This is first day of use stuff. No complex surfaces, and still not an
  assembly. I'd say 4-5 hrs of going through the exercises.

  C Smith

  Can Alibre render that stuff?

  Paul Lamar

  I guess I don't understand the question. I made these myself, with alibre,
  today. Render as in????
  I exported them to igs files, because I've seen that format here on this
  letter. There are quite a few export choices. As far as the term "render",
  what do you want to see? A jpg? There are a few .stp choices. I will
  document the export formats, tomorrow.

  C. Smith

  jpgs.

  This is what your parts look like rendered with Rhino.

  Paul Lamar


  So here is a jpeg of the completed assembly. I haven't explored all the
  features of presentation, there's a whole slew of options, so these are
  just
  defaults. I'll try to add fillets to edges, and I think the top block is
  doable later today. Some of the hole dims aren't clear to me from the
  jpegs,
  but I think I can come pretty close.
  C. Smith

  That is pretty good Craig. Either that program is easy to learn or
  you are a genius. I suspect the latter.
  What does it cost? Can I get it for Linux?

  Paul Lamar

Alibre is THE bargain parametric modeler. Their website is here:

http://www.alibre.com/

Bob Fritz did an article on it in Kitplanes sometime in the past year. The
eval can be downloaded for free and after the eval period is up is still
remains functional but crippled. There's lots of stuff on the web including
comparisons between Alibre and SW.

I've played with it a little bit. For mechanicals its probably a good
choice. For lofting an aircraft (or your cowl design contest) probably isnt
a good choice. Surfaces are a problem. Which is why I asked about Rhino.

What all of you guys touting SolidWorks are failing to recognize is that
most of us here are doing this for a hobby, not a living. SW is a great
program but I cant justify the expense for the sort of doodling I want to
do. It appears to me that Alibre will do 90% of what SolidWorks will do for
10% of the price and for a hobbiest that's a good tradeoff.

For those who mentioned a steep learning curve with SW, you should try ProE.
What took me a week to learn in ProE took 2 hours in SW.

Take my comments with a grain of salt - I'm definitely a rookie with this
stuff.

Mike Wills


I like to see the competition. That will force the price of 3D
programs down.

Paul Lamar


Here are the top block files. After I finished, I realized the boss was
incorrectly oriented. However, my editing abilities are still challenged, so
rather than spend the time trying to figure out those issues, all that
really matters is your being able to get a sense of how well the program
works. I had to guess at a lot of dimensions. I believe you did publish an
igs file of the block anyway, so I have the correct drawing somewhere in the
mail archives.
Now on to the cowl creation.

C. Smith

BTW Craig was that Hytek data aq system working when you sent it to
me? My programmer says he cannot get it to work.

Paul Lamar