[partlysean]

I think a good parallel of this is Webflow, which I find to be an incredibly powerful tool and gives design teams a lot of freedom to build and deploy their designs, however it’s incredibly cumbersome if you’re using it to mock up options and explore iterations. That work still happens in Sketch for our team, and when it’s approved that same team brings it into Webflow and “does it for real.”

I expect exporting from Sketch/Figma into React components would be cumbersome in this same way.

If I may pose another example from my days of industrial design, Rhino is a great tool for rapidly iterating designs and building CAD for renderings, however when your design is approved you really need to rebuild it in Solidworks for it to be made.

The real solution here is for companies to adopt a Design Ops/Design Systems Manager that can design and code in the front end. This would remove burden from the engineering team so they don’t have to worry about doing tiny design tweaks, etc.

[auggierose]

What can you do in Solidworks that does not work in Rhino? Do you have a list of top five points, maybe?

[stevegalla]

Judging by partlysean’s response, “our industrial design team would use Rhino and then hand it off to the mechanical engineers to rebuild it in Solidworks.” I would think Rhino lacks the entire Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) capabilities that Solidworks has.

The Wikipedia page for Rhino says it’s a CAD tool, but Solidworks says CAD and CAE. So Rhino has a subset of Solidworks’ capabilities.

Engineers use CAE to help with determining how the materials, dimensions, and other engineering choices will be have under loads. So these have some similarities in that Solidworks can also do 3D modeling, which is used as an input to performing CAE.

Different audiences and different use cases.

[partlysean]

It’s not necessarily a feature comparison, but I’ve found it much easier to just “try” things in Rhino. Solidworks is best when you already have a clear idea of what you’re building. In that way, our industrial design team would use Rhino and then hand it off to the mechanical engineers to rebuild it in Solidworks.