CAD for machine design vs industrial design?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pat
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Pat

I'm somewhat new to the CAD area, and while looking around at different CAD
products I've noticed that there seems to be a (somewhat vague) distinction
between those oriented toward machine/mechanical design vs those oriented
towards industrial design. However, it's not entirely clear to me what the
differences are. On first blush the model examples they show all look the
same.

So I was hoping someone could shed some light on this. What is it, in terms
of features or capabilities, that differentiates one from the other?

Thanks for any info.

Pat
 
You can get a good idea of the differences from the two different pages
of my online portfolio (Acrobat format), linked from the main page of my
Web site. The first page is all machine design, with one exception.
The second page is all product design which at least somewhat
incorporates industrial design principles (I don't call myself an
industrial designer).

'Sporky'
www.h2omarkdesign.com
 
If I had to say one thing which I have used to make my final choices on
CAD for now 20 years, it is ease-of-use.

Unfortunately for me, I have bought lots of CAD packages in both 2D and
3D before finding the ones which I consider easy to use.

SolidWorks handles what I need for medical plastic product design and
its tools, though I am not designing things with elaborate surfacing of
"organic" shapes. There are surfacing tools and they are getting more
powerful in SolidWorks, but I rarely used them and are not knowledgable
about the full range of capabilities. There have been flame wars about
the surfacing subject in the past year or so, but it is mostly by some
people hearabouts who have an agenda to promote their orator image.

If you are already in mechanical design, and work with other engineers
and companies, you will need to collaborate with files you both can
read and work with & will likely not want to deal with translation
issues in a major way.

Hence, talk to other companies and consultants and get a feel for what
is used.

SolidWorks has gone from zero users to something like 300,000 licensed
users in about 10 years because it does perform for a lot of users and
companies.

Bo
 
Guess I misread your initial post slightly, although I think the
graphics might be useful to help envision what is required for
industrial design as opposed to machine design. Good capability for
SURFACING is probably the most major thing that distinguishes CAD for
industrial design, along with good capability with lofts and sweeps.
SolidWorks has all that, but a couple of the higher end MCADs (like
Unigraphics and Catia) surely have some tools for that which outstrip
SolidWorks.

'Sporky'
 
by some people hearabouts who have an agenda to promote their orator image

meaning?
 
neil said:
meaning?
Click to expand...

Promoting some other CAD package/s here in the SolidWorks user group,
with a certain amount of persistance and rigor that makes one wonder
why.
 
Thanks for the all the replies.

It makes sense that surfacing abilities would be a notable difference, given
the intent of ID.

Some other things I've seen comments about are the use of constraints to
preserve "design intent" - which I guess is less common in industrial design
products.

What about things like the ability to detect interferences between parts,
compute part volume, mass, or center of gravity? Those also seem like
things that would be less critical for ID applications.

Anyway, just something I started thinking about which made me wonder what
the real differences were. Definitely a gray area though.

Thanks again for the responses. -Pat
 
Pat asked "What about things like the ability to detect interferences
between parts,
compute part volume, mass, or center of gravity? Those also seem like
things that would be less critical for ID applications."

SolidWorks handles all of these quite well, regardless of what you are
designing.

Bo
 
Pat asked "What about things like the ability to detect interferences
between parts,
compute part volume, mass, or center of gravity? Those also seem like
things that would be less critical for ID applications."

SolidWorks handles all of these quite well, regardless of what you are
designing.

Bo
 
Machine design is about making a product work, industrial design is about
making it look pretty!

Ken
 
The difference between industrial design is that industrial design (ID)
is concerned with "swoopy" stuff and mechanical design (MED) is
concerned with prismatic stuff. ID is organic shapes and aesthetics,
MED is blocky things and documentation. ID spends a lot of time with
creativity and variations on a theme for a single product, while MED
spends a lot of time varying a single product to fit multiple market
spots or grabbing things from catalogs.

Now before the IDs and the MEDs jump all over me, I have to lay out the
disclaimer that these are extremes and there is a blurred boundary.
Sporky is a good example of that blurred boundary.

There are CAD packages like Rhino that cater to the IDS. They are
non-parametric but very good at the freeform and aesthetic. At it's
heart Rhino is a math engine that manipulates state of the art math
models of geometry. Then there is SolidWorks which is parametric and
therefore able to make many variations on a single theme easily. But it
is also able to do a fairly decent job of the freeform but the freedom
to model is a bit more restricted. And at the heart of SW there is also
a math engine, but it is surrounded by algorithms to make it user
friendly.
 
Bonobo said:
Pat asked "What about things like the ability to detect interferences
between parts,
compute part volume, mass, or center of gravity? Those also seem like
things that would be less critical for ID applications."

SolidWorks handles all of these quite well, regardless of what you are
designing.
Click to expand...

