Creo Explained – Part 3
<< Part 2
As I explained in Part 2 of this series I don’t believe PTC is going to maintain two sets of code bases for two platforms – one for Pro/ENGINEER and the other for CoCreate. It appears that they are dumping CoCreate in favor of Pro/ENGINEER. But the real question is how will this affects users of Pro/ENGINEER and CoCreate, especially CoCreate.
Well, users of Pro/ENGINEER do not have to worry about a thing. You can think of Creo Parametric 1.0 as Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 6.0. In fact, PTC programmers haven’t even changed the description and version number of parametric.exe (formerly proe.exe)
The product name still reads “Pro/ENGINEER”. Looks like PTC programmers didn’t get the “Creo Name Change” memo from Marketing. 😉
As regards users of CoCreate, things begin to get interesting. From what I understand, in time PTC will put all the features and capabilities of CoCreate into Pro/ENGINEER. Obviously they can’t do that by simply adding stuff to the existing Pro/ENGINEER platform quite simply because Pro/ENGINEER is a rigid history based parametric modeling system and CoCreate is a flexible direct modeling system. The process of geometry creation and modification are almost diametrically opposite to each other.
So this is what I believe PTC did. They took Pro/ENGINEER and made two copies of it. They called one Creo Parametric and the other Creo Direct. They didn’t do much to Creo Parametric. But they changed Creo Direct in such a way that the entire history based parametric modeling workflow of geometry creation and editing was completely hidden from the user. They then threw in CoCreate’s 3D CoPilot and the intelligent toolbar (now called Live Toolbar) and the user started getting the look and feel of CoCreate oblivious to the fact that Pro/ENGINEER is running under the hood.
3D CoPilot and Live Toolbar
Siemens PLM is solving this “how to give users the best of both worlds” problem in their own way. They are giving users a single program that does both things and the user needs to do the book keeping of features while switching from one mode to another. PTC is giving the user two entirely seemingly different programs and makes the software do the book keeping of features.
I will explain exactly how that is done in the next part of this series.
Part 4 >>
