I got very impressed by a demo of Creo last week. I had a few sale guys on a screen-sharing meeting, and they showed me Pro/Engineer and ISDX.
That is nice stuff, and some features seems more stable than in SW (curve on surface and some others). However I suppose they showed me what ProE is better at, not the other way around
After some surfacing examples we had a look at next relese, Creo, and a future the called SubDivision. Man! Was that cool!
They had made a way to allow modeling like in polygon-apps, like subpatch-modeling in Lightwave, but better! And then use that geometry to do normal mcad stuff on, as rounds, cuts, shell and such.
Basically the control-cage itself were controlled by numbers (resolution), it were able to merge-in cage-parts, and you could control the weight on the fly for the points!
And this were done inside Creo, and somewhat parametric (if I did understand this correct) since you could go back and do changes that came trough to the true parametric side. You could add constrains to the shape, were you needed a perfect straight or round, stuff that I have never seen before.
Call it cage-modeling, subpatch, subdivision or whatever, but we need this too, quite soon! Give me some fait, show some of SW 2012
Mans,
The folks at Catia showed us their ID tool that is, I think, quite similar and most impressive several years ago. We almost made the leap, and then chickened out when the Catia demo folks couldn't generate a clone of our SW case part in the time allowed, which seemed more than enough. Like you, I would love to have this capability in SW, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Jerry Steiger