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The failed promise of parametric CAD part 5: A resilient modeling strategy

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bamboo-gardenThe model brittleness problem inherent with parametric feature-based modeling is a really big deal. And it’s something, honestly, that I don’t have a great answer for. I’ve even asked a few power users who I know, and their answers seemed to involve a bit of hand-waving, and a reference to having lots of experience.

While best practices are a potentially good step forward, they need to be straightforward enough that mere mortals (as opposed to power users) can follow them.

Around Christmas last year, I got a call from Richard Gebhard, an engineer’s engineer, who has made his living selling CAD, and training people to use it (including more than his fair share of power users), for longer than he would like me to admit. (I’m pretty sure I’ve been in the CAD industry longer than him, though.) Richard told me he had something he wanted to show me, and if I’d take the time to meet him, he’d buy me lunch.

What Richard showed me was a way of creating and structuring CAD models that made a lot of sense. It not only reduced parent-child dependencies, but it made them more predictable. And, more importantly, it made it a lot easier for a mere mortals to scan through the feature tree, and see if there were any grues (it’s a technical term. Feel free to look it up.)

Over the next several months, we had lunch several times. I made suggestions. He rejected some, accepted some, and thought about others. At the same time, he was bouncing his ideas off several of his best power users (including his son). By a couple of months ago, he had refined his system to the place where it would work impressively well with nearly any parametric feature-based CAD system. So, he went to work finalizing his presentation.

I had mentioned that Delphi, by patenting some of the elements of horizontal modeling, limited the number of people who could benefit from it. (Worse for them, they patented it, then filed bankruptcy. That didn’t help much.) Richard’s goal wasn’t to monetize his process. His goal was to evangelize it. To help CAD users—both power users and mere mortals—to get their jobs done better.

Richard and I had talked, over time, about what he should call this process. At first, I liked the word “robust.” In computer science, it is the ability of a system to cope with errors during execution. In economics, it is the ability of a model to remain valid under different assumptions, parameters and initial conditions. Those are good connotations. But, then I thought of one of my favorite examples of robustness. The first time I visited Russia, I noticed that the apartment buildings were built of thick poured concrete. Very robust. And nearly impossible to remodel.

Richard’s system wasn’t robust. It was resilient. So, he has named it the Resilient Modeling Strategy. RMS.

So far, I’ve written over 2,600 words, to provide some background on the problems of parametric modeling, and some of the solutions that have been offered over the years. But, after all that, I’m not going to tell you anything more about RMS. At least, not yet.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 26, Richard will present RMS for the first time ever, at Solid Edge University, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His presentation will start at 9:00AM local time, and will be in room 6 of the convention center. If you’re there, put it on your calendar. If not, you’ll need to wait until Richard gets back to Phoenix, and I publish a follow-up post.

RMS is not anything difficult, or fundamentally new. It’s just an elegant distillation of best practices, designed to work with nearly any parametric CAD system, and simple enough that it doesn’t get in the way.  It’ll help you make better CAD models faster.

The failed promise of parametric CAD part 4: Going horizontal

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In the early 90s, Ron Andrews, a senior product designer at Dephi’s Saginaw Steering Systems Division, became fed-up with the difficulties of editing parametric CAD models. So, he and a team of his colleagues, including Pravin Khurana, Kevin Marseilles, and Diane Landers, took on a challenge of trying to find a solution.

They came up with an interesting concept that they called horizontal modeling. Here’s a description of it from their patent abstract:

“Disclosed is a horizontal structure method of CAD/CAM manufacturing where a base feature is provided and one or more form features added to it to form a model. The form features are added in an associative relationship with the base feature, preferable a parent child relationship, but are added in a way as to have substantially no associative relationships with each other. The result is a horizontally-structured Master Process Model where any one form feature can be altered or deleted without affecting the rest of the model. Extracts are then made of the Master Process Model to show the construction of the model feature by feature over time. These extracts are then used to generate manufacturing instructions that are used to machine a real-world part from a blank shaped like the base feature.”

Here’s a picture that makes it clearer:

Horizontal Modeling

The simplest explanation I can give for it is this: You create a base feature, and bunch of datum (working) planes. You attach all the child features to those datum planes. Viola: no parent-child problems.

