Pro/Engineer Manikin Extension goes live

I thought this was made available in the Wildfire 4 release cycle, but it appears that I was wrong (blame my rapidly increasing years) - anyway, this is good stuff. PTC has released a new add-on (for Extension as they like to call them) that allows you to integrate a digital mannequin into your product models. The human models can be customised according to a pretty wide range of human factors inputs, whether that's gender, race, nationality and they conform to the H-ANIM standard (ISO/IEC 19774).

Pro/Engineer Manikin Extension seems to let you put the human form into your models, while the more advanced version which lets you analyse your humans against "a number of quantitative human factors, and workplace standards and guidelines."
But what I love the most is the fact that PTC is an impressive company all round, has some fantastic tools and technology that is, despite the message from many vendors, still highly active in many sectors - the stories we've been writing about industrial designers and product developers, backs this up - but when they put together their product pages, to show off a tool that's modern, fresh and pretty impressive choose to show the female variant of the mannequin stood at a sink (as below). Either that or its a dude with a pony tail. Either way, its pretty outdated.

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HyperShot V 1.5 is ready to rock

Sextant Navigation Eye2It Media Console courtesy of Pixelmathematics

Bunkspeed has launched HyperShot V 1.5 with new key enhancements being interaction with all major 3D solid and surface modelling products, as well as even brighter, more realistic photographs rendered even faster from 3D models.

How are they doing that? Let's break it down. Faster Performance is gained through improved real-time raytracing (done with quicker self shadow calcs), better real-time handling of materials on objects without texture coordinates and a cached material library, which will display all materials instantly. And end results are going to be improved with sharper shadows and texture maps in the final rendering and better turntable animation in HyperShot Pro (for the record, I think the turntable animation tools should be in all of the offerings. No pun intended). The translators have also been worked on support for Rhinoceros both on the Mac and Windows, better support for Pro/Engineer Wildfire 4 and better SolidWorks and IGES support.

Since I was 16, I've been fighting with creating realistic looking renders based on accurate CAD data. While many industry pundits love to talk up the amount of time they've spent looking at this software we called CAD, the only reason I say this is that I know exactly how long it takes to create the type of imagery you can see here, and its too dammed long - HyperShot solves many of those bottlenecks. There's a full review of HyperShot 1.5 in this months DEVELOP3D - so reg up and get your copy. If you've already done so, then enter your email address and read at your leisure - there are five copies of HyperShot Web to be won as well, along with a whole host of other goodies.

Oh and its time to confess, we f&*ked up: the cost of the Pro version is not 10 grand, but a much more reasonable 3,495 USD - sorry Thomas.

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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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