I would be super interested to hear how you go with that.. I've been looking for a good CAD program for personal use for ages. Done lots of research and can't find anything that ticks all the boxes. I have been very intrigued by IronCAD, which has a super innovative primitive boolean push/pull approach unlike anything I've seen before. Still $6kUSD for one license, but more manageable than $20k
Interesting decision. Will you be doing the NX elective? It totally depends what part of the industry you plan to go into I think. Lots of industrial design consultancies operate entirely with SW. If you plan to work with a huge manufacturer like GM, Dyson or Apple however, a big chunk of them use NX.
Just a word of advice from experience, NX is weird in that some parts of it actually feel like a huge step down from SW. I still think the sketching tools in SW are WAY better than NX, and when I was making the switch, I was so frustrated by features I missed from SW. The thing is, NX uses a different paradigm. Instead of being so heavily reliant on sketches, NX uses the concept of curves, which is any sketch object, or any edge. So you can make extrudes and features with existing edges, and inside the extrude command you have heaps of options to offest and create detailed features from those curves, without even having to make a sketch. Convert entities? Not necessary in NX. This was so confusing to me at first. But now that I'm used to this new paradigm, I don't think I could go back. Using curves saves so much time.
Another weird niggle was that NX doesn't have 3D sketches. Again, I was so confused, but it actually uses a way better system. Instead of having to draw 3D splines in a sketch, each spline is just it's own feature, and can be attached to any object up to G3 curve continuity.
One of my favourite features in NX, is deleting attributes. You can select the whole model, and essentially 'flatten' it, which removes all the features in the tree, and leaves you with just dumb solid bodies. In SW, I wasted so many hours fixing the feature tree so it didn't fall apart. In NX, just delete all the features after a day of work, and start from the dumb solids the next day. It reduces the file size, speeds up the system, and because of the unbelievably powerful direct synchronous modelling tools, you're never limited by what you can then do with those solids.
The only time I'd use a full parametric feature tree, is when you're making a complex A-surface model for the shape of a product. It's easier to tweak the shape in that case. But for rudimentary geometric constructions often seen in computer design? Delete those features! If a CAD program doesn't have this capability, I don't think I could even consider switching, that's how much time it saves.
Man, I could talk about CAD all day. I'll stop now before this turns into a proper rant
