Healey Marque to be reborn with V5

According to Applied, UK Dassault Systemes Partner, the Healey 3000 Sports Car is to be re-born and built in the UK with the help of CATIA V5. HFI Automotive, an Anglo-American Consortium of engineers and investors has purchased the Dassault Systemes Catia V5 for use in the design and development of their new Healey 3000 sports car.



News on the latest developments with this seems to stop in late 2007, but according Applied, Healey Automobile Consultants (HAC), owners of the British sports cars brand "Healey", was purchased by HFI back in 2006. HAC was originally founded in 1955 by Donald and Geoffrey Healey. HFI's development of the new Healey 3000 is advancing with plans for their manufacturing base to be in the UK.

More details at AutoExpress and AutoCognition.

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Catia V6R2009x: it does stuff

Design team interaction is something that DS are taking to new levels.

Dassault Systemes has launched Catia V6R2009x at its annual European Catia Forum event at Disneyland Paris. As ever, the press release is an absolute doozie. When you spend your time reading these things, getting anything from DS is always a joy. Why? Because the company's shear inability to actually tell you what they mean is always fascinating thing to work with. Take this paragraph:

As with the previous release of V6, Release 2009x is designed to extend the value of customers' existing PLM assets. Dassault Systemes continues to develop and make available transition scenarios for its varied user base, including customers with mixed DS and non-DS applications. Support for collaborative design scenarios between V4/V5 and V6 enables gradual adoption of V6 for an OEM and its supply chain. Further, DS plans additional releases of its popular V5 line of solutions, such as the recently announced V5R19, whose functionality enhancements are synchronized with and available in V6R2009x.

What I think they're trying to say is:

With V6R2009x, you can do more with your data. If you're using V4 or V6, then there are tools to move data to V6 (the use of transition is telling - it means its a one way move, not bi-directional). If you mix and match data (such as Catia and something else), then this is also possible. They're not going to discontinue V5 and have a new release out now called V5R19.

Dassault have some truly breathtaking technology and products, and as you dig into the web-site that details all the advances made in the R2009x release of V6, that becomes more and more apparent.



The real time rendering looks incredible, the ability to work interactively on your live data, with geographically dispersed design teams, to inspect data visual and gain a meaningful idea of how your product is progressing (using the 3Dlive tools) are all ahead of the game.

Why Dassault can't manage to communicate that in a simple press release baffles me. Baffles me entirely.

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FirePro V5700 vs Quadro FX 1700 with Catia

DEVELOP3D's hardware expert, Greg Corke, has been playing with graphics hardware again (it keeps him out of trouble). This time he's been comparing the performance of FirePro V5700 vs Quadro FX 1700 in Catia V5.
As the blurb says: The FirePro V5700 and the Quadro FX 1700 are tested side-by-side for real-time performance in CATIA using the standard CATBench high polygon count models. These tests were conducted at X3DMedia in London on Oct 25, 2008 under the supervision Greg Corke and Martyn Day of Develop 3D magazine. The tests were run on identical HP xw8600 workstations.
See the next issue of DEVELOP3D (coming very soon) for more the first in a series of articles on how to tune your graphics performance and get the best out of your hardware - this month its Catia (as you might have guessed), but we'll be covering all the biggies in the coming months.

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Where's the Future of 3D interaction?

3Dconnexion has just released details of research they've been doing into the return on investment, commercial pay back that can be gained from using its 3d motion control devices. According to the research those using 3D mouse devices users noted that they were comfortable using the 3D mouse within two days from the time they began using it (80% of them in fact) and 70% felt proficient within the first week.

The report (available at www.3Dconnexion.com/productivity) brings many more facts to light about the time that can be saved by adopting a tool that's designed specifically for the job. It is really worth a read.

The question this raises for me is that that for decades now, many of us have been using 3D based design tools to develop new products on a daily basis, but still many of us are using the same keyboard and mouse combo that we have had since time immemorial. Let's not forget that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down typists on mechanical typewriters so they wouldn't jam up - is that really the optimum way of interacting with 3D data?

