Develop3D - Technology for the Product Lifecycle

AU Follow up: Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program and Grants

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:47:00 +0000

Green Ocean Energy relies on Inventor to develop groundbreaking wave energy devices. After a discussion with Autodesk's ultra impressive sustainability team (seriously, this team is intimidating with their knowledge on the subject) at AU last week, one thing that came up was the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program. Essentially, Autodesk is giving away grants of software to early-stage clean technology companies "who are working to solve some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges".

The grant gives you five licenses each of Inventor, Revit, Vault, Showcase, NavisWorks and Alias Design worth around $150k. At the moment the program is restricted to North America (US and Canada), but what I found most interesting is that while almost every vendor is making its sustainability play, Autodesk are putting its money where its mouth is and offering some assistance to companies looking to develop new ways to assist the planet. Without spending more on software tools, those companies that they engage with can spend more on developing new technology that can help. That, my friends, is a good thing which ever way you cut it.

AU 2009: Manufacturing keynote round up

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:57:00 +0000

For me, the one session that's worth the trip to Autodesk University is the Manufacturing Solutions keynote session. This is where you get to see what Autodesk are working on, some of which, as history has proven, is due for the next release, some of it isn't and is just concepts. But the chances are that what you see here will make it into a release some point in the next two years (the next major release cycle is due around march next year). So, here's the crappy video. and then some notes.

Alias Sketch for AutoCAD

This was announced a few days ago and it sees the integration of SketchBook into AutoCAD. While the UI is adapted to its new home, the tools see to remain emminently usable. One of the key points about SketchBook and why it's seen such success is that it has a very stripped back set of tools, unlike Photoshop, and some specialised tools for design-led users. Looks nice and should be available soon according to Shaan Hurley's blog. Alias Freeform within Inventor

This bring a pretty easy looking set of geometry modelling tools directly within Inventor. While the video isn't too clear, the concept is that you have a single feature which gives you all of the dynamic modelling operations you need to quickly create complex forms, then use the more standard existing tools to add engineering detail. The toolset demo'ed looks extensive and pretty powerful for manipulating geometry - one thing to consider is how straight edges are turned into curves, how planar geometry is is turned into curved surfaces. This demo reminded me of the ISDX-based Style feature within Pro/Engineer and any advanced Pro/E user will tell you that its worth its weight in gold - hope this one makes it into Inventor. Direct Editing in Inventor

This is the first time Autodesk has shown any of its direct editing tools integrated into Inventor. While things are shaking out with regards Fusion and Change management, if this is what the future of Inventor's direct editing tools looks like. again, that can't arrive quickly enough.

Product Analytics and Data management This is an intriguing one. Autodesk are looking at how to make data management more user experience. Using graphical output as the basis for data management interactions, using heavy use of colour coding, data filtering, it all makes sense - allowing you to grab the information you want and get on with the job. Also tagged on the end of the video is a quick look at the boosted graphics richness. Autodesk has a rich set of tools for visualisation (with Showcase, 3dsmax etc etc) and if these types of capabilities to work in a much more graphically rich environment are implemented, it'll be useful and make working life much more pleasant for the user and provide a great deal of context for design work. Of course, visualisation tools have always had the benefit that it makes communicating complex forms much easier when dealing with those outside of the design environment 3D Printing

Autodesk worked with Stratasys to create the world't largest 3D print of a turbo-prop aerospace engine. All 188 components were produced in 4 weeks and assembled in 2.5 weeks for a total production time of 6.5 weeks. Using conventional fabrication processes, such as machining and casting, a manufacturer would expect to spend 9 months or more producing a model like this. Costs were roughly $25,000 compared to estimated $800,000 to $1 million that would be required using conventional processes. Having seen the thing up close, its an incredible feat of prototyping. Inventor Publisher

We've discussed this already, but here you'll see the Publisher application and the iPhone integration. Publisher makes huge sense and I'm fascinated to see where this is going to head. At present it covers 3D publishing, but as we all know, paper documentation is still heavily prevalent and I'm intrigued by what Autodesk has up its sleeve in this demand. One thing that came up this week was an element of dismissal of the iPhone has an industrial tool - I can see that point of view, but let me illustrate this for you. I recently saw an electrician turned up at a house to do some work. The part he was fitting wasn't supplied with the correct manual. He flipped out an iPhone, looked up the part on the manufacturer's web-site and read the PDF manual. Was he a young nerdy type? Nope. just a 50+ professional tradesman that found a solution that works wonderfully well. That's a sea change in how tech gets adopted by the masses. Moldflow visualisation

I like this one. Moldflow simulates how plastic is injected into a mould tool. But the results it gives are complex. What this shows is how you can take visualisation tools and provide an environment that shows users exactly how a part will look should manufacturing defects (such as sink marks) are left to enter into the manufacturing chain. Simulation

Last thing is simulation tools for Frame analysis. Beam element modelling is something that's perfectly suited for framework, but there's often a disconnect between the framework design and the highly stripped back model you'd use for simulation. This solves that very nicely indeed.

Fill out Cyon's fall survey - get two grand's worth of research in return

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:51:00 +0000

After having ran into Brad Holtz, founder of Cyon Research and mastermind behind one of the industry's most intriguing events, COFES, at Autodesk University this week, I was reminded that he's running Cyon's annual survey and this year it's focussing on "software stickiness."

The survey is open to employees of any firm that uses CAD, CAE, PDM, PLM, and/or BIM software for design, engineering, manufacturing, and or construction. Initial survey results will be published in January, with the detailed report published shortly thereafter. Why should you take the few minutes to fill out the form?

Firstly, because this research is pretty interesting. Anyone, particularly users, with an interest in trends and adoption of product development tools would find the results interesting as it's typically the type of data you'd pay a pretty penny to get your hands on. And the other reason is that if you are a user, manager or just plain curious, for your time, you'll also receive a copy of the final report which sells for around two $2,000. Link to the survey is here: cyonresearch.com/fall2009survey.

Live from AU: Inventor Publisher launches on Labs

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:45:00 +0000

First post for Autodesk University, so I figured we'd just jump straight in with a quick look at a new addition to Autodesk Labs. Inventor Publisher Technology Preview sees autodesk release a 3d product documentation application for creating assembly/disassembly instructions, manufacturing process instructions and all other manner of 3D documentation. It allows you, at present to bring in data from not only Inventor, but other formats, create keyframe style steps with automatic and manual explosion tools. The system gives you tools around the process, such as reversing workflows, managing views and step times as well as a range of output options, from DWF, through movie files (including flash output), powerpoint and word documents.

Taking much of its user interface queues from Fusion, the system looks pretty slick. What's also interesting and coming soon is a publishing option for the iPhone platform which gives you 3D model animation, manipulation (panned, zooming, rotation etc). It's not clear whether data will be local or hosted in the cloud, but it's an interesting trend and one that makes huge sense for making documentation and instructions portable.

Squeezable 3D Control Device

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:32:00 +0000

I'll admit it, I have absolutely no idea how this is going to work, what it offers for the world of design and 3D control, but I find it curiously fascinating. I just got a press release from Cambridge Consultants about the launch of Suma, and I quote, "a uniquely intuitive yet very low-cost squeezable user-interface technology that creates a whole new way of interacting with computers. With nearly 60% of US households predicted to own 3D displays within 5 years*, Suma offers a full 3D highly sensitive control experience for gamers and others who expect a high degree of interaction."

According to the release:

The patent-pending Suma sensor system translates the three dimensional deformation of a squeezed object into a software-readable form. Enabling highly sensitive control by finger movements and whole-hand grip in this way means that Suma-based devices can capture far more of the degrees of freedom of the hand than conventional controller technologies, without the need for cumbersome gloves or sensors.

A Suma-based device is like a traditional gaming controller with the normal casework replaced by a 'Suma skin'. This incorporates the proprietary Suma sensor network at an incremental parts cost of less than US$1. Suma will enable companies developing a wide variety of products and applications - from gaming and design to music and creative arts - to unleash the full capabilities of both the human hand and the user’s imagination.

There you go. Love to hear what you think. I'm buggered if I can work out how this will work for design tools, but it is, as I said, fascinating. And I'll be off to find out more when I get back to the UK.