I admit that I’m not going to do justice to horizontal modeling in this conversation. There’s actually quite a bit to it, and it makes a lot of sense when coupled with computer-aided process planning (CAPP.)

Horizontal modeling has a handful of problems. First, it does a pretty good job of killing the possibility of having design intent expressed in the feature tree. Next, it works better with some CAD systems than others. (When horizontal modeling was in the news, SolidWorks had a problem managing the normals on datum planes, so it didn’t work too well.) The deadliest problem is that Delphi got a bunch of patents on the process, then licensed it to some training companies. From what I can see (and I may be wrong), none of these training centers offer horizontal modeling classes any more.

While, technically, you can’t use horizontal modeling without a patent license from Delphi, the concepts at its core are fairly similar to things that CAD users have been doing for years. A few years ago, Josh Mings posted on a couple of online forums that “Horizontal Modeling is just one word for it, you may also know it as Skeleton Modeling, Tier modeling, Sketch Assembly modeling, CAD
Neutral Modeling, or Body Modeling.” (It’s actually two words for it, but I get his point.)

Horizontal modeling is not a silver bullet solution for the problems inherent in parametric feature-based CAD. It’s just a best practice—a strategy for getting around the problems. It seems to be headed in the right direction, but it suffers from the complexity that comes from trying to fix too many problems at once.

Next: A Resilient Modeling Strategy

The failed promise of parametric CAD part 3: The direct solution

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Pull-PushDirect modeling—a syncretic melding of concepts pioneered by CoCreate, Trispectives, Kubotek (and many others)–has shown the most promise to cure the parametric curse.

Direct modeling is today’s hot CAD technology. PTC, Autodesk, Siemens PLM, Dassault (CATIA, but not so much SolidWorks), IronCAD, Kubotek, Bricsys, SpaceClaim (and certainly some other companies I’ve forgotten) all have their own unique implementations of it.

The common thread in direct modeling is to use standard construction techniques when modeling, and feature inferencing (or recognition) when editing. It’s easier said than done. It’s taken about 35 years of industry research to get to the place we are today—where you can click on a face of a model, and the system will recognize that you’re pointing to a feature that has some semantic value. And that’s not even considering the tremendous amount of work that has been required by legions of PhD mathematicians to develop the math that lets you push or pull on a model face, and have the system actually edit the geometry it in a useful manner.

For the CAD software, figuring out which way to edit a selection is almost a mind reading trick: A user clicks and drags on a part of a model. What would they like to happen? In some cases it’s easy: Drag once face of a rectangular block, and the system will just make it longer or shorter. But if the block is full of holes, bosses, and blends, it becomes a lot more complicated. What should the system do if you drag a face so far back that it consumes another feature, and then pull it back to where it was? Should the consumed feature be lost forever, or should the system remember it in some way, so it can be restored?

There are no right answers. It seems that no two direct modeling systems handle the decision of what is a “sensible” edit in the same way.

While direct modeling absolutely solves the model brittleness problem inherent with parametrics, it does it by simply not using parametrics. Even with hybrid parametric/direct CAD systems, the answer to the parametric curse is still to not use parametrics when you don’t need to.

The solution of “use direct modeling when you can, and learn to live with parametric hassles when you can’t” just isn’t very satisfying to me.

Next: Going horizontal

The failed promise of parametric CAD part 2: The problem is editing

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ErasermIn the previous post, I wrote about the failed promise of parametric CAD: problems such as parent-child dependencies and unwanted feature interactions, coupled with no easy way to either prevent, or check for them.

The difference between modeling and editing in a parametric CAD system is simply the difference between creating things from scratch, and modifying things you’ve already created. The distinction may seem academic, but it is only when editing that parent-child dependencies are a potential problem.

Consider a scenario, of creating a parametric part—one that you’ve worked out in your head pretty well ahead of time—where you start from scratch, modeling sequentially, and spending all your time working on the most recent feature without needing to go back to edit upstream features.

In that context, the model’s parent-child dependencies would exist, but would be benign. They’d never get in your way. That is, until you went back to edit the part.

