Bentley Systems offers the MicroStation application and product family as a 3D and 2D modeling and computer-aided design (CAD) solution for engineers and designers.
$250
Per User Per Month
Tacton Design Automation
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Tacton
Design Automation provides constraint-based and parametric engineer-to-order
automation inside SolidWorks, PTC CREO and Autodesk Inventor. With needs-driven design, CAD engineers can configure designs of complex products – including feedback on incompatible
choices - and automatically generate complete 2D drawings, 3D models and quote
documents. The configurator-powered Tacton Design Automation is designed to propose a solution that's not just buildable, but optimal for the…
MicroStation is well suited for environments where animation and 3D modelling is required for designs. It perfectly fits into scenarios where Building Information Modelling (BIM) is used. One should avoid this platform if the budget is low and the overall length of the project is not huge.
Tacton works best with products that always look the same and use a large number of the same shaped parts, but those parts are often a custom size. Tacton can also work extremely well with products with parts that don't need to be resized, but just have different options of parts.
Tacton has a non-linear solver, meaning it can solve lots of equations without them being is a particular order. This enables the software to be incredibly flexible.
Tacton has a great interface to set up configurators for people to use. No knowledge of programming languages is required. The configurator uses equations similar to Excel equations to control what the users options are.
Tacton has the ability to easily add lists of data like product lists, beam or pipe sizes that because available for user selections or for calculations.
The Tacton configurator also automatically builds the user interface as you set up user inputs making it much easier to set up then competitor software.
Layout mode is probably the most lacking aspect of the software (within Tacon Design Automation Engineer). Something so powerful as having modular parts should be more heavily supported. Although, I've heard Tacton is focusing on updating this with better functionality.
The constraint editor does not display complex/lengthy constraints very well. I end up using Excel to visually break out in cells the different aspects of the constraint.
MicroStation is very hard to use for our newest employees. It is not intuitive, and you need to know where to find the buttons to perform the commands you would like to perform instead of typing in the commands like other similar modeling programs. Also, it has no good traffic turning add-ins. We continue to run ALL our turning in Autoturn, since this is not a usable feature with MicroStation.
Microstation is not intuitive. It is almost impossible for our newest employees to use effectively, and I strongly prefer to start them with Civil 3D, where possible. With MicroStation, you really need to be an intermediate to advanced user to use the program and know where the buttons to do what you want are located. They need to make their program more command based. Things like snapping to a near point or correcting text size universally are not intuitive like they are in Civil 3D or SOLIDWORKS. For other programs you can just type in commands like "LINE" and draw a line. In Microstation, you need to select between a polyline or smartline from the tools>geometry menu. Why does it need to be so complicated? We ONLY use this program, because we are required to deliver our models in the DGN format to our client. Otherwise, we would use Civil 3D for everything.
My company initially purchased DriveWorks and I was trained. However, a year later we found Tacton Design Automation. Based on the same points mentioned in this review we left DriveWorks for Tacton. Briefly those points are: Tacton, at the time, was the only design automation software integrated (meaning the interface for programming and running Tacton) within SOLIDWORKS; GUI creation is streamlined; automatic error handling is huge; layout mode; multi-unit support.
Time to produce submittals went from 1-2 weeks down to a couple of days. Then, once approved, normally to produce the fabrication drawings (70+ unique parts) it would take from 4-6 weeks. We can get it down to as little as a few days.