ATI FirePro ushers in 10-bit colour support for Adobe Photoshop

GregCorke@gmail.com (Greg Corke) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:21:00 +0000

Hidden away in the release notes for ATI's latest FirePro graphics driver (8.663.3) is 10-bit colour support for Adobe Photoshop. But what exactly does that mean? Those that can afford HP's stunning DreamColor LP2480xz monitor will now have access to over one billion colours inside the industry standard imaging software - 64 times more colours than most LCDs. And that means incredibly smooth colour transitions - more colours, in fact, than your eyes can see.

What's going on at Adobe?

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:53:00 +0000

When Adobe got into the 3d CAD market following the aquisition of TTF a few years ago, many involved in the industry where wondering what the company would produce and how it would effect the CAD market.

To date, the impact has been restricted to the tools surrounding Acrobat 3D and perhaps the potential impact of Adobe bundling TTF's translation tools making high quality translation tools available for a much lower cost than has typically been the case through specialist vendors.

But last week, while the Global Product Data Interoperability Summit (GPDIS) (hosted by Boeing and Northrop Grumman) was underway, we got a phone call asking if "All was well with Adobe," as there was a booth at the event with Adobe's name on but Adobe were a no show. A curious thing, but with massive lay-offs at Adobe, it was perhaps an indication that the company was retrenching to its stronger areas.

Randall Newton, Editor in Chief of CADCAMNET was at the event and recently posted a report on his inquiries to Adobe, and he's agree to allow us to replicate that post in its entirety and it fleshing out some of the details:

New Adobe Layoffs Include Manufacturing Solutions Group
By Randall S. Newton Editor-in-Chief
November 12, 2009 - This week Adobe Systems announced the layoff of 680 employees. CADCAMNet has learned that employees of the Manufacturing Solutions Group were among those affected.
Adobe responded to our questions about the specific impacts of the layoffs with a vague statement: "Adobe is restructuring its business to align costs with its fiscal 2010 operating plan and budget, the company's three-year strategic priorities and the realities of the business environment, as well as to ensure its ability to continue investing in long-term growth opportunities."
Adobe's Manufacturing Solutions Group was scheduled to have a booth and a session at this week's Global Product Data Interoperability Summit (GPDIS) hosted by Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Conference organizers filled in with a new vendor on short notice when the Adobe team failed to appear on Monday.
3D Development to Continue
Adobe has given assurances to its technology partners for Acrobat 3D that the current round of layoffs do not affect the status of Acrobat 3D. Adobe is ending a vertical approach to marketing its 3D technology, but will continue development.
An informal poll of vendors and users at GPDIS found that, while many are using Adobe Acrobat in their documentation workflow, almost no one questioned was using its 3D capabilities. (To counter that, we are also aware of many uses of Acrobat 3D technology in manufacturing and construction.) In not-for-attribution comments, more than one developer told us that the technology remains challenging to work with, and that the "hooks" into the program are not nearly as robust as one might expect from a company as large as Adobe. In recent weeks key members of the Acrobat 3D team have left Adobe for other technology firms, including AMD and NVIDIA subsidiary mental images.
Tough Year
Last year around this time Adobe laid off about 600. This week's layoff of 680 is about 9% of Adobe's global staff. Most of the layoffs will be at the company’s San Jose headquarters and other locations in the San Francisco Bay area. Adobe revenue has been down, year-over-year, in each the last three quarters. In 3Q09 revenue was down 21% and profit was off 29% from the year earlier
Randall's also giving free access to all the articles posted at CADCAMNET for this month, so dive in and have a look to see what they've got for your interest.

In Search of Elegance #5: HDR Editing & the drive for Realism

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:20:00 +0000

If you're into visualisation, then you know about HDR images. They're becoming increasingly common in the world of rendering, with all the leading systems and their rendering counterparts including support for them. For those not up to speed, it's best we turn to that oracle of all things slightly inaccurate, Wikipedia, which defines a HDR image as:

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to represent more accurately the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight.

In terms of their use in product development processes, HDR images give you the ability to both light your rendering scene quickly and to create basic background imagery. It's built into the likes of Bunkspeed's HyperShot, Pro/E Wildfire 5, Modo (and hence, SolidWorks PV360), Autodesk Showcase, 3ds max (particularly with ART-VPS's ShaderLight on the way), Maya and pretty much everything else. When used correctly, HDR images give you results quickly, with realistic results. But there are two issues:

a) Unless you shell out for or hire a Spheron camera, you are stuck with either stock scene options in your rendering tool of choice, or have to purchase stock images from the likes of DoschDesign, 3six0.net and many others. While these are good, they're typically exterior shots, whereas the majority of users are looking for interior, studio like shots where reflections, highlights and details are paramount. Just as you would with a lighting rig, backdrops and a light tent.

b) When you're obsessing over render details, trying to get those reflections right, get the highlights where you want them, having a single image controlling the light and reflections isn't ideal. HDR images can be edited, but typically require editing the HDR image. Problem is, that's quite tough to do. yes, Photoshop now supports HDR editing, but its not ideal in terms of workflow.

How about something a little more elegant?

Enter HDRLightStudio from the guys at Lightmap, a company founded by the team at Protograph, a well known visualisation outfit that's been spearheading the use of advanced rendering tools for many years. Realising that they didn't have control over the HDR input into their work, set about developing a software tool that brings that control back to the user. The result is HDRLightStudio, which allows you to create custom HDR images.

Within a single, easy to use standard interface, you have complete control over the colour of your scene and the lighting within it. There's a number of standard shaped synthetic lights (circle, hexagon and rectangle) and you can position these anywhere within a HDR map (which is a spherical image that covers a 360 degree view).The system adapts each light you create to ensure that when used, the light retains the required shape and you have full control over luminance values according to real world values.

Alongside the Synthetic lights, there's also a range of Light Packs. These are standard libraries of real-world lights, such as windows, bounce sheets, spotlights (with barn-doors on or off), Soft-boxes and many other lamps. These can be selected from the library and positioned and adjusted within your scene alongside the generic light types already there. This allows you to better replicate true lighting rigs for photo-shoots and get exactly what you want.

Here's the basic workflow:

Figure 1: You can create synthetic lights from the standard forms or add realistic lights from the LightPack library.

Figure 2: Each light is fully controllable and adaptable to your requirements.

Figure 3: The preview gives physically accurate lighting and you have a number of guides to ensure that you're positioning lights correctly. Once you've happy with it, it can be rendered out to .HDR or .EXR format - you'll need to check your rendering software's support for each of these.

Figure 4: Load the HDR into your tool of choice (in this instance, HyperShot) and render away. 3D model courtesy of PK3d.com

Figure 5: The final thing - what says lovely more than a Volkswagen with green metallic paint.

To me, HDRLightStudio is a highly elegant solution to a particularly complex problem. People are getting more and more adept at recognising digitally rendered images and even the slightest thing can cause something of a negative reaction. All too often, you see product renders that over use marble, standard wood (seriously - what the ****is Bubinga?) materials and dodgy lighting schemes.

HDR image use lets you solve the lighting problem, but to get things really nailed, it doesn't give you as much control over the process and the results as hand knife and forking individual lights - so you're typically stuck with a choice between quick lights and no control versus excellent lighting and a lengthy set-up process. While for the CGI professional, time can be spent finessing the results, for those where rendering is a part of their job, usually under massive time constraints, you simply don't have the time. HDRLightStudio gives you that control back, in a quick and easy fashion. Oh and it's a bargain price (it starts at 149 quid) and if you're interested, we've got a discount code for you to get a 10% discount if you order it - just enter 'Develop3DNov09' into the online order page.

PLM+ targets user experience to bring PLM to the cloud

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:23:00 +0000

Just had an entertaining phone call* with Benny Shaviv of PLM+ who are trying to bring a fresh approach to the PLM world. PLMplus (or PLM+ if you can find the extra bit on your keyboard) has the goal of solving one of the longest standing barriers to PLM adoption - ease of use. By Ease of use, I'm not talking about implementation, cost of adoption, but rather the plain simple fact that many PLM projects fail purely because the systems in place are to complex, to hard and often too bewildering for users to accept as part of their day to day working practices. It's a common thing to find myself talking to PLM adoptees that have not got up and running with their system purely because buy-in of users has stalled the process. The need is there, from both a process and organizational requirement, the software is all encompassing and highly functional, but you'll often find one of the following reasons are prevalent:

"It's too complex and I don't have time to use it properly - so we don't" "It presents me with such an overwhelming amount of data, I don't know where to start" "I'm a designer/engineer - I'm not a database administrator - why should I bother?"