Yes, but would you find those same features in a CAD tool oriented more
towards industrial design?

Thanks, Pat
 
Yes, but would you find those same features in a CAD tool oriented more
towards industrial design?
Click to expand...

At some point some one may actually want to make something
besides paper.
What about CAD/CAM?
 
Cliff said:
At some point some one may actually want to make something
besides paper.
What about CAD/CAM?
Click to expand...

Very true.

So is the main difference then between ID and MD CAD packages primarily just
the tools (i.e. menu picks) the designer is given for creating models, where
an ID oriented package gives you better tools for doing the curvy, swoopy,
organic stuff, while an MD one gives you better tools for creating common
"mechanical" shapes and solids?

Pat
 
If you are going to get serious about product design, I personally
think you will wind up with more than one CAD package, and that is just
the way it goes.

If you buy SolidWorks, you really will likely want the Pro version and
all those addins as they are very valuable additions. Likewise, you
may find you eventually need the full "Mold Flow", and if so, the cost
of the full package for analyzing your plastic molded parts will set
you back another significant 4 figure chunk of dollars.

If you get heavily into surfacing, you may then have to buy a package
(Rhino or others) to do advanced surfacing, but I doubt any one package
will replace the need to have a CAD application like SolidWorks. I've
bought, used and tried a lot of 3D solids from InCAD (early 90s on the
mac), Ashlar Vellum/Cobalt/..., SDRC I-DEAS, AutoCAD's smorgasbord, &
looked at ProE, Unigraphics and I've stuck with SolidWorks for ease of
getting up to speed in getting real work done fast.

It really depends on what environment you are working in. If most
people you are going to work with use ProE, then I'ld bet you would be
best using a directly compatible product so your collaboration works
fast.
 
If you are going to get serious about product design, I personally
think you will wind up with more than one CAD package, and that is just
the way it goes.

If you buy SolidWorks, you really will likely want the Pro version and
all those addins as they are very valuable additions. Likewise, you
may find you eventually need the full "Mold Flow", and if so, the cost
of the full package for analyzing your plastic molded parts will set
you back another significant 4 figure chunk of dollars.

If you get heavily into surfacing, you may then have to buy a package
(Rhino or others) to do advanced surfacing, but I doubt any one package
will replace the need to have a CAD application like SolidWorks. I've
bought, used and tried a lot of 3D solids from InCAD (early 90s on the
mac), Ashlar Vellum/Cobalt/..., SDRC I-DEAS, AutoCAD's smorgasbord, &
looked at ProE, Unigraphics and I've stuck with SolidWorks for ease of
getting up to speed in getting real work done fast.

It really depends on what environment you are working in. If most
people you are going to work with use ProE, then I'ld bet you would be
best using a directly compatible product so your collaboration works
fast.
 
Pat said:
So is the main difference then between ID and MD CAD packages primarily just
the tools (i.e. menu picks) the designer is given for creating models, where
an ID oriented package gives you better tools for doing the curvy, swoopy,
organic stuff, while an MD one gives you better tools for creating common
"mechanical" shapes and solids?

Pat
Click to expand...

Answer = no, that's too simplistic, but you're headed in the right
direction. Think of MD (or MED) as not only the ability to create
prismatic shapes and solids, but also to use those in proper fashion to
create and sometimes analyze complex assemblies. So, there is the
ability to create and handle assemblies with large numbers of parts and
also (absolutely necessary) subassemblies, to deal with geometric
relationships between components, and to generate engineering drawings
(with proper tolerances) to create manufacturable items, to calculate
centers of gravity and moments of inertia based on density information,
and to included metadata useful in bills of material, etc., etc., etc..
Industrial Design often requires some limited amount of the above (but
often minus the need for engineering drawings) and also the necessity to
do other things besides just "swoopy" features. Creating draft for
molds, for instance, especially since a large percentage of ID design
work is for injection molded plastics. But there is SUCH a huge overlap
of requirements (e.g., draft is also necessary for most kinds of
casting/forging design) that most of the major-player CAD companies out
there have found it to be in their best interests not only to provide
only pretty complete tools for one, but also to provide pretty complete
tools for the other . . . SolidWorks included. Most of the differences
between CAD softwares in these areas are in degree only, and in the
number of bugs and quirks, and in stability and in quality of technical
support. There are exceptions. IronCAD targetted mechanical design
specifically and left out most tools for anything else. Think3 went the
opposite direction. Neither company is doing well as a result. McNeel
(Rhino3D) is probably an exception there also -- they've done well
enough by targeting a small segment, but doing it quite well and in ways
useful to people who use other softwares.

Mark 'Sporky' Stapleton
Watermark Design, LLC
www.h2omarkdesign.com
 
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