ironcad

Latest release of IronCAD helps move 3D designs to production faster

November 30, 2020 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

IronCAD, a 3D CAD productivity platform for metal fabricators and custom machinery manufacturers, announces the release of IRONCAD 2021, which contains many exciting improvements and capabilities that help customers drive innovation and move to production faster.

Every year, IronCAD global customers submit feedback with enhancement improvements that matter the most for increasing the design productivity or improving the 3D to the production drawing process. In addition to user feedback, after having endured an unprecedented year, it was essential to keep IronCAD users working and ensure that productivity is the way of life for their business with the release of IRONCAD 2021. In this year’s release, the main focus was on improving productivity to help create designs and production drawings faster. With this in mind, the goal for IronCAD 2021 was to improve the performance from 3D to the 2D detailing stage, improve the detailing user experience, continuous quality improvement, as well as improvements that make the design process more productive.

Examples of the new improvements in IRONCAD 2021 are:

Improved IntelliShape Handles for Increasing Performance – New behaviors to quickly symmetrically size shapes with a right-click drag, quick access to handle values attached to the cursor, and more powerful snap options to get precise locations from a point or center point that allow users to design faster with IronCAD shapes.

User Interface Improvements to Enhance the User Experience – Easier access to multiple catalogs, direct feedback on face and edge length/area information, direct selection access to assemblies, parts, features, and faces in the current selection viewing direction, TriBall® shortcuts to reduce steps in repeating copy/link commands, and many more to improve the user workflow in design.

Sheet Metal Design Improvements and Accessibility – Improved processes in selecting stocks, automatic bend alignment on angled sheet metal stock for creation and updates, and accessing common commands for sheet metal bends to speed up the design and editing of sheet metal.

Overall 2D Technical Drawing User Improvements – 2D Annotation catalog for common annotations, 2D Template catalog to quickly change templates for drawings, new tools for revision clouds and ISO Tolerance Codes for dimensions, improved bulk view creation options to automatically generate drawing layouts that speed up the 2D detailing, and many other improvements to enhance the detailing process for production designs.

Communication Improvements for Sharing – The free Share 3D viewer has an improved user interface and support for measure and textures while supporting large geometry data sets that allow users to communicate 3D designs faster and easily with customers on any tablet or laptop device on any platform with an HTML5 supported browser.

“In a year with major uncertainty and with businesses and people across the globe impacted in unique ways, IronCAD worked closely with our customers to shape the 2021 release to meet their current needs and to help plan for future capabilities for remote working and collaboration,” stated Cary O’Connor, V.P. of Marketing for IronCAD. “IronCAD remains committed to focus on our customer satisfaction and to deliver solution to assist our customers in remaining competitive and innovative in these challenging times. IronCAD 2021 is our first stepping stone in this direction and more solutions are being developed with our teams to deliver innovative solutions to our customers.” he continued.

Try the newest, updated version of IronCAD now for free by navigating to https://www.ironcad.com/free-online-trial/ to start your free online trial.

IronCAD
www.ironcad.com

Multiphysics for IronCAD 2020 released

January 10, 2020 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

IronCAD, a leading provider of design productivity solutions, announced the immediate availability of the latest version of its fully integrated Multiphysics for IronCAD (MPIC).

Since the unveiling of Multiphysics for IronCAD, the usability and robustness of MPIC have been appreciated by many IronCAD users. Each year, additional improvements and refinement have been added to further increase the ease of use as well as the functionalities that sets it apart from the competition. Most of these new features are based on user feedback and requests to speed up the design cycle, simplify analysis setup, and reduce analysis times.

MPIC 2020, includes several new and improved key technologies designed specifically for CAD design analysis. IronCAD’s focus was on general CAD designers and users who want to adopt design analysis earlier in the digital prototyping cycle and aim to provide accurate, realistic and quick analysis. As such, most of these improvements are in the assembly analysis functionalities.

Some of MPIC 2020 new technologies and features include:

• New tolerance assembly analysis technology is implemented with respect to how parts are assembled and meshed for analysis. This new option uses parts’ discrete boundary surface facets to smartly unite parts together for design analysis. This technology enables the healing of CAD assembly models with intentional or unintentional gaps so they can be glued together for quick design analysis.

• New drag-and-drop user interface has been implemented in the part tree of materials, boundary condition constraints, and load areas. Users can select the part’s tree node and drag it to a different material tree to quickly assign it to a different material. In boundary condition constraints and loading, the sequence of the priority of the constraint can also be changed by selecting the condition and drag it up/down to change the priority of the boundary condition.

