Alibre Design Expert 2012

I've used Solid Works, Ideas and Pro-E... but recently started my own industrial design and engineering firm. Alibre Expert is just as powerful and full featured (minus surfacing) as the so called elite parametric packages. It's easier to learn, faster, bug free and the technical support has been unbelieveable. File translate works seamlessly too, so there's really no excuse to spend 5x more money for SW. BTW: The loft functionality gives me 95% of what I would ever want or need to create and control sexy shapes. You can even pull on the geometry to get the surface just right. At this price point, only a fool would buy into the hype behind SW and Pro-E. Believe me, you will pay for that hype... literally!

Posted: Saturday, August 28, 2010

Pros: motion, strength material, 3D.
But I need also the following options: conversion to CNC, heat calculation, oiling consumption, exact distance between screw and nut, and energy efficacy.

Posted: Thursday, August 26, 2010

Robust program that runs crashless on Vista 64 and Win7 64 . Lots of learning material is supplied and targeted to facilitate learning. Mechanical design module is very well thought out and quick to learn. Working in Rhino, I often need to shell or thicken polysurfaces , and this is a time consuming story in Rhino. In Alibre, you insert any polysurface as single surface , and thicken it in one click. I actually laughed yesterday, as I was able to thicken a polysurface in one click, which took me to rebuild to thickness in Rhino half a day with lots of clicks. Same story with shelling polysurface solids. Also , it opens complicated 3D files created in Rhino without problem. If you need to use multiple bitmaps to trace on , this is where Alibre is weaker , and Rhino4 is the answer. Alibre translates between many major formats, including parasolid. This is great. With dwg format, it handles only 2D dwg ( read - write ). For 3D dwg read - write Rhino works better. Truth being that to work effectively one need to handle at least two 3D programs , Alibre is definitely one of them. And at its price and features packed , plus openness for learning - it is really right priced.

Posted: Friday, April 02, 2010