A program I did not know existed

[Doug Griffith]

CorelCAD
http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4120067

I'm an Illustrator on Mac guy. That's where most of my 2D work is done. Cadtools helps out with some needed features and quick and dirty dimensioning.

I'm also a CAD guy. Most of my 3D work is roughed out in Ashlar Cobalt on the Mac. I then jump over to SolidWorks via Bootcamp when work gets serious.

What I'm always looking for are new CAD tools on the Mac. I tried an early demo of AutoCAD and the interface didn't jive with me. I also beta tested Rhino but since I work in Solidworks I found it weak by comparison. I probably should have given both more effort. TurboCAD, SharkFX, and Concepts 3D are all based on the same Kernel as Ashlar so not much point there.

Well, I just found CorelCAD and it runs on the Mac as well. It's time to load the demo and put it through it's paces. The website says that the Mac version won't import .CDR files but I'm hoping it will.

The big daddy of CAD on Mac is Siemens NX. It's what Apple uses. The problem is that you need Apple's bank account to purchase it. Not for mere mortals.

Oh, and for you PC users, CorelCAD runs on your platform as well!

[Mary Geitz]

Hi Doug:

This past weekend I switched over to the "dark side", and I now own a Macbook Pro 15". It was a birthday gift from my kids and hubby and lucky for me, my daughter has been working in the Apple world as a web developer for quite a while. She had everything pre loaded for me because she knew if I couldn't run Corel, I would rather stay with a pc. So I have a few questions as a newbie on Mac for you. First, why use Bootcamp instead of VMware Fusion? I have Corel in my bottom tray and it runs as if it were a Mac program. It also connects with the laser as a network printer, so I'm sending .cdr to the laser on Mac. My daughter said it would be the same for any Windows-based program I run and the only thing stopping me would be my hard drive size. I can also connect to my Windows desktop and import files to my Mac in Corel. So theoretically, can you use any CAD software found on windows and use it on the Mac instead of searching for only Mac-based programs? Remember, I'm a Mac newbie so you might be doing a palm-to-forehead maneuver at my question, so be gentle.

Thanks,
Mary

[Joe De Medeiros]

Hi Doug:

This past weekend I switched over to the "dark side", and I now own a Macbook Pro 15". It was a birthday gift from my kids and hubby and lucky for me, my daughter has been working in the Apple world as a web developer for quite a while. She had everything pre loaded for me because she knew if I couldn't run Corel, I would rather stay with a pc. So I have a few questions as a newbie on Mac for you. First, why use Bootcamp instead of VMware Fusion? I have Corel in my bottom tray and it runs as if it were a Mac program. It also connects with the laser as a network printer, so I'm sending .cdr to the laser on Mac. My daughter said it would be the same for any Windows-based program I run and the only thing stopping me would be my hard drive size. I can also connect to my Windows desktop and import files to my Mac in Corel. So theoretically, can you use any CAD software found on windows and use it on the Mac instead of searching for only Mac-based programs? Remember, I'm a Mac newbie so you might be doing a palm-to-forehead maneuver at my question, so be gentle.

Thanks,
Mary

I'm also a Mac guy, and the reason you want to run in bootcamp, is you get all the machine resources, instead of splitting it between OSX and windows, in my case I'm a power user and need all the speed I can get, I'm a designer that works on very large 3d cad files. I believe windows is the dark side ;)

As for Autocad I get it as part of my subscription, but I prefer to run it on Bootcamp, I have a lot of custom C# plug-ins that won't work on the mac, besides we are a Revit and Inventor shop.

[Dan Hintz]

I'm still a fan of DoubleCAD XT... free is a good price, and being compatible with AutoCAD, et al. is a good deal.

[George Brown]

Doug, I tried corelcad and definitely did not like it, found it very cumbersome. Let us know what you think.

[Doug Griffith]

I'm also a Mac guy, and the reason you want to run in bootcamp, is you get all the machine resources, instead of splitting it between OSX and windows

Joe nailed it. Solidworks is processor hungry and runs much better in Bootcamp. It's a pain in the butt to reboot but worth the time for long stints. I've also got Parallels installed that accesses the PC partition that Bootcamp uses. I take this route if I'm just jumping in for a quick edit or the like.