PLM+ are looking to solve this by creating a rich application that engages the user, provides ease of implementation and on going maintenance (by allowing the user/admin, rather than costly consultant) and can be delivered over the web, in an on-demand manner (which saves hardware and infrastructure cost). The on-demand aspects are interesting. Many have tried the on-demand the approach before. PTC have PLM OnDemand with Windchill, Arena Solutions have it's own set of tools. Can PLM+ achieve the level of success it's expecting? Who knows, but the time is right for web-based applications to thrive and in the wider IT world, they already are. Can that level of success be transitioned to the professional, more data-heavy world of product development? Who knows, but there's a change in the air. Or should that be, there's a change in the cloud. With a well respected team that have been involved in both support and sales of PLM for years, with an interesting blend of investors, timing is right. But perhaps the most interesting thing is how the team is approaching this from the user experience point of view, rather than functionality. That's something even I can get excited about.

PLM+ is currently in closed beta and we'll eagerly await further product news sometime next year. *One of the things I enjoy about something like about twitter is that you find people that you need to interact with on a professional basis, but get to know them through other means, through shared tidbits of information, of personal thoughts and personal views - so you have a much better understanding and personal relationship with them when the time comes for business talk. It's nice. Give it a try. You'll find me at twitter.com/alistardean.

Dassault spins out SmarTeam development and support

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:10:00 +0000

Dassault issued one of its classic press releases* this morning, relating to the continuation of Enovia SmarTeam's development. Entitled "Dassault Systemes Strengthens Commitment to ENOVIA SmarTeam V5", the release details how the a new Israel based company, artizone, has been subcontracted for the development and support of SmarTeam V5 technology. artizone is a newly created and independent company that will "develop and support Enovia SmarTeam technology under an exclusive contract with Dassault Systemes."

What's interesting is that artizone is comprised of many of the former team working on the SmarTeam product in Dassault's Israel office, which has been refocussed to sales and support for the V6 platform in the region (as we reported a little while ago). artizone will be headed up by Alex Zeltcer, former CEO of the SmarTeam brand and VP of Dassault Systemes' Value Channel.

artizone's plan is to "continue to invest in the SmarTeam product roadmap, while supporting new customers, as well as the current installed base of more than 8,000 customers around the world." As Zeltcer explains, "artizone has its basis in Enovia SmarTeam and leverages the same people and the same product expertise. By building an entity that is based on a solid relationship with DS on one hand, while developing new solutions for the future, everyone wins: DS customers, DS, and artizone's employees." Alongside taking on the SmarTeam business, artizone will start an additional, non-competitive business line in the area of online retail. *The reason this was a classic DS press release was how the headline, alluding to a stengthened commitment to SmarTeam, was found to actually mean, we're giving it to someone else to develop because we're focussing on V6. And the two don't exactly match. Or is it just me?

FreshFiber launch 3D printed iPhone cases

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:37:00 +0000

I picked this up from the folks at Freedom of Creation (or FOC for short). A Dutch outfit called Fresh Fiber has just started producing iPhone cases using 3D printing technology. There's no information about what process they're using as yet, but I'll be investigating and get back to you.

Truly fascinating. The ability to create customised products, either by the consumer or to create limited edition runs (Freedom of Creation's Janne Kyttanen designed the one shown above) is something that the rapid prototyping/direct manufacturing/fabber community has talked about for many years - and it's finally starting to happen. Looking at the forms there are decorative models, but the one that captured my imagination was Kyttanen's design, which features a dual layer of shock absorption using forms that would be very difficult to mould in a single peice.

Here's a short interview with FreshFiber founder Christian Dijkhof, courtesy of shufflegazine.com

European HyperWorks Tech Forum: Day 1 continued: A quick peek at solidThinking Inspired

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:18:00 +0000

This is another key area of focus for this 8.0 release, the launch of solidThinking Inspired. To set the scene, since Altair acquired the company, the two development teams have been looking at each other's technology stacks and finding areas of cross-over - something that might seem at odds between teams responsible for a concept development tool and those working on hardcore simulation tools. The first fruits of that cross pollination is solidThinking Inspired. To give you the background, this takes a technology from Altair developed for simulating the laws that apply to bone growth. While I'm not going to go into the detail, bone structure is developed by having a complex organic algorithm that build material to act and support the forces that occur within the structure of those bones. Essentially, nature takes on the role of optimisation and gives you a complex structure that's typically perfectly suited to its operating parameters. The scientific theory that defines this is Wolff's Law and implemented in a product called medical simulation product called OptiStruct. This is a field referred to as biomimicry, where technology is used to mimic the processes that occur in nature. What the solidThinking team has done is taking this underlying tech and build a product (referred to as solidThinking Inspired) that gives the designer tools with which to run simulation on basic work envelopes and have the algorithm remove material where it's not needed, giving you an optimised reference for further design work.

Base solid model defining working envelope and required geometric features

You start with a single solid model built within solidThinking that describes your rough work envelope. Most products conform to a basic size and form. In the case of a chair, you have supports (legs), a back and a seat. With a bridge, you have a span to cover, a platform for transfer and a spatial envelope for structural work, either above or below that platform. Once this is quickly sketched and modelled up, it's transferred to the Inspire environment.

solidThinking Inspire has very little in the way of user interface, but does stack up multiplecommands into single icons nicely

This is a separate application and there's very little in the way of user interface and the small smattering of icons is used to define the forces and constraints that act on that design envelope. You give it basic controls for where pressures and forces are expected to act on that design envelope, where it's expected to be fixed and such.

Loads, restraints and such are added. you can give precise values or rough estimates - experiementation and inspiration is the name of the game here. When you've defined the operating conditions, you then send the job off to calculate with an expectation in terms of percentage material removal. You choose say 25%, 30% and 50% and set it on its way. The system chunks through the work and presents back an optimised structure that enables material to be removed where stress are not present and retaining material where they're needed to reach its performance goals in terms of structural stability.

You then have a number of tools available which allow you to explore the design, to vary material removal, trade off weight against strength and inspect the results in 3D. The results are a decimated polygon mesh which represents what the system calculates to be the optimum structure given your defined loads and constraints.

The Final result set- you can see that the system has removed material where possible and gives you back intriguing results.

That form can then be transferred back into solidThinking to be used as reference for more traditional design exploration. The concept is that this gives you inspiration for new structures and new designers, which can then be used as the basis for further work in solidThinking. One thing that came up, considering the nature of the event we're at and its heavy focus on simulation technologies, that people involved with simulation ask questions about mesh density, about how the results are generated. And for me, this misses the point entirely. What solidThinking Inspired is about is giving the design community a new tool that, while it's based on robust proven technology (as used by the likes of Airbus for optimising wing spans or leading architects, SOM, for designing high-rise buildings) its delivered in a manner that enables its use for creativity, rather than simulation. This is a tool that's intended for finding new design alternatives, for providing, as the name suggests, inspiration, when working on new products. By bringing this type of technology, removing the complexity, but retaining the robustness, designers have the ability to research new structures for any given performance requirement and experiment further. The fact that it's based on OptiStruct gives you the reassurance that the structural forms it suggests are a better match to the functional requirements - you then have all of the power of solidThinking to assist with taking that form as the basis and developing a more refined product form. There is a download coming online very soon and it's worth playing with. From having access to the beta for a few weeks now, it's clear that there's huge potential in this system and the results it gives you don't always conform to how you might imagine they would. That for me is a benefit. it makes you think about what you're designing in new and interesting ways. But to realise that, you can then push your creativity, design and engineering skills to see how that can be taken advantage of.