In most cases, people don’t build models from scratch without periodically going back to adjust earlier features from time to time. In that process, they’ll catch, and be able to deal with, some of the dependencies. But not likely all, or even most, of them.

I’ve heard experienced CAD people use an interesting term for models with hidden and untested parent-child dependencies: Parts from hell. When you’re trying to modify them, you never know when a small change might cause them to completely fall apart. I think a better, more descriptive, term is brittle: Hard, but liable to break or shatter easily.

This also suggests a descriptive term for CAD models which are not liable to break or shatter easily: resilient.

I’ve only ever seen one group of users who could consistently create complex yet resilient parametric parts models from scratch: PTC application engineers from the early to mid-1990s. Of course, they could only do it during customer benchmarks, with parts they’d practiced ahead of time, where they had worked-out and memorized all the steps, and where they had a good idea of the parameter ranges. Even then, if you were to ask them to change a dimension that would cause a topological change, the models might unceremoniously blow up.

Not to paint too bleak a picture, there are certainly CAD power users who have the skills to create resilient CAD models. I’ve met more than a few of them: true professionals, who by combining experience, insight, and education, have earned the respect of their peers. They understand how to structure CAD models to avoid any problems with brittleness.

Nah. I’m just messing with you. Power users struggle with this just like us mere mortals. It’s just that their models don’t usually fall apart until you go outside the scope of parametric changes they had anticipated. Give power user’s carefully crafted CAD model to a user who has a black thumb (I’m sure someone comes to mind), and they’ll find ways to blow it up that the power user never imagined.

Next: The direct solution

The failed promise of parametric CAD part 1: From the beginning

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The modern era of 3D CAD was born in September 1987, when Deere & Company bought the first two seats of Pro/Engineer, from the still new Parametric Technology Corporation. A couple of years later, Deere’s Jack Wiley was quoted in the Anderson Report, saying:

“Pro/ENGINEER is the best example I have seen to date of how solid modelers ought to work. The strength of the product is its mechanical features coupled with dimensional adjustability. The benefit of this combination is a much friendlier user interface plus an intelligent geometric database.”

According to Sam Geisberg, the founder of PTC:

“The goal is to create a system that would be flexible enough to encourage the engineer to easily consider a variety of designs. And the cost of making design changes ought to be as close to zero as possible. In addition, the traditional CAD/CAM software of the time unrealistically restricted low-cost changes to only the very front end of the design-engineering process.”

To say Pro/E was a success would be a terrible understatement. Within a few years PTC was winning major accounts from the old-line competitors. In 1992, on the strength of its product, PTC walked away with a 2,000 seat order from Caterpillar that Unigraphics had thought was in the bag.

The secret to Pro/E’s success was its parametric feature-based solid modeling approach to building 3D models. To companies such as Deere and Caterpillar, it offered a compelling vision. Imagine being able to build a virtual CAD model of an engine, and, by changing a few parameters, being able to alter its displacement, or even its number of cylinders. And even if that wasn’t achievable, it would be a great leap forward to just be able to rapidly create and explore design alternatives for parts and assemblies.

Yet, things were not that easy. In 1990, Steve Wolfe, one of the CAD industry’s most insightful observers, pointed out that Pro/E was incapable of making some seemingly simple parametric changes.

Pro/Engineer placed limits on the range of parameters. (A designer could not increase the dimension of L2 to point that L3 vanished.)
Pro/Engineer placed limits on the range of parameters. (A designer could not increase the dimension of L2 to point that L3 vanished.)

David Weisberg, editor of the Engineering Automation Report (and from whose book, The Engineering Design Revolution, I have liberally cribbed for this article), pointed out the fundamental problem with parametrics:

“The problem with a pure parametric design technique that is based upon regenerating the model from its history tree is that, as geometry is added, it is dependent upon geometry created earlier. This methodology has been described as a parent/child relationship, except that it can be many levels deep. If a parent level element is deleted or changed in certain ways it can have unexpected effects on child-level elements. In extreme cases (and sometimes in cases that were not particularly that extreme), the user was forced to totally recreate the model… Some people described designing with Pro/ENGINEER to be more similar to programming than to conventional engineering design.”

