Week 1 report on my NX trial:
- You
really need some kind of training to use this program effectively. I've used i GET IT ($89/mo I believe,
Online Training for Manufacturing, Engineering and Design - i GET IT) coupled with YouTube channels and it's done a lot to illuminate things. NX has been updating rapidly lately so the courses on i GET IT are for an old version with slightly different UI and dialogs/menus, but it's easy enough to figure out. This YouTube channel especially (that someone on this forum linked) has been excellent at showcasing newer features on the CAD side:
Bizlearn - Siemens NX Blended Training - YouTube.
- I've probably allocated 30ish hours over the last week to NX the program and/or reading through the i GET IT courses. Much of that has been without being at the computer, just reading through courses on my phone before bed. It would be better to have the program in front of me, but my trial license is node-locked to the work computer that I leave in the office. Did my first "CAD project" a couple days ago and was very happy with the result (a model that can generate a variable family of parts based on boolean parameters and external references).
- Overall, NX CAD seems to be extremely nice, easy to grasp, and very powerful. I was worried, coming from Fusion 360, that I would be tripped up by the top-down model that Fusion prefers compared to the bottom-up model that NX seemed to prefer, but it hasn't been an issue.
- NX moved to a "continuous release" model after NX 12, and the current version is now NX 1926. As of this latest release, a lot of work seems to have been put into making things more "discoverable" on the CAM side. I believe one of the reasons that people considered NX to have a "vertical" learning curve was that shit you expected to see was just so hard to find... hidden in layers upon layers of dialogues that you had to click through. With 1926, CAM operation creation has switched to what they call the "Explorer" view, where much more has been "flattened out" and made available by clicking through tabs as opposed to clicking obscure buttons that opened entirely new dialogs. For instance, stuff you'd almost
always want to look at, like stepover/depths/etc., was behind a button that took you into "cutting parameters". Now the obvious options are available on the "main" tab and the less common options are behind another tab.
Beyond playing around with individual operations (confirming barrel cutters work with a fixed axis!), I haven't tried fully programming a part yet, but I may find some time this weekend to give that a try (reprogramming a part I've already programmed in Fusion to see how the process compares).