[Mark Ross]

I am lucky enough to use Autodesk Inventor 2013 Design Suite. I have access to the full thing, from 2D and 3D to simulation analysis to 3DS max. Here is the kick in the pants with 3D regardless of the platform (i.e. Inventor or Solidworks). 3D CAD by its very nature is linear. I have a machine running 8 processors but guess what? Inventor can only use 1 for many things. Yup...1. There is no way around it. For things like 3D rendering it can use multiple processors but when I am designing plastic molded injection parts, it can only use a single processor. So adding a program to mimic windows on top of that, things are going to be even slower. I have nothing against apple, but every truly high end CAD system I have ever seen for anything has not been MAC based.

[Doug Griffith]

I have nothing against apple, but every truly high end CAD system I have ever seen for anything has not been MAC based.

Except for the elusive Siemens NX which is at the top of the CAD food chain:
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/about_us/newsroom/press/press_release.cfm?Component=82370&ComponentTemplate=822

[Kevin Groenke]

Hey Doug,

Just wondering how you found Rhino lacking compared to SolidWorks? It does take some time to adapt to making surfaces from curves in various viewports and orientations then joining them to make solids but once you "get it", the complexity of the forms that you can produce fairly easily is very broad. Rhino's limited parametric editing can be problematic, but history works with many more functions in rhino5 than it did in 4.0. Of course there is grasshopper if you want to get into scripting and parametric form-finding. RhinoOS is a quite a ways out in development from 5.0, I'd suggest running Rhino on the PC side until the OS version is further along in development.

We laser cut directly out of Rhino and also run RhinoCam on our CNC router and plasma (using RhinoNest and RhinoTerrain at times). It's nice to stay in the same app from concept through design to output and since Rhino has broad and open plug-in development it seems to have wider capability in that regard.

Of course the in-app and plug-in rendering capability are great too. With neon you can get real-time, in-viewport ray-tracing which is pretty fantastic.

-kg

[Doug Griffith]

Hey Doug,

Just wondering how you found Rhino lacking compared to SolidWorks? It does take some time to adapt to making surfaces from curves in various viewports and orientations then joining them to make solids but once you "get it", the complexity of the forms that you can produce fairly easily is very broad. Rhino's limited parametric editing can be problematic, but history works with many more functions in rhino5 than it did in 4.0. Of course there is grasshopper if you want to get into scripting and parametric form-finding. RhinoOS is a quite a ways out in development from 5.0, I'd suggest running Rhino on the PC side until the OS version is further along in development.

We laser cut directly out of Rhino and also run RhinoCam on our CNC router and plasma (using RhinoNest and RhinoTerrain at times). It's nice to stay in the same app from concept through design to output and since Rhino has broad and open plug-in development it seems to have wider capability in that regard.

Of course the in-app and plug-in rendering capability are great too. With neon you can get real-time, in-viewport ray-tracing which is pretty fantastic.

-kg

I was using Rhino 4 (PC and Mac) and admittedly didn't give it much time. The fact that it wasn't parametric encouraged me to move on. Also, almost all of my design work goes straight to tooling and the files generated by Solidworks play well with CAM. I'll have to give version 5 a try.

[Joe De Medeiros]

I am lucky enough to use Autodesk Inventor 2013 Design Suite. I have access to the full thing, from 2D and 3D to simulation analysis to 3DS max. Here is the kick in the pants with 3D regardless of the platform (i.e. Inventor or Solidworks). 3D CAD by its very nature is linear. I have a machine running 8 processors but guess what? Inventor can only use 1 for many things. Yup...1. There is no way around it. For things like 3D rendering it can use multiple processors but when I am designing plastic molded injection parts, it can only use a single processor. So adding a program to mimic windows on top of that, things are going to be even slower. I have nothing against apple, but every truly high end CAD system I have ever seen for anything has not been MAC based.

Mark, I agree it's a pain, I run a 12 core 24 thread Mac Pro with a Quadro 4000 and 48gigs of ram, and watching it use only 1 core is frustrating.

[Doug Griffith]

Mark, I agree it's a pain, I run a 12 core 24 thread Mac Pro with a Quadro 4000 and 48gigs of ram, and watching it use only 1 core is frustrating.

Gosh darn. I'm putting together a computer wish list for compensation for work done. Yours looks like a good place to start!

[Joe De Medeiros]

Gosh darn. I'm putting together a computer wish list for compensation for work done. Yours looks like a good place to start!

Wish it was mine, but it belongs to my employer, but it is on my desk, and I'm hoping they let me buy it when they upgrade next year, to what ever apple has to offer as a replacement, It's a fantastic machine.