Weisberg barely scratches the surface of the issues that can create problems.

In 1991, Dr. Jami Shah wrote an Assessment of Features Technology, for Computer-Aided Design, a journal targeted to people doing research in the field of CAD. He identified that there were problems with features:

“There are no universally applicable methods for checking the validity of features. It is up to the person defining a feature to specify what is valid or invalid for a given feature. Typical checks that need to be done are: compatibility of parent/dependent features, limits on dimension, and inadvertent interference with other features. In a study for CAM-I, Shah et al. enumerated the following types of feature interactions:

  • interaction that makes a feature nonfunctional,
  • non-generic feature(s) obtained from two or more generic ones,
  • feature parameters rendered obsolete,
  • nonstandard topology,
  • feature deleted by subtraction of larger feature,
  • feature deleted by addition of larger feature.
  • open feature becomes closed,
  • inadvertent interactions from modifications.”

The important thing to notice here is that, not only are there multiple failure modes for features, there are also no universal methods for validating features. It’s left up to the user to figure out. And that process, as Weisberg hinted, is much too difficult.

Rebuild Error

Since the early days of Pro/E, a lot of work has been done, both by PTC and other companies in the CAD industry, to improve the reliability and usability of parametric feature-based CAD software. Yet, the problems that Weisberg and Shah identified still exist, and still get in the way of users being able to get the most from their software.

Next: The problem is editing.

 

Bertrand Sicot: Seriously, we’re not going to mess up SolidWorks.

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please_stand_byA few days ago, SolidWorks CEO Bertrand Sicot posted a blog, reiterating yet again that, no, they’re not going to mess with the SolidWorks program that so many people count on. Just as since it was first written, it will continue to use Parasolid as its geometric modeling kernel.

While I think it’s healthy for SolidWorks to periodically remind its customers that it still loves them, in this case, the message was made a little bit more urgent, as Dassault Systemes head Bernard Charles had been a bit overly enthusiastic at a customer meeting last year, and made a statement that pretty much sounded like DS was going to ditch Parasolid. OK — it was more than “pretty much.”

So, record set straight: SolidWorks Mechanical CAD (the name they’re now using for the existing  SolidWorks product) will continue to use the Parasolid kernel. There is no plan to change the kernel. They will continue to develop and improve SolidWorks Mechanical CAD, and have no end-of-life plan for it. They’re not going to do anything to alienate their largest customer base.

That is all.

We now return you to your previously scheduled programming.

 

How real people use CAD: Shane McKenna

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In the CAD world, there are all kinds. Some people just use CAD as part of their job—in the same way as they use Word, Excel, or Outlook.  Others become power users, investing themselves in becoming experts at using one or more of the mainstream or high-end CAD systems. Then, there are the CAD hackers. People who see computer programs as raw material, to be used and abused in whatever ways are necessary to achieve their creative vision.

Shane McKenna is a CAD hacker. He doesn’t believe in following the rules, or using his software tools in the way that their creators envisioned. Here, he talks about his process, and how he uses tools.

Most of the furniture I built using 2D CAD. To be honest, while 3D CAD is powerful, I can draw and project it out in my head for all the sides, faster than I can fiddle out the panel details in a 3D platform. I have tried many times to bend the time curve with 3D tools, but I still end up going back to my simple little $40 DeltaCAD program to draw it up. Time tested projected drawing techniques, used back in the days of the drafting table and T-square, are still faster for me.

McKennaIf I am doing a lot of interlocking joints such as boxed corners, mortise and tenon, or shaped joints, then I will build it in 3D to insure fit before cutting. One of the issues is that a CNC router cut panel leaves material in the kerf. Wood compresses and springs back when cut. That spring-back amount varies by feed rate, spindle speed, grain direction, and type of wood or panel that you are cutting. You have to design out this spring back, and simply changing your offset in your tool path program is not sufficient for most of my applications. To avoid re-cutting parts, I do this kerf compensation in the design phase, and check for it in the 3D model at all the joints. This takes a lot of time, test cuts, and fiddling with offsets in part mating. The payoff is my fit is exceptional, often not perceptible, even with close scrutiny. It is not uncommon for me to spend a week to 10 days just on the fit in the design phase on a complex piece. I have a sign up in my shop, “Perfect is close enough.”