European HyperWorks Technology Conference 2009: solidThinking Product Day

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:11:00 +0000

After a hellishly early start from Birmingham out to Stuttgart and a couple of quick train rides on the ever efficient German train network, I arrived in Ludwigsburg to attend the first couple of days on Altair Engineering's European HyperWorks Technology Conference yesterday. For those that aren't familiar with the company, it has a huge range of simulation products, of which HyperWorks is probably the most well known. Alongside it's simulation tools (which we'll talk about tomorrow), it has recently acquired a company that doesn't initially fit into it's engineering focus - namely, solidThinking.

solidThinking is a hybrid modelling product that's been on the market for a good long while and while it's been well received in Europe but has yet to find it's feet outside of it's core market. With a heavy focus towards the creation of complex shapes, solidTHinking offers a range of tools that you'd expect. curve and surface quality are key, but there's rendering, animation and all the things the industrial and product design community would expect. The solution has also gained much interest over the years because of its dual platform for both Windows and Apple Mac. There's been a huge focus on display quality and visualisation. On the display quality side, both in terms of speed (particularly when using openGL), but also allowing you to use environment maps (very handy for first pass renderings or to evaluate form) and better presentation of entities on screen (driving curves are anti-aliased and presented thicker than isoparms and such - making it easy to manipulate a design). In terms of visualisation, there's also been a huge concentration on bringing this area up to speed. The 8.0 release introduces not only progressive rendering (a la HyperShot and Modo), but also real-time rendering, where lighting and material changes are instantaneous. Another focus is the addition of manipulators - for editing geometry position using translation, rotation and scaling using axes and workplaces graphically handles. WHen you're experimenting with form and position of geometry, it's key that you're able to manipulate geometry as you wish, quickly and efficiently. Construction planes are automatically switched, based on your view, which is particularly handy when you're working in the perspective view - it'll switch to the most likely plane for sketching geometry, but you can also click the plane and lock it in position. Also there's some nifty new tools to allow the precise editing of curves, using not only the familiar control points, but also more ad-hoc curve manipulation tools that give you control over tangency, curvature, radius at any selected point, without having to create a heavy curve with additional control points.

But while updates that the team showed today are enhancements, the really big news is the stuff that solidThinking has done for years. The system is history based and retains a record of exactly what operations and features you create, the parameters you set and the tools you use to create complex geometry. There's been a debate raging on a recent post about Inventor Fusion (link) with a reader questioning why you would want a history tree when working with complex surface forms. In short, seeing solidThinking in action answers those questions. by maintaining a fully featured history, by linking the seemingly simple curve forms you use to create surfaces, then the maintaining an intelligent history of the edits that you make (such as moving control points, pushing and pulling geometry), you have a toolset that's perfectly linked for creating multiple design iterations, new concepts and new models in a very short space of time. There's much talk in the world of 3D CAD about mainstream products supporting the design workflow, but few actually support the work that an industrial or product designer does with traditional tools. The tactile response of pencil and marker sketching, the modelling of Stryofoam, are all still key ingredients during the formative stages of form and function exploration - at the point where product form is fluid and unfixed. solidThinking focuses on giving the user tools that are similar in their flexibility to play with form (in this instance, geometry). Yes, there's the obvious digitalisation barrier that removes the use from a tactile process such as sketching, but the benefits you can, from using a 3d-based concept modelling tool can give you similar results in terms of output - rapidly generated concepts, ideas and forms. These can be created, played with an worked in a fraction of the time you'd take to do it in a general purpose modelling systems (such as SolidWorks, Solid Edge or Inventor). And the reason you can do that is because you're using an intelligent modelling system tuned for the process, rather than a generic surface modelling tool. But enough of my yacking - want a look? Yet another sketchy video showing how the history is used to great effect when carrying out some structural packaging work, where the design of the final features, those that truly challenge any geometry modelling system. What's interesting is that here, the complex geometry is created first - then the rest falls into place.

There's more from yesterday shortly.

Geomagic debuts parametric exchange for NX on labs website

GregCorke@gmail.com (Greg Corke) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:24:00 +0000

At DEVELOP3D we love the increasing use of Labs websites to let users try out new tech in development - and this latest development from Geomagic is sure to interest users of NX. Geomagic has launched Parametric Exchange for NX which provides an intelligent connection between Geomagic Studio and NX. The tool is designed to take point cloud data and reconstruct it in NX as a parametric CAD model, complete with model tree. We'd love to hear from any NX users out there that try it out.

Hands on with Inventor Fusion Tech Preview 2.0 & Change Management

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:59:00 +0000

Finally got around my subscriptions update with Inventor 2010 (you need both SP1 and the Subs pack), so I've spent most of the day playing with Fusion Tech Preview 2.0 which was announced earlier this week and made live at the same time. What I've found has intrigued me, but before we get onto that, lets look at what we're dealing with. Fusion is about two things, in no particular order, other than it makes sense in terms of our focus. Fusion TP2 bring some changes and refinements to the user interface, which Autodesk is testing out with this project, so see what people like, what they don't and what sticks. Some of the changes for this update include a rework of the geometry selection tools (the feature recognition for selection is still a bit flakey), but for me the work done on the triad to make aligning it to other geometry (there's a small glyph you hit to then align the triad) makes the whole direct editing thing work, as you would expect. While these are interesting, the big news is the introduction of the Change Management add-in for Inventor. Essentially, this enables the round tripping of data between Fusion and Inventor. You have an Inventor part, you want to edit it in Fusion, load it, edit it, directly, without recourse to geometry History. You save it. Load it back into Inventor and rationalise the changes to update the history and feature tree. It tracks what you've edited, what you've added and what you've deleted and updates the history and feature data accordingly. This is the background to the Fusion name. Autodesk are attempting to fuse the ability to use both Direct Modelling in combination with History based modelling tools. The eventual goal, at present according to the powers that be, is not two separate applications, but to prove out the technology and integrate it all into core Inventor, rather than providing it as a standalone application. Hence, it's Technology Preview, not a Product Preview. So, let's have a look and see what we can do. 1. Let's start with a simple part. One of Inventor's sample parts. As you'll not particularly complex. The Feature tree shows a free extrudes, a few holes and that's about it. Easy meat for Fusion to Edit. 2. Loaded up into Inventor Fusion, we started by removing this hole feature. Easy job, as you simply select the faces you want to take out, the system removes them and removes the internal boundaries of the faces and closes the surfaces out. 3. Once that counter bored hole is gone, I shifted the remaining hole along the edge and back into the part a little. 4. Next I grabbed this feature, all in all, 8 faces and shifted it a few mill up the face. The new Triad orientation thing works very nicely indeed. 5. Final move was to take these two other holes, use the Press/Pull comment to make them both 2mm larger by offsetting the internal faces. Not an accurate way to redesign a hole, but for this purpose, it'll do. There you have it. Four things have changed. Two things have moved in position, one has been deleted and two have been resized. It took a couple of minutes at most to effect these changes. So let's see what happens when you read it back into Inventor Professional. When you read the part into Inventor, the Change Management add-on kicks into gear and inspects the part you're loading. What's interesting is that because I was using .ipt files and Fusion saves out .dwg files, I was actually not loading the original file back into Inventor. Obviously Fusion, when making edits, stores the original feature information somewhere and the new edits alongside it. So what happens? 6. The Change Management add-on presents you with a list of edits made to the model and shows you graphically on screen on where those changes occur. It shows you the changes in blue/yellow slowing before/after for geometry changes and red showing deletes. In the image above you can clearly see the four edits we made. You have the ability to control exactly what happens with each detected change. You can have them executed, so the feature gets rebuilt, you can ignore it, or if you encounter problems, then you can choose to have the faces extracted and the system try to patch them back into the model with the Sculpt command. Thinking this was a reletively simple set of changes, I hit the Apply All. It broke. and while it rebuilt one feature out of those three changes, very little else worked. I was surprised so I did some digging. What it boils down to is that because of the nature of whatever Autodesk is doing with Fusion and the edits it makes, there are at present, very explicit limitations in terms of what can and can't be done when you're moving data between Fusion and Inventor and hoping to have the history and feature tree reconciled and maintained. Your features have to be features in their own right. There can be very little interdependency between features, no patterns, no mirrors, no nothing. If you try to edit a child of a pattern, you get an error. If you try to edit the parent, you have problems with updates. I looked into this simple part we have here.

