How many of you feel the pain of having to use engineering tools to do industrial design work? I hear from a lot of designers more and more these days that they are getting persuaded, coerced or bullied into using an engineering modeling tool. Certainly these tools have come a long way from what they were capable of fifteen, ten, even five years ago. Do you find that they just aren't suited to the way you, as a designer, are wired to think? Do you see your design ideas compromised at best, butchered at worst, due to a tools inability to easily create the shapes you want (see my previous post on G3 continuity)? Tools like Alias are the king of nurbs modeling and in the hands a skilled surfacer, is unparalleled in it's ability to create to most complex and mathematically correct models. It's fast and freeform beyond belief, but not everybody uses it. So how do you find yourself doing complex shape modeling in an engineering tool? Do you use an engineering specific tool, like Autodesk Inventor? Do you think there could be easier ways to get the results you want?
Let me know your thoughts.