• MPIC model is now upgraded to XMD 2.2 model and compatible with all AMPS product lines. It can be opened, modified, and analyzed by any AMPS XMD application if additional features/capabilities are needed.

Multiphysics for IronCAD offers basic to advance versions that include non-linear, fluid, dynamics, and rigid body kinematics. Once installed, users have access to the full functionality limited to 2000 mesh nodes that can be used to get started with the analysis application. You can access the latest Multiphysics for IronCAD 2020.

“This new release with new tolerance assembly analysis technology will streamline the design analysis for design engineering beyond anything in the market today” stated Cary O’Connor, V.P. of Marketing of IronCAD. “Users will be able to quickly design products and assemblies with accurate design simulation easily without having to struggle with gaps and inaccuracies often found in CAD designs that don’t fully model manufacturing processes such as welds and fixturing. Overall, users can improve designs and design-to-product times with this new functionality” he continued.

Dr. Ted Lin of AMPS Technologies, developers of MPIC, and meshing technology partner Dr. Mark Beall, President of Simmetrix Inc. says, “For more than three years of development and testing, our team has taken on this task to resolve this well-known problem in CAD models. This new technology gives the user more control over gluing together parts in assembly models with intentional or unintentional gaps for quick design analysis that virtually eliminates the CAD modeling inaccuracy issues that users struggled to resolve in the past.”

IronCAD
www.ironcad.com

IronCAD launches Design Collaboration Suite 2020

December 4, 2019 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

IronCAD, the 3D CAD platform of choice among metal fabricators and custom machinery manufacturers, unveiled IRONCAD 2020 and it’s got more than just perfect vision for design productivity. Designed to increase productivity for CAD software users to get their products to market faster, this release focuses on performance, commonly asked usability items, and continued improvements on key functionality that sets IronCAD apart in the design process.

Every year, IronCAD users submit feedback with enhancement requests that matter the most for increasing the design productivity or improving the 3D to production drawing process. The IRONCAD 2020 release delivers improved large assembly performance, streamlined workflows, and new capabilities that help users design, present, and communicate their ideas faster and easier. This year’s release, the main focus was on improving the ICD (IronCAD Drawing Environment) to increase productivity. With this in mind, our goal was to improve the 3D to 2D detailing process to reduce the design to manufacturing timing with better performance, improved commands, better accessibility to common commands, faster drawing creation with our automated bulk view creation tool that enable users to go from concept to manufactured products faster.

Beyond the IronCAD Drawing Environment, IronCAD delivered performance improvements for working with large assemblies. This significant development was implemented to increase the system’s performance and to take advantage of newer hardware with multiple cores. In addition, many functional items were added to streamline the interaction with large assemblies, such as additional improvements in our Shrink Wrap commands for condensing large assemblies into workable reference geometry. With IronCAD 2020, noticeable improvements can be found importing, opening, saving, and working daily with large assembly files.

Examples amongst the new improvements in IRONCAD 2020 are:

· Large Assembly Performance – Open/Save/Import speed is improved for files that contain large structures that may have large assembly trees containing many nodes under individual assembly levels. Changes implemented have significant improvements in speed in all areas while working on large assemblies that range from 30-50% improvement.

· Real-time Interchanging of Full and Lightweight Models – Using IronCAD’s Shrink Wrap capabilities to create lightweight versions of parts and assemblies, you can dynamically interchange the fully detailed model and the lightweight model within an assembly file. This capability significantly improves the interaction with large assemblies not only on load/save but while design within the context of the full assembly.

· Many Technical Drawing/Detailing Improvements – IronCAD 2020 focused heavily on improving the speed from taking 3D Designs into production drawings ready for manufacturing. Speed improvements in creating and editing dimensions with quick access to dimension properties, Automatic Break Line support, Overall View Dimensions, 2D Catalogs support for reusable Annotations, and Spell Checker are among some of the many improvements added to improve the process.

· Commonly Requested Functionality – Focus was given to provide functionality commonly requested by our industry users. Command Search, Dockable Catalogs, 4K Support, Feature Fill Pattern, Sheet Metal Conversion and Layflat Design feature are among items added to enhance the design experience with IronCAD.

“Expanding on our recent 20th year release capabilities, IronCAD 2020 gains a significant leap in the ability to work and manage large assembly files commonly used among our custom machinery manufacturers” stated Cary O’Connor, V.P. of Marketing of IronCAD. “Users will feel improvements to the performance while working in 3D all the way through to the final production drawing output with the many improvements developed in the IronCAD Drawing Environment to speed up and aid the detailing process” he continued.