If you look a the history tree, you'll find it's all driven by patterns and there are three core features that are repeated throughout the part. I've coloured coded them above and below - the grey is the base extrude, the green features are the parents, the red features are the children. Below shows what happened when I just edited the parents. Because patterns are based on linear references, you find that the pattern tries to update too and that breaks the history tree. Now. I don't want you to think I got the hump, threw the toys out the pram and proclaimed "this fusion stuff doesn't work". I didn't. I tried out some more parts, built some myself, tried them out and found that there are instances where the Change Management tools actually work and work well. But these are very simple operations in very rare conditions where the feature has almost no effect or influence on other parts of your geometry. For anything else, if you want to, purely for technical reasons, try to get this to work and with this first release (that's key to note - this is a first public showing of a new technology - NOT a product), then you have to understand exactly how your changes will effect your history tree if you want to try and reconcile even the simplest of changes. This struck me as odd. Part of the pitch for direct modelling is that its easier to use when you either aren't aware of how a part's been built, have forgotten or that make a simple change you need to make is going to royally mess with your history-based part. The irony is that if you do use a technology like Fusion and unless Autodesk pull something out of the bag in terms of improving this Change Management technology, you're going to have to be just as familiar with your part's build history, its method of construction and the effects a seemingly small edit will have - then you might as well just do it in core Inventor. What should also be noted is that this doesn't change Fusion's potential as a direct modelling technology. The user interface, although much the same, feels slicker, with a nice workflow and use model now developing and it's power is there. The ability to open a part, make edits and get on with the job at hand, without worring about data source is a good and valid one for many - and Fusion executed all the operations I wanted to do perfectly. it seems more consistent and more robust and repeatable than the first Tech Preview - or maybe that's just me. But in the end, I can't help but wonder where the Change Management technology is going and whether it's actually worth the effort or indeed, even possible to get this to work in a reasonably functional manner. Kudos to Autodesk for trying to pull off what's an incredibly complex thing. The good news is that this is all done, for free to the user, so they can see what it can do, try it out and feedback into the process. Autodesk Labs (as with all Labs sites) is all about trying things out. Some work and some don't. Some make it to market, some don't. Portions of some products get shipped while the rest gets scrapped. The good thing is that these days, we all get to try it out and see for ourselves. Looking at the industry as a whole, there are many different approach and different ways that vendors are looking at the Direct Modelling world and this is just one avenue of experimentation. For those with an interest in how product modelling is moving forward, these are truly interesting times.

Inventor Fusion Tech Preview 2.0 Goes live: history & non-history do the fandango.

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:38:00 +0000

I got briefed about this last Friday (as did the rest of the press/blogger community I'm sure), but I wanted to wait till it was up and live on the Autodesk Labs web-site and I'd had a chance to play with it. When Autodesk publicly and officially announced Inventor Fusion Technology Preview, much was made of the name and the aims of the technology. This is Autodesk's answer to the likes of Synchronous Technology, Instant3D and all the other non-history-based modelling technologies out there. What the company has focused on, with both the messaging and the name, was the ability to rationalise together traditional feature+history-based model edits with the history-less modelling practices founds in Inventor Fusion. Essentially you could edit a traditional Inventor model in Fusion, without using features of any kind, then pass it back to Inventor to rationalise the changes and update the history tree to integrate those changes back into the history-based model. This isn't the history-tree appending method used by the likes of NX and SolidWorks, but something more integrated at the very core of your modelling history. The problem was, that capability wasn't available in the first Technology Preview - which many missed. That changes today with the introduction of the Change Manager add-on for Inventor alongside Tech Preview 2.0. Today, Tech Preview 2 has gone live and you can download it and play with it. Again, you have the ability to try Inventor Fusion if you're from the qualifying countries. But you'll need to be a suscriptions customer using Inventor 2010 Subscriptions release if you want to try the Change Manager. The two peices of code (fusion 2.0 and Change Manage) are delivered as separate zips/installs. It's also worth remember that separate applications are not the end goal of this process. This is a Technology Preview, and separating out the Fusion tech from core inventor, allows the team to play with and distribute the code and see how users like the interaction between the two different types of modeling methodology - but the end goal is that Fusion technology will be built directly into Inventor, not sold as a separate application. We'll be trying it out later on today, once we've updated Inventor to the latest release (without which the change manager won't work). There are also some new additions and changes to the core Inventor Fusion tools as well, so stayed tuned for more. In the meantime, here's some video fun for you.

New SketchBookMobile: 1.1 a-go-go

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:43:00 +0000

As ever, it looks like Josh beat us to the jump with this one, but its worth covering a little. Autodesk just pushed out the 1.1 release of SketchBookMobile and it addresses some of the issues with the initial release, namely, layer perservation (you can now push out a .PSD file out to Photoshop) and for me, the big one, importing landscape image (which is something I'd asked about when it launched) and brush preview when you're resizing them. It's available now on the App store. Josh also has a very handy comparison chart looking at other sketching apps for the iPhone.

Finally, here's a slick little vid* that shows a workflow with moving data from concept to 3D with SketchBookMobile and Inventor.

* nice video, but honestly. Where the hell are they getting this music from?

Nvidia to take CAD rendering to the Cloud with RealityServer 3.0

GregCorke@gmail.com (Greg Corke) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:05:00 +0000

Nvidia and mental images are reaching for the Cloud to offer ray-traced rendering over the web using stacks of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) instead of CPUs. Set for official launch at the end of November Nvidia's RealityServer 3.0 platform will enable architects, automotive engineers and product designers to send 3D scenes up into the cloud with the rendered results streamed back over the web. The major sell for this is significantly reduced rendering times, but the tech will also be able to stream interactive 3D to any web connected device including mobile devices - though of course bandwidth will be an issue. The platform is highly scalable, and more users can be serviced simply by adding more GPUs. Nvidia is already talking to a number cloud computing providers and expects to announce partnerships with several of them later this year, one of them being Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). The cost of cloud-based deployment is expected to be less than one EURO per hour. While the Cloud computing aspect of the technology is sure to dominate the headlines, of equal interest is the fact that RealityServer 3.0 can be deployed within the confines of a firewall, not only as a GPU-based 'render farm' to serve up rendered scenes in double quick time, but also as a means to distribute interactive 3D graphics throughout the enterprise. The background to this technology is Nvidia's CUDA programming architecture that enables Nvidia GPUs to carry out computationally intensive tasks usually reserved for CPUs. CUDA was used to devise a new GPU-based rendering mode called iray, which is based on mental images' mental ray 3.8 rendering engine. This is different to most rendering technologies which rely on CPUs to do the calculations. On the hardware side, RealityServer consists of multiple Nvidia's GPGPU (General Purpose GPU) Tesla cards, which are used to render out the scenes plus a few CPUs, which are really just used for housekeeping, says Nvidia. The technology is already primed up to be exploited a number of 3D CAD companies. There are over ten major CAD applications that already use mental ray, including Autodesk (3ds Max, Inventor, Revit), SolidWorks, Dassault Systemes (CATIA), and most recently PTC (Pro/Engineer Wildfire). The critical technology here is mental ray 3.8, which is due for release later this year and will enable GPU-accelerated mental ray rendering for the first time. Once these vendors implement mental ray 3.8 into their core products, they would have all the tools to hook up to RealityServer, says mental images, but for some CAD software, particularly the more mature products that carry a lot of 'architectural baggage' the implementation would not be trivial. That said, mental images told DEVELOP3D that development is already underway at many CAD companies and it expects to see applications supporting RealityServer next year. While mental images was unable to name all the names it did confirm that all of the aforementioned CAD developers are already working on systems that would allow them to virtualise their applications or to at least have server-based collaborative solution directly connected to their applications. As a result the company is confident that this technology is well placed to take a lot of work off the CAD developers' plate as they are essentially offering them a whole suite of tools to get started faster instead of doing everything themselves. mental images also disclosed that Autodesk showcased the technology at a conference in Munich, Germany only yesterday. In terms of the actual rendering technology RealityServer is a progressive renderer, so users are able to get a good idea of the final render in seconds or minutes, even though the final rendering may take hours. For comparative render times between CPU and GPU-based solutions it was hard to draw mental images on exact figures. However, the company did provide an example of an architectural scene that took 45 mins to render on a four Tesla cluster system and 8-10 hours on a more traditional four core CPU-based system. That said, it was wary of comparing apples and oranges as the scenes were not identical because the GPU renderer is slightly different from the CPU renderer in terms of shading technology. The company did say that it that would be providing benchmark results from customers next month and the early results are encouraging. While for most CAD uses the emphasis is likely to be on using Reality Server as a rendering server, mental images was keen to point out that it also provides a platform on which companies to build applications that utilise the technology in different ways. In the automotive sector, for example, it is already working with a number of manufacturers on projects to develop and enhance their in-house design / review pipelines. A dedicated car paint shader is also in development and will be released early next year. For those that wish to set up their own facility there are three different packages. In true American style there is no small - instead just a M, L and XL. Medium is a 2U rack mounted system with 8 Tesla GPUs and is suitable for smaller architectural offices and product design teams with 10s of concurrent users. Of course, this depends on the intensity of use and some customers may need to dedicate four GPUs for a single task. The 'Large' package features 32 Tesla GPUs for 100s of concurrent users, while 'XL' features 100 Tesla GPUs for serving 1,000s of users over the web. Nvidia is still working on overall system costs, but with a single Tesla cards costing in excess of 1,000 EUROS one may speculate that a medium system would cost around 15,000 - 20,000 EUROS just for the hardware. On the software side, however, customers should expect a one-time licensing cost of 2,000 EUROS plus 20% maintenance per Tesla card. From complex architectural visualisations and 3D city modelling to product design and automotive styling, the CAD-centric target markets for RealityServer are huge. And with mental ray already the rendering engine of choice for most major CAD developers, one may speculate that it's only a matter of time before RealityServer becomes a widely supported platform for CAD. What makes this technology particularly interesting is the fact that it is designed to use GPUs in the Cloud and not CPUs, but this is also a current barrier to deployment. None of the large Cloud service providers currently offer GPUs in their facilities, but Nvidia expects this to change early next year. This coupled with the expected release of RealityServer-compatible CAD products should make 2010 a very interesting year for rendering in the Cloud.

