huangyhg

promechanica versus risa
i am working for a small company that does mechanical (product) development and design, and civil engineering(roads, subdivisions, drainage). i am the new (only)structural. i have risa 3d which i bought for myself. i would like risa floor. the owners are a bit reluctant, understandably, to spend any more money on design software given the cost of the promechanica package they own. i have agreed to look at the capabilities of both. this weekend. i have just finished flipping through the instruction mauals for the "structural" sections of pro e mechanica. am i wrong or is this the equivalent of trying to use a nasa crawler to tow my compact pick up truck to my garage? has anyone doing building structures in a small company used promechanica for design - i mean like wood and steel and beams and columns for traditional structures? does anyone have any input that i can add to my misgivings, before i spend all weekend on these manuals? has anyone used risa floor? do you like it?
thanks
as far as i can tell risa floor is supposed to be another of a thousand building products out there (ram, etabs, staad, etc.). never used pro mechanica. sounds high end. risa is more on the low end. many high end products like etabs or staad usually have thick manuals. that is the price you pay for playing with high-end features. i like staad because of the ease of use of a command file and graphical environment.
we just purchased risa floor. it is version 1.0 so very early in its life but based on our experience with ram (another floor design product) it appears to be well written and geared to the building designer. input is graphical, intuitive and quick (the r in risa standa for rapid). have not used it yet on a project, though.
by the way, in my humble opinion, a "good" program is not measured by how thick its manual is.
i have used risa 2d for some years now, and rigth now i am gonna go with risa3d director, wich includes the risa floor, i am happy with the interface that risa have oppossing a batch program; i think a good software program goes with a thin manual...
promechanica is a high end fea package which has been specifically designed for mechanical problems. to do structural stuff with the same ease as other structurally biased software will be almost impossible. rivals for this software are probably algor, ansys, abaqus etc. for slab problems robot millennium is veru easy to use, never used risa but believe the cost to be low (but sometimes you get what you pay for). however all the others listed in other responses do the job also.
i agree with barnieb in that you get what you pay for. sap and staad are high-priced for a reason. they have about 25 years of testing and usage behind them and have about 5 times the number of people working on their products. i use all three product and use ansys for doing ductility and fatigue analysis. staad has slab and shear wall design as well in their new version. i think they are a tad behind on the release date (says march 20th on their website). renemartinez's comment that good software goes with a "thin manual" is absurd. having a thick or thin manual has nothing to do with anything. as an engineer, you learn to glean what you need from any resource and come to a conclusion. i much rather have more info than less.
lippie:
i think that a good software has to prevailed with or without a thick or a thin manual, because you´ll got to have a good technical supportby phone, online, etc. so, why i will need to buy a 600 page book in order to know how to use excel for example???, anyway hand calculations has to be the sure way to review your software.

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