We've had SharkCAD/Viacad v15 for about a month now. I decided to upgrade despite concerns about the AI Copilot and some unresolved bugs. Honestly, v15 isn’t bad, even though there aren’t many significant improvements.

It feels like there are only a handful of us users left active here. Personally, I can’t help but wonder if v15 could be one of the final releases, though I really hope that’s not the case. Given the current level of user activity, I wonder how sustainable it is to maintain the cost of a development team.

The last post in this thread was four months ago, which makes me wonder if anyone is still around to share their thoughts. Maybe this can spark some new discussion?

Hi Relaxibus,

I'm curious about the layer management in Alibre (vs SharkCAD)...

1. Can the layers be ad-hoc reorganized across boundaries, like, from branch to branch, tree to tree, more than and better than in SharkCAD? (As long as the re-org is not circular, as into from self to self.)

It is utterly, absolutely dePRESSING that the layer manager is so structurally limited, deficient by modern standards. Office/hobbyist standards or not, Punch can't expect users to see/predict months into the future and future proof any need to move geometry between files, without incurring non-removable new top layers, suffer the inability to reorg the tree from top down, or have file recipients suffer the same.

2. If you open two instances of Alibre on the same machine, can you copy and paste, or drag and drop text, geometry, or anything user-generated between the app instances?

(Assuming that that's possible, despite what the license says; reason for allowing is, as drawings.grow larger, it may they crash, and if an older reference fole is crashy, no one in yhe6ir right mind wats a crashy ref file taking down their real, main session, right?)

3. Can a tree or branch of geometry be cloned/replicated with all history of said geometry, so the user an create alternatives in a design? Imagine of instead of symbols or placeholders, the designer wants to show alternative arrangement of sleeping spaces, and just tear off a layer as a copy, without copying amd losing entity traits. I know SharkCAD had duplicate with history and as instance, but it is only a ouece of geometry, and not the branch it's in.

While exporting, pruning the excess dozens or hundreds of layers can achieve some of what I need, it's annoying that each successive expirt-to-import mesns more snd more nesting because we can't just extract a complete layer and move it. They're — to me — just IDs or symbols in a database, and, like cells in a spreadsheet.

It honestly feels like, A) the company doesn't care a user needs more reorg capabilities, or, B) the company might care, but someone put Tim under a cruel contractual constraint to never do it and never acknowledge the need for it. It is depressing, and makes me feel claustrophobic amd stressed when weeks or months into a design, I need to fork and reorg it, and can't even find nested layers by words/letters in the layer names.

Thanks for any feedback you can offer about your findings.

ZLC.

Hi,
1. The layers work totally different. Alibre is more history tree based, like you see in Catia or NX and so on. There are layers, but they aren't so much used like they are in Shark/ViaCAD.
In the history tree items can be selected and dragged above or below items, so for example if you have a hole in a part and it breaks a rad or chamfer, you can move the hole around the history tree to change the outcome of the chamfer/rad. Will doing this break something? Probably, depends how it's been modelled. Say you do this and then the chamfer/rad breaks, you right click the feature in the history tree click edit and reselect the edges which require a chamfer/rad. Alibre suppresses the tree up to the thing you edit, so once you are done you click a button and it reloads the rest of the history and updates the model.
This link is probably a good place to look for how to do things. I personally only use layers now in the drawing sheets if I perhaps have to hide something away or whatever.

2. Drawings are generated as a new file part and you select the part you want to make a drawing from, so it's all separate, not like in shark.
You wouldn't have two instances open at the same time. In the assembly that will be one window and a separate file part. You can right click a part in the assembly and open in a new window, do the edits and close the window, the assembly window up dates.

3. Alibre has something called configurations. So if you have a bunch of parts which are similar you clone the history tree (upto which ever point you want the clone to work from) give it a new configuration name and continue modelling. Say you have a screw with 20 different heads, you simply set up the clone to change the head only. Add a new sketch and draw the new head. When adding these parts to an assembly you can select the configuration and it loads the correct bit.

Other things they have introduced recently are excel driven modelling to make similar parts easier to make, on going 'toolbox' where they are adding standard parts, trace parts also provides native Alibre models. The drafting toolbars provide, welding, machining, tolerancing etc so there is no dragging symbols about. Plenty of view options, section, exploded, rotated section, cut out and so on.
The latest release has seen an introduction of PDM to manage files and such. I've not used it but could be useful to some.
There is of course different levels of purchase, think Atom is the basic, but still has a good few features and maybe a nice starting point.
https://help.alibre.com/articles/#!alibre-help-v23/introduction
This link may be useful to flick through and see how the set up of it all works.

So you can't just select a body of one part and copy/paste into something else because Alibre works on sketch / history based modelling. There is no random copying of things no.

To do what are describing I think it's just building an assembly file is it not? So all parts are their own file, then you start an assembly file and insert the parts, the parts are then constrained or anchored to fix their movement. https://youtu.be/vBMI_s1YUn0?si=6trZC6VuUHw_ua9u

If you find you need to edit a part, just open that in its own window and edit it.
The only thing that wouldn't have any history is an imported stp file, where it loads it as a solid body. That can then be edited but again it's all history based.