Now I work for a small company which has long history using ACAd. But I use ACAD and Mechanical Desktop for quite a long time and actually I have done some ACAD customization. I have no any experiences on Autodesk Inventor. footprint of components and their exact position. I will take adventage of his output-2d ACAD drawing Vs. U got what I mean? Layout people finish layout out by using ORCAD. In detail, I was asked to develop the mechanical desktop so I can make the 3D process automatically after the ORCAD output. I came to this web coz I want to find some information on Mechanical Desktop customization. OK, OK, I just register and it is my first post. Feel free to contact me if you have any RE: Which 3-D Cad Software is Best? Dand (Mechanical) 24 Oct 00 07:36 I speak from experience, I am a Mechanical Design/ Automation Engineer by day and teach Computer Aided Design on a collegiate level at night at UMass. Another thing to remember is that almost every package out there can read/write an ACAD file. ACAD/Mech Desktop lead the market now but they blundered with anouncing the discontinuation of Mech Desktop. Cadkey, Aries, CADDS and IDEAS are dead, some of them may still be for sale but they do not own any significant portion of the design market. I have used Cadkey, IDEAS, CADDS 5.X, Aries, SolidEdge, ACAD, Mechanical Desktop, Pro/E, and SolidWorks. Rumor has it that a few disgruntled employees of PTC (Pro/E) left the company and started SolidWorks, so there is almost the same functionality but the interface is much better. It is by far one of the best systems out there. SolidWorks ($3500) was cheaper for a new licence then the upgrade from ACAD 14 to Inventor. After using AutoCAD for 7 year, and Mechanical Desktop for 2.5 I bought SolidWorks.

Once you figure out work arounds for the interface it is by far the most powerful system out there. The interface is difficult to manipulate and the program has quite a few problems with it, although I will admit that Pro/E has the biggest Cult following out of any of them. You need to use it for about 1000 hours before you can be considered proficient. Pro/E is very expensive ($7000) and has a very long learning curve. They have stated that they will be discontiuing the Mechanical Desktop product within two years, I have used Inventor and found that it lacks many of the features that you would expect it to have for $5000. AutoCAD makes a nice package but they seem to be in some turmoil lately. I have checked price and capablility of each system. Desktop, Inventor), SolidWorks, and Pro/E. There are 3 main contestants in the arena. I have done a considerable amount of research in this area.

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