Hello there.
I am a new user and I am learning ZW3D. I have started with CAD/CAM already in 1980 in Los Angeles -City of Industry (I believe) the city college class with IBM APT 360…then followed number of other applications: Compact II, PC APT, Cadkey 2D - later 3d Surfaces, Bentley, Vellum 2D CAD, Gibbs, Mastercam v.3->9, Toolchest, Pro-E Junior, WorkNC, Solid Works, lately Fusion 30, Rhino and Spaceclaim (and there might have been couple more I just cannot remember right now). Not all of them did I bring to the point of knowing it 100%, because it was obvious, that it did not have any sense to continue due to application ability vs. price ratio. I own number of above mentioned application as I used to have my own business.
Lately -as a retiree-I am starting to learn again, after 19 years of hiatus, because I want to help my grandsons to become engineers…and having teacher at home for free is the best thing…
In 4 months learning myself with temporary free license I have received I found several problems.
No.1 the manuals are insufficiently explained for novice. The explanation of the commands is skimpy and it really misses examples.
I would suggest someone sits down and develops the vocabulary of the terms used in the manual, because -as someone else posted above- the manual uses interchangeably different names of some functions or descriptions…right now comes in my head the word Part, Solid and one more word, which I cannot remember right now(I did not expect to find a page, where I can submit this kind of complaint, so I did not make notes of it).
Second problem, which took me about 3 month to solve was, that solids in the history manager and the components(extracted shapes from solids) in Component manager under Assembly(before you actually start to move them in the assembly-so they are in original location/position) are covering each other, unless you manually switch visibility of one of them off…This should be fixed by the software developer, as in my opinion it is logic error. It should be not up to the user to switch the visibility of Solids or Components on or off, but rather it should be automatic, depending on which environment are you looking at it…so in History manager only the solids should be visible, in Assembly/Component manager only components should be visible. So, as you change the environment, the visibility of its corresponding pieces should be switched on/off, without the user doing anything…