Solid Edge revision 20 and design collaboration

A good place to start is 2D migration. All vendors are chasing the huge AutoCAD user community and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future – after all, there’s a lot of people left out there using 2D and they all want them as 3D users.

For those that missed it, Siemens PLM Software released a free 2D application last year and so far it’s been downloaded by over 50,000 users.
This took all of the 2D drafting tools available inside Solid Edge revision 20 and reduced the cost to absolute zero, meaning that instead of maintaining AutoCAD licenses, you get 2D for free.
But within those tools and within Solid Edge revision 20 at large you also have tools to assist in making use of AutoCAD data – and these have been updated.

For example, the system now supports the ACAD Color 7 attribute which automatically inverts black/white lines depending on background sheet colour, so your drawings are displayed exactly as they were in AutoCAD.

The Solid Edge drafting tools now support multi-sheet drawings, Image and Smart Frame objects, Images with drawings, blocks, embedded documents and such.
The system has also been extended to support the loading of Xrefs from AutoCAD – these aren’t externalised and managed as you can in SolidWorks, but it does mean your DWG data loads correctly.

Moving onto 3D data exchange, there is now an additional cost option for a Catia V5 bi-directional translator that allows you to read and write .CatPart and .CatProduct files.
It doesn’t replace the existing Catia V4 tools and is available for purchase separately. While the V4 translators cost around £495, the new V5 translator is priced a great deal higher at an additional £4,995.

Costly, yes, but in comparison to acquiring Catia, even with the recent changes within the V5 pricing model, it still represents a significant cost savings if you’re just looking to load and write out Catia V5 models.
Elsewhere you can read Pro/E Wildfire 3 files and should you want to, you can now load in STL files and use it as reference data.

The new Goal Seek functionality provides basic back solving technology to allow you to solve basic engineering problems that relate maths to geometry – and it’s available in the Free 2D application.
Tabulated Drawings in Solid Edge revision 20

Tabulated Drawings in Solid Edge revision 20

Tabulated Drawings allow you to document arrays of features using tables, rather than documenting each individually.