowerPack was released with 9.5.1.

Now in VW10, a lot more of that functionality is being integrated and expanded upon in the VectorWorks environment.

...

I'm not as certain about how you mean associative drawings and parts. You can reference layers of other drawings so that an up to date copy of one drawing is reflected in another, but this is not a live process as it would be in something like Microstation. Changes like that need to be written out to disk for VectorWorks to see them.

You can however place geometric associations on 2D objects. Like keeping one line always perpendicular to another, or two points always touching.