In search of Elegance #4: Surfacing. Without the headache

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:56:00 +0000

Basic construction of a Viking sailing ship. Boat design is one of the most elegant forms in the world of engineering. Simple, efficient and timeless (and when I say timeless, I mean, since 1500 BC). Image courtesy of the good folks at Vikingskip.com Here's something I was reminded of recently on a trip to see the team at Delcam (in their HQ quarters, a scant 15 miles from my home, rather than 8,000 miles away in Korea this time). If you're not familiar with it's solutions, Delcam has a huge range of technology which often solves real, live problems faced in the heady world of design and manufacture, rather than, as some vendors choose, creating solutions looking for problems. While there's much elegance in many areas of Delcam's offering, one thing lept out at me - and that's how it's flagship modelling system handles surface creation. Surfacing is a complex business. From first principles, when you're trying to create sculpted, complex forms, you're looking at an inherently more complex workflow than when working with prismatic features. the geometry is more complex, so the creation of it is going to be more complex, right? Traditionally, yes. Absolutely. Surfacing requires that you first build a network of curves and the precise form of those are controlled by not only the form you want to create, but how you want to create it. There are many types of surfaces. Planar surfaces are flat and the simplest. Then you have four sided surfaces, n-sided, bi-rail surfaces, extrudes, lofted surfaces, swept surfaces, blends, flanges, fillets. Filleting in itself is a very complex art depending on your form requirements. If you're working to corners, then you're looking at trying to merge three or more surfaces converging on a single point and at that point, you might want different fillets, different set-back value. All in all, its a complex and often daunting prospect - particularly for those that have learned their trade-craft using mainstream, solid modelling applications. Knowing what forms you're aiming for is essential to create curves (often referred to as wires), before you even get to actually creating a surface. Delcam's PowerShape has been on the market for about ten years or so and the company has been through revision after revision to give its users a set of tools that allow you to work with complex geometry, fix it, prepare it for manufacture That's given it a perspective that is only shared by a handful of vendors. Delcam has a set of tools that are used by a community that's both a) demanding (as they need flawless data - which begets flawless tool forms) and b) very used to dealing with crappy third party data. These are the people that take crappy data and turn it into a manufacturable item - something that requires highly efficient tools. Perhaps the perfect example of this is how PowerShape handles surface creation. As we've discussed, you're often facing multiple decisions about what curves to create, then what exact type of surface you want to create, before you even start to think about creating any geometry. What Delcam has developed is Smart Surfacer and it takes many of these decisions out of your hands - or at least, gives you a helping hand. Basically, you create the curve network you want, then invoke the Smart Surfacer command. This presents a simple dialog box. With this active, you then start to select the geometry, either from curves or from existing surface edges. The system inspects your selections, looks at the types of surfaces it can create, then presents you with the best guess is has for the best type of surface you could create based on that selection. As you add more geometry to the selection, it reevaluates the choice and switches the surface type and displays a preview. 1. Take this simple geometry set - two circles and a connecting arc. 2. Select the smaller circle and you get a planar fill surface. 3.Add in the connecting arc to the selection and it'll switch to a drive Curve, to push the arc around the circle. 4. Adding in the large circle maintains a Drive Curve, but runs it between the two circles, using the arc as the Drive Curve. Here's another example. 1: Rectangle, helix, circle. - selecting the rectangle gives you a planar surface. 2: Adding the helix into the selection gets you a drive curve that's very similar to a swept feature. 3: Adding the circle in switches the Drive Curve to push between two forms, creating a smooth transition. Of course, these are pretty simplistic demonstrations for the purposes of getting the concepts across, but the usefulness and the simplicity of the tool should be clear. Quite often you're not dealing with singular surfaces such as these, but rather, dealing with the complexity of trying to finish up that set of surfaces, to squeeze that final last few in that tie together the whole form, the points where form quality is won or lost - and that's exactly where this tool comes into its own. Rather you having to rework other surfaces in the set to patch in that final surface, the system can find the optimum solution and present it to you for inspection and fine tuning. there are also more manual tools avialable from the command, such as the Composite Curve creator, which can assist greatly when you have multiple, disjointed surfaces meeting at one area. PowerShape's Smart Surfacer is a perfect example of what I'm looking for in this search - it's a deceptively simple tool that collects together best practice, knowledge and experience of dealing with some of the worse geometry known to man and presenting it in a tool that adds that intelligence in an unobtrusive manner, while giving you the freedom to dive in and edit things manually if needs be. PowerShape-E is avialable for free, to play with at your leisure at www.powershape-e.com - I'd recommend doing so to anyone with a passing interest in complex shape description.

Z Corp launch integrated monochrome 3D printer

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:55:00 +0000

Z Corp have released the latest addition to it's range of 3Dprinter products with the launch of the ZPrinter 350. As many readers will know, Z Corp is one of the leaders in the 3D printing world, where speed and low-cost are absolutely key to support the product development process. While the company always grabs headlines with its colour printers, there's still a big market for monochrome machines. Running costs are lower, the machines cost less (due to the reduction in complexity) and for many, the ability to quick create a series of prototypes, discuss them around a table and progress design is all that they want. What this brings to the product line-up is an advancement of the existing 310 monochrome product, adding in the integrated post processing capabilities of machines like the 450 and 650 (which we took a look at a while back), to give you a system that builds quickly, provides you with the tools to break out the model from the build chamber, recycle the unused material and post process the material. It also takes advantage of Z Corp's most recent build powder (ZP150) which gives you a much whiter model (which is ideal for concept development and for architectural users, is ideal) and a much more robust green model (green refers to the state before you infiltrate the model to 'fix' it). Build volume is a very usable 203 x 254 x 203 mm, it builds just under Z Corp's benchmark 1" per hour (they quote 0.8" per hour), with layers in the 300 x 450 dpi resolution range (no mention of layer thickness). One thing I did find interesting was the discussion of the affordable nature of the machine. The ZPrinter 350 costs around $25,900. While that's a cheap machine by historical standards, there are much lower cost commercial machines from traditional vendors on the market (the Solido machine and Dimensions' uPrint spring to mind). The 350 pulls things back in cost of consumables and a greater build volume, but there's changes afoot in the RP market. One of the other low-cost hopefuls, Desktop Factory, got into financial trouble recently and the assets got picked up by 3D Systems - the results of which still seem uncertain. Alongside this, there's the homebrew market that is gaining huge interest amongst many users, purely because of the ability to create parts with very low cost hardware, often self built. Take the MakerBot, the RepRap project (which is now on its second generation). I'm not for a minute suggesting that professional designers and engineers are going to foresake investment in professional level technology that solves a serious requirement, but there's a home brew enthusiasm for this type of technology which is now 30 years old in many areas. Another thing to consider is that many of the original patents are now starting to expire and that always means that the technology can be freed from the stranglehold (a morally correct one I might add) that the originators have on it. There are interesting times to come for 3D printing. Very interesting indeed.