Users are now becoming much more familiar with 3D based working practices, particularly in the professional design related sphere of influence - but I do wonder where we're headed next?

The last few events I've attended have seen references to how Nintendo have changed the 3D interaction world with the Wii and specifically, the WiiMote device.

Dassault demonstrated how the WiiMote device can interact with CAD-related data at the recent DEVCON event in Paris. Of course, Dassault has an interest in Gaming technology because of its Virtools technology (which now supports the Wii platform) and has a head start on many of the CAD company's not involved in the industry. Dassault's Bernard Charles also hinted at the same event that their development team is currently working on a hardware-based device for Catia and Enovia users. A chat with the head of their Research and Development team confirmed that this might be in the offing.

Elsewhere, a CAD user has built a drive to allow the use of the WiiMote within Autodesk's Design Review and the same tool has been made available on the Autodesk Labs website.

I'm reminded of a chat I had with Bill Buxton, the then Chief Scientist of Applied Sciences at Alias Wavefront, who, ten years ago, talked about many of the things that are only now coming to light. If you take a look at his personal web-site, then you can see many of the devices that his team worked on back then. And if you want a further interesting read, get hold of his Sketching User Experiences book. It's honestly one of the best books on subject I've ever read and should be on every designers bookshelf.

Bringing us back to 3Dconnexion and its research, I'm amazed that the company still is the only vendor actively pursuing this area. The potential to do really interesting things has been there for some time. Many have come and gone.

The Dimentor Inspector - combined a trackball and optical mouse - and had around the same lifespan as the average rodent.

There was the Dimentor Inspector device from Sweden, which combined a mouse with a trackball to navigate in 3D (I've still got one sat in a box in the loft). It only really worked with SolidWorks and the company was only around for a year or so.

Others have had a crack at it with limited success and I find it strange that its only 3Dconnexion that has managed to actually achieve any form of market penetration - and I take my hat off to them. They took some time to develop truly usable products and made a few mistakes on the way. I still use a prototype of the original, but short lived, SpaceNavigator device, which saw the integration of a SpaceMouse with a Logitech Keyboard (3Dconnexion's parent company) - and promptly got canned.

I'm off to interview the guys in charge of SpaceMouse products in a couple of weeks and if anyone has any questions, ideas or information they'd like me to ask, to find out, then I'd be more than happy to ask and report back on the response I get.

And don't get me started on MultiTouch - that's stuff is coming - its an exciting new world and as professional users of 3D, we're looking to get the most out of it.

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Blue Ridge launches CFdesign v10

The image above shows simulation results from a Quick Natural Convection on LED light design shown with CFdesign v10 new user interface - nifty looking eh?

Blue Ridge Numerics (at 1pm, UK time today to be exact), released details of the latest release of its CFD application, CFDesign. The big ticket items for this rev seem to be a new user interface, greater CAD integration, better design review features and interactive void filling and external volume creation.

Interesting, UI changes aside (which look pretty good as you can see), the CAD associativity interested me. There are two schools of thought here. To built the app directly within the CAD interface, or to build it standalone and provide tight links. The two are not always as clear-cut as they seem. In all fairness, CFDesign has always been in the Standalone/integrated camp and this release sees that worked on with the ability to extract much more from the CAD data, such as model orientation, part and background, part names and material properties. Blue Ridge also talks about mapping of mouse functions. I guess that this means the user will load CAD data from their workhorse tool and the system can be set to mimic the user interaction methods of that CAD system. Also of interest is the new multi-view mode, which allows you to work with different analysis results sets and have the system synchronise the panning, zooming and rotation of the views. Other updates include interactive void filling and external volume creation meaning you don't have to do it your CAD system.

Lastly, Blue Ridge has also introduce CFD-tv which provides users with "on-demand, task-specific training in a Web 2.0 format that will appeal to multi-tasking engineers who want to add CFD to their armory." Apparently, each CFD-tv episode is a short video segment led by a CFdesign power user intended to answer commonly asked questions.

There will of course be a full, indepth review of CFDesign 10 in the next issue of DEVELOP3D - so make sure you sign up for a subscription.

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