CoCreate is back with 2008

Things all went a little quiet on the CoCreate front while the PTC acquisition worked its way out and through the system, but that's done with and the company is pushing its latest release. Today saw the announcement of CoCreate 2008. You'll notice that the hideous OneSpace Designer Modelling nonsense naming has been dropped. What we're now dealing with is CoCreate Modelling and CoCreate Model Manager: a much clearer naming convention. What's also interesting is that the press release mentions "incremental enhancements" that peaked my curiousity so I took a closer look. Updates for this release after the jump:





A) Improved and reworked pattern, that guides the user through the process of creating a pattern features, but also gives you better options for non-uniform patterns and selective suppression of specific instances.



B) Shaded and rendered drawing views



C) You can now capture work-in-progress and this is an interesting one. By allowing the user to save daily work and “what if” scenarios, even when you have multiple revisions of locked parts and assemblies loaded into your session. This type of thing will save that, end of day – "Who the eff locked out my parts, I want to go home?" problem that many PDM users will be familiar with.



Modelling updates



With the recent interest in Direct Editing, Explicit Modelling, Push me Pull me modelling technology, its also no wonder that PTC are making some noise (if a little subdued) about the modelling tools in CoCreate. This release sees some enhancements made to cross-sectional modification and there's some new surface editing, which allow you to maintain curvature tangency, coincidence, and continuity.



Considering the noise that Siemens are going to make this week with the dual-headed launch of Solid Edge and NX with Synchronous Technology, this release is perfect timing. CoCreate 2008 is scheduled to be available in May 2008 in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

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Protecting IP with the new breed of 3D design

One thing I've been thinking about of late is the new breed of modeling technology that's clearly coming on stream, which allows you to work with geometry in a very freeform, unrestricted manner. If, you can load a part or assembly, then edit it, without recourse to the construction history, you have the ability to edit a part without having knowledge about how it was constructed. And believe me, I think that's a good thing, when the tools finally get there, it means that we'll be able to concentrate on design and engineering, rather that operation of software.

But...

The benefit of history and features is that you are storing the intelligence in your model, of how you construct the part, how you design it. With the rise of more intelligent features and such, you can store a great deal more information about the design intent, the process you went through to create those forms. In other words, the CAD model, at present, reflection a big portion of your intellectual property.

While its a royal pain in the arse, it also means that if you're working in a supply chain, you can protect your intellectual property to a large extent, because of this complexity. If a design change needs to be made, then the customer has to come back to you and your design team to effect that change, because, they have the knowledge of how it was constructed. and for many organizations, that consultative role is a source of revenue and on-going business.

If this new breed of modeling tool does not rely on that recipe that you store, and anyone can load the part, edit the information it represents, then that revenue might be lost.

Absolutely, I'm absolutely aware that the intellectual property held within a CAD system is the end result of the process, rather than the be-all and end-all of your organization's skills, the fact remains that this is something that more and more organizations are going to have to accept and deal with. How do you protect your data? what tools are available to ensure that your intellectual property is protected. Does is mean that the integration of Digital Right Management tools, such as LivePolicy from Adobe are the way to go, or as Bruce Boes of Siemens PLM Software commented in an interview I conducted recently, "This is something that should be rationalised with the security capabilites within your software, whether that's through your PDM system or through your CAD system"- it all that remains to be seen.

Its an interesting concept and I think something the industry as a whole is going to have to face up to at some point and I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on the subject.

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