In search of Elegance #3: DriveWorks Solo

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:46:00 +0000

Phillipe Starck's 1980 Juicy Saliff for Alessi. Often seen as an iconic design. Is it elegant? As a form, yes, undoubtedly, it's lines are clean and refreshing like the lemons that it juices. Is it an elegant product? No. It's rubbish. It spills juice everywhere, skids all over the worktop and generally annoys the living crap out of almost everyone that buys one, unless they're just putting it on a shelf. Now let's look at something useful. We've already talked about the concept I'm trying to get across here and taken a look at what Siemens has been up to with NX 7.0 and HD3D. For this post, I want to look at a much different vendor from Siemens, namely, DriveWorks. One of the benefits that I've had, doing this strange job that I do, is I've had the chance to meet a lot of people over the years and seen them develop new tools, new ideas and grow their businesses from the very beginning. One of those that always springs to mind is DriveWorks. The British company is a provider of design automation tools the SolidWorks community. I believe I first met co-founder and CEO Glen Smith when he worked for a now-defunct SolidWorks reseller, back in the late nineties. The occasion of our meeting was a trip with him to visit a customer of that reseller who had adopted an automation system that Glen had developed for them to automate the design of some very complex automotive products (I won't mention the name as many years have passed and they might have changed their strategy). I got to see the company get a presentation of the barebones of what would become DriveWorks, based on Access databases, Excel spreadsheets and a whole host of custom API programming done by Glen himself. That was over ten years ago now and the company DriveWorks, now headed up by Glen alongside co-founder and Vice President, Maria Sarkar, has been through all manner of changes, buy outs and strategic decisions that have brought the company to its current position as providing an integral part of SolidWorks' offering (DriveWorksXpress) as well as it's own products that are sold by resellers across the globe. It's been a true delight to see a company grow and become highly successful from very humble beginnings. Only a few months ago, I got a call to come up and see Glen, Maria and the team to talk about something they had brewing. Not even a Swine Flu scare kept me away (even if we all agreed not to bother with the usual handshake or hug), this team always have something interesting to say and always something interesting to show. What they had to show was DriveWorks Solo, a system that bridges the gap between the DriveWorksXpress product that almost all SolidWorks users have as part of their solution, and the high-end, web-based DriveWorks Pro system. DriveWorks Solo is meant to find that sweet spot where an organisation can make heavy use of automation of its products, but doesn't need all the bells and whistles. The product is sold on the web, supporting digitally and while it's early days indeed, seats have been sold within days of its launch. So, how does DriveWorks Solo fit into this series of articles? The answer is something like this. Automation is something that, when you strip it back, makes a huge amount of sense for many design and engineering based organisations. While most won't be able to automate everything, there are a great deal of organisations that have design and engineering resources tied up in repetitive work. Standardisation is something that many organisations took to heart ten years ago and the ability to create custom solutions for customers, based on a set of standard components, can give you a real advantage. Custom solution, but without having to redesign everything. Parameter and input capture is relatively simple, as is rules definition. While that's true, being able to do that digitally is somewhat difficult. Using a standard parametric modelling system to try and automate the design of even the most modest sub-system or modular product can be very difficult. Its theoretically possible to do, but once you start to do it in anger, you're generating one hell of a lot of data that can very quickly become messy. What you need is a set of tools that allow you to do that, but in a sensible and efficient manner. Hence, Design automation technology. Many of the higher-end solutions (such as NX, Catia, Pro/E to some extent) have knowledge-based automation tool, but even these are incredibly complex processes and not attuned to the needs of the mainstream. On the other hand, DriveWorks Solo most certainly is. The team has completely reworked the interface to build a system that runs within the SolidWorks UI. It steps you through the process of capturing a starting assembly, identifying the parameters and rules that drive the automation, then building a user interface on top of it, making it possible for anyone to jump into the system and create a customised product or sub-system, using performance and customer inputs, and have the system generate not only the 3D description, but also the supporting documentation in terms of drawings. None of the custom programming, none of the consultancy, none of the painstaking rework of existing products. It's designed to be done by the designer or engineer and maintained by the same. DriveWorks Solo gives you the ability to create a UI for automation, making it much easier to deploy and make use of. The benefits that an organisation can derive from this are many fold. By automating design (without impacting other work), you have the chance to both remove the drudgery of repetitive work by your team, and can have them working on the 'non-automatable' (yes, I made that word up) parts of a design project, finding new areas for exploration and new potential. It's done easily, cost effectively and could bring huge benefits to many SolidWorks users. To my mind, that's an incredibly elegant solution. It's easy to use assuming you understand how your products are defined, it's affordable and can pay real benefits. Benefits to both your personal productivity - who doesn't prefer working on the challenging product, rather than the crappy-same-soup-reheated-work. And of course, for business in terms of more productivity, greater potential for innovation. There you go, another example of how things should be. I wonder what's next.. Stay tuned to find out... NB: We took an in-depth look at DriveWorks Solo in the September issue, which is available here.

