Hey All,
Where can we get student editions of solid works or AutoCad Inventor for student use?
For Solidworks, you need a team sponsorship to get the software free. Go here to apply. You’ll generally get enough licenses for the entire team, and it is an annual renewal.
for Inventor, go here . This is a free download for each person to get their own.
Thanks so Much
I see SolidWorks much more in industry now, what is everyone’s opinion between the two?
In southeast Michigan (center of the Automotive industry), most people use Solidworks or Catia (Catia is optimized for working on curves and surfaces like car fenders). According to our CAD instructor at MCCC, “nobody” in Monroe County uses Inventor. But elsewhere in the country, things are probably different. Check to see what your local community college is teaching, since they will do what local industry needs.
We encourage our students to learn both packages (and SnapCad for the elementary IQ), but they all seem to prefer Solidworks in the end.
Is solid works easier to use than inventor or AutoCAD? My team currently uses inventor, but most of the team is not interested in approaching it due to the steep learning curve.
Our Team Virus students think that Solidworks is more intuitive than Inventor (they learned inventor first, then made the switch). Personally, I haven’t used an AutoCad product since R13 (1994) when the company switched to SW, so I can’t give any insight. Since both are professional-grade products, they both have a somewhat steep learning curve, but Solidworks is newer as a VEX sponsor, so there is not as much out there specifically supporting VEX training. Hopefully the VEX community can change that this year. I’m trying to encourage our students to make some VEX (or VEX IQ) training videos this year.
The ONLY thing that annoys me to death about SOLIDWORKS , is the fact that it is not GPU accelerated except for specific workstation cards like a Quadro.
My system is no petite little system either. I have an 8-core 4.2GhZ CPU which is used by SOLIDWORKS as its primary render device.
The GPU has so much more power and it’s not hard for them to implement.
Most programs similar to Solidworks generally utilize a workstation graphics card rather than a gaming card. When I bought my laptop 4 years ago (yikes time for an upgrade) I thought I was set with a NVIDIA GeForce, but turns out its not that helpful for SW. Luckily by tweaking some display settings and such I’ve been able to get good usage on SW with the laptop (A full VEX assembly gets pretty tough though with all the square holes).