In search of Elegance #2: Siemens NX 7.0 + HD3D

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:02:00 +0000

Consider the single speed bicycle - it's a seemingly complex arrangement of steel tubes, mechanical linkages, spoken wheels, gearing, pneumatic types, valves, rubber tyres and bearings. but when time optimises that combination, you reach something that provides transportation for millions, cheaply and efficiently. I thought I'd start off with this first in my series of Elegance posts, as it's fresh off the wire and brand new and all shiny. If you look at Siemens' product portfolio, there's an interesting dynamic. Solid Edge gains all of the marketing noise, all of the marketing push - after all, it's the company's mainstream offering to market. But behind this, there's always NX, something I personally find much more appealing and interesting. Why? Because it's one of those systems that's been around for so long that it does almost everything you could ever imagine. What Siemens are facing is the simple fact that while NX's power lies in its long history, it's problems also find their root cause in the same. That said, there's been a concerted effort that predates the Siemens acquisition, to bring NX up to speed. The work done on the user interface in NX2 (I think) has been progressed over the last four or five years and the system looks and feels fresh, but with all that technology behind it that allows you to define some very complex products. NX users spread across a huge range of industry sectors, but product complexity (in terms of assembly size), process complexity (in terms of development and manufacture) and form complexity (in terms of the shapes the users are defining) seem to unit them. The big news for the NX 7.0 release is split into two areas. Of course, there's extension of the Synchronous Technology that has been the big headline grabber for Siemens PLM over the past two years. Within NX, Sync Tech's impact has been much lower key when you look at the grand scheme of things - much of this is down to the fact that with NX, you don't have the bifurcating decision to go history-based or non-history-based as you do within Edge. NX is more refined and more flexible than that. Yes, you can completely blow the history away or you can choose to use those more freeform modelling tools as part of a history-based part, recording each action, so its entirely traceable, repeatable and editable (this, I suspect, is how Edge will end up too - but that's purely speculation). That's a good example of this elegance we're talking about. Sync tech isn't a panacea for everything. It's a technology that is best suited to solving specific design or more accurately, geometry creation and editing problems. Whether that's down to working with dumb native data or working with highly complex feature-based parts, where you need to execute a seemingly small tweak, but doing so will require huge amounts of rework. Sync Tech aside, the thing I'm most fascinated by is the introduction of HD3D or to give it its full moniker, High Definition 3D and this is a truly elegant solution - not necessarily because it's new technology (which it isn't) but the manner in which the various component parts have been put together and implemented to solve a very complex issue relating to buried data (both geometric and metadata) and issue resolution workflow. Let's look at those two very quickly. Visual Reporting: Take the average design and engineering organisation that's fully adopted both 3D design and PLM. Within those two technologies you now have the ability to fully document a product. Not only it's form and function, but the full gamut of information that relates to its development and its manufacture and further into its use lifecycle and eventual retirement. In short, that's a crap lot of data. The problem is that unless you have a very intimate knowledge of where that data is, who created it and what you're actually looking for, it's very hard to get an idea of where a product is at. the 3D datasets contain the form, then these are linked to the metadata attached to each part, sub-assembly, sub-system in the form of documents, text, spreadsheets, pdfs etc etc etc. and to find both, you need, typically, to use two different systems - in the case of Siemens, that's NX (or a 3D viewing technology) and Teamcenter and despite all of their best intentions, the two don't exactly work together. Here a visual report has been created based on weight, using customised ranges to define different categories of parts and sub-systems. What HD3D does is provide a framework that's delivered in both NX and Teamcenter, that allows you to use the graphically rich nature of 3D data to gain access to the metadata that's underneath it, to explore and visualise that data, delve into details where needed and to filter it to gain the information you need. Whether that's a peep at where development efforts are concentrating (by filtering and visualising parts or sub-assemblies under work - in itself derived from change status), what parts are being outsourced, where costs or weight are found (by filtering for parts within specific cost or mass ranges). Customisable searches and filters allow you to find the information you want and filter out that you don't need. Here, the Visual Reporting allows you to colour code the assembly by supplier, while the dialog shows you more detail. What Siemens has done is take its experience with the JT format (for lightweight viewing and data manipulation), some of the technology it's had for large scale visualisation and its master of data management with Teamcenter and build a technology that allows this to be done visually, efficiently and very cleanly indeed. Searches can be saved (there are presets delivered), but its possible to create custom searches and reports based on whatever search criteria you require. This allows you to load up, gain an idea of where things are at, based on your focus areas, then get to work. it's a combination of some quite complex technologies that have been reworked into a very slick environment. One thing that's key is just that: getting on with the job. This is the other focus for this first HD3D release. Issue Management: When you have highly complex products and geographically dispersed and outsourced input into the development of those products, you have serious issues with data management. Not in terms of storing them within a database, but rather around the workflow relating to ensure that data is conforming to company requirements, whether thats in terms of geometry quality, ensuring compliance with company, customer or international standards. What NX 7.0 introduces is a workflow, backed up with better use of existing technology, to solve these types of issues. Siemens has, for sometime, had the NX Check Mate product. This has performed just these types of checks for a while. What Siemens has done is integrate these checks into the HD3D environment. you load up the assembly, run the checks and get back a very visual list of issues that it finds. The combination of visualisation tools and reporting allow you to work through those issues, find the problems that need to be addressed (whether that's small faces that don't match FEA requirements or PMI formatting issues doesn't really matter). It's done very interactively and very efficiently. The issue management tools built into HD3D inspect your product models, find potential problems and present them in a graphically rich environment that not only presents the information, but allows you to very quickly gain an understanding of the context in which they occur What's impressive from my perspective is that there are then tools available to move these issues you discover into a workflow to resolve them and progress the project forward. Essentially, an issue is identified through automated checks, you assigning it to the person or team responsible for its resolution and that then kicks off a change request (handled by Teamcenter) to progress and resolve it. The CoverFlow style issue browser (top right) allows you to flick through issues, explore further. Clicking a part or issue tag (shown in a small red icon with a white cross) brings up further details. This is an initial release but the promise it holds is phenomenal. None of this technology is new. Check-Mate, JT, Teamcenter and NX itself are existing technologies that have been combined, rationalised and delivered to create a solution to real engineering problems. Data burial and retrieval is a constant problem for many organizations. The data is there, but how you get at it is anyone's guess. By providing a combination of rich graphical visualization backed up with clean efficient search tools, you can get the information you want, almost instantly. On the flip-side the issue management and resolution tools again do the same, take existing tools and redeploy them to create an environment where fundamental bottlenecks can be first identified, but then progressed through to resolution in a fully traceable environment. To my mind, it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about with this Elegance idea. Stay tuned for the next part, when we look at the seemingly complex world of rules-based design automation and how DriveWorks Solo is changing how it's done.

In search of Elegance #1: An introduction

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:46:00 +0000

Spotted this a while back. Recreation of a Saxon door lock (circa 5th and 6th century). Complex yes, but elegant. It serves the purposes of both keeping intruders out when you're inside and just locking the door when you need it. Something I've been thinking about over the last few months is the complexity of the systems available today. Feature creep is something that every vendor is facing. Apart from a handful, the majority of systems on the market are at least ten years old, relying on technology that was developed in the last millennium. Features have been rammed into every system on a 12 to 18 month cycle for nearly ten years. Ten major releases of new.. well... stuff. Stuff that does stuff slightly different or stuff that does things in exciting and new ways. But at the end of the day, it's that. Stuff. While I'm as guilty as anyone else as being wowed by the latest and greatest technological advancement, the simple facts are that the technology we're discussing is only a part of a designer, an engineer or a manufacturer's toolbox. We could, if push comes to shove, do the job using a sheet of paper, a pencil and a rule/french curves. sure, it would be less efficient and more error prone, but that's a simple fact. These are tools - nothing more, nothing less. And it's now getting to the point where many users are looking at what they've invested in, both in terms of personal learning and often theirs or their employer's cash in and wondering if they need it all. I recently attended a launch event by a major vendor and sat talking to some old friends that have been through the gamut of technology and asked, "Do you ever use any of the new enhancements?" The answer came back as I'd suspected it would. "Nope. I still use the system the same way I did in 1998." While this is the atypical pessimistic British response, there's some truth in it. I dug a little further into their views. it turns out that battle hardened veterans will use new technology if is actually adds some value to their working practices - and that it seems, is something that's missing. The hook that gets people using new enhancements. And how do they get hooked? The simple answer is thus: Users adopt new features that make things easier. Now, this might sound obvious, blatantly so in fact, but there's more to "easier to use" than is immediately clear. Design and engineering is an inherently complex process, the definition of part forms is something that takes complex mathematics and geometry wrangling. All too often vendors obsess over removing user control over how geometry is created to the point where a reasonably intelligent chimp, persuaded with a bunch of bananas, could create geometry. That's not what users seem to want. They want tools that are clean, efficient, solve an issue or challenge, but allow them to retain control over what's happening. To my mind, that's not ease of use, that's building elegance into an application. So this is what I've been considering of late, elegance. And how stuffing new features into a product isn't the best way forward for many users, but rather a reworking of things a system does, how it does it and how you gain better results, better workflows or a more efficient design process as a result. What's interesting is that there's been a shift in how vendors are refocusing their development efforts. Some are being very vocal about the fact that they're refocussed on improving existing tools and fixing what's broken or clunky, while others are being much more subtle about it. Of course, there's also a correlation between the vendors being noisey on the topic and the amount of criticism there's been in their user community of the exact same subject. So, over the next few posts, I'm going to talk about a few bits of technology, some new products and some examples of where elegance is becoming something all the more appealing than plain old ease of use.

PTC UK Technology Forum 2009 - registration opens

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:45:00 +0000

Given the tag line, "Design without Barriers", PTC are hosting their annual user event towards the tail end of next month. This follows the Global gathering of PTC users in Florida earlier this year with more scaled down, but more local event. It's being held on the 24th November at the Heritage Motor Centre, Gaydon. The press release states that "Commencing at 0900am, with an introduction to PTC´s Technology and Vision roadmap, followed by over 12 presentations, 3 business tracks, and a networking lunch." Highlights of the day seem to be a hands-on introduction to Wildfire 5.0 (there's also an in-depth review coming up in the next issue of DEVELOP3D), as well as looks into ProductPoint, PDMLink for larger organizations and Mathcad. A handful of customer will also be presenting, including the masters of all things cleaning related, VAX. As you would also expect, there's an exhibition with resellers, partners and such. Registration is now live at www.ptc.com/go/technologyforum

Objet expands elastomer offering with TangoBlackPlus

noreply@blogger.com (al dean) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:52:00 +0000

Objet Geometries has just launched its TangoBlackPlus, a new material that allows designers and manufacturers to "create high-quality parts that more closely resemble a broad range of rubber products." TangoBlackPlus expands Objet's existing Tango family of materials, building on the same mechanical properties of Objets's TangoPlus, FullCure930, first launched in 2007. For those running Objet's single material machines (the Eden machines), while for those using the multi-material Connex machine, a new Digital Material pack has been introduced that provides 18 new materials comprised of combinations of VeroWhite and TangoPlus or TangoBlack Plus (the Connex line of machines can mix materials to achieve the look and feel you're looking for). the potential uses for this new material range from wires and cables, grips and handles, plugs and connections, shock absorbers, function buttons, gaskets and seals, among other rubber applications. One key use for elastomeric materials is in the Footwear industry, where RP techniques are very commonly used to prove out sole designs. Steffen Scherer, Prototype Creation Technician at Adidas, commented that "The new Objet digital material pack allows us to achieve greater resemblance of our running shoe outsoles with an impressive touch and feel."