As and artist and designer, my primary skill is vision, and as far back as I can recall I could see an object in 3D, and rotate it in my head. This spacial awareness is mostly innate for me, but obviously honed with practice. Once I have a design concept in my mind, I begin to flush it out with hand sketching, hand sculpting, and 2D or 3D software. I don’t use the software to see what something is going to look like: I try to get the software to shape what I already see.

Sailing shipAs far as CAD/CAM, I go through my bag of tricks and choose the one that works best to work out the shape. Many times I don’t have an known path, and I have to figure out how to get to the end result with what I have, or what I can create as a tool. The ship bed was a challenge to program the base shape. I could not get the software choices I had at the time to make the shape I wanted, so I designed and built a laser line scanning system to scan a hand sculpted 1/8th scale model. The system was crude, but it allowed me to create the shape I wanted. ArtCAM has the ability to create a surface from a grey scale raster image. So I have used Photoshop to create a shaded image then used ArtCAM to model a relief panel. The carved rearing horse doors are an example of this. I used hand sketched topography, scanned into Photoshop to create a level map of about 12 depth layers. The result gave me a quick way to hog out most of the material from the doors so that I could go in and hand carve the final shape and details. I did that project in record time, under a super tight 1 week deadline. (Another carver had dropped the ball, and they came to me last minute). That method can only work if you understand the shape. In my case, I grew up around horses and have owned many. If asked to do the same kind of project with elephants, I might choose a different way, since I would have to study the shapes more, and figure out how to compress the relief for their shape. Possibly sculpting the relief in clay and scanning it, so that I could add and take away until it felt right.


Sometimes my process can be decidedly “redneck,” like hot gluing up a bunch of layers of acoustic ceiling tiles, and grinding away the shape. It is what I had in arms reach, and in 20 min, I had a fiberglass mold. I will use cardboard, chicken wire, duct tape, or whatever I have laying around to make a shape. The scanner does not care what it is, only the shape counts.

I design longboards, and none of my software is perfect for creating the subtle shape changes for the deck molds. I use SolidWorks to create multiple shapes, then use ArtCAM to morph the shapes together. Maybe there is a way to get to the exact shape I want with just one program, but I have not found it yet. Software does not have to be spendy or have a bajillion features to get used by me. I used SketchUp to design a production machine for processing large volumes of urethane film. I engineered the machine, and built it in less than a week, which got my client a huge contract. I often use SketchUp when I need it fast, and it is all in-house work. I don’t need polished drawings to build my own design. I used it to design a large project for another shop, and it turned out perfect even if the drawings didn’t have all the polish of SolidWorks or AutoCAD drawings.

McKenna

My method is constant experimentation with all my tools, and being willing to see it through, no matter how long it takes to figure out. In the long run, you learn how to use your software in ways and combinations unique to your projects. You gain skills that translate to other problem solving areas, and you step outside the box. My goal has never been to perfect a method. If I did that, I would falter from boredom alone. My goal is to accomplish the work, learn, and improve. A perfect result is far more satisfying to me than having the perfect tool.

Shane shared a list of the tools he uses for his artistic work (he also does more conventional engineering work.) Quite a mashup:

So, what are your favorite CAD/CAM hacker tools?

CAD in the pursuit of art: Shane McKenna

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As an engineer, I often think about CAD as a tool for the engineering and design of technological products. But, every once in a while, I’m reminded that CAD can can be used in ways its makers never anticipated.

Shane McKenna is an engineer, designer, craftsman, and artist. I recently talked to Shane about how he uses CAD/CAM in his work, and he, as an aside, shared some of his art. Here’s what he said:

I always turn my tools to artistic endeavors sooner or later. It occurred to me that I could create abstract art by modeling shapes and then playing with the lighting, rendering and camera angles. I have not had a much time to play with these ideas lately, but would like to get them into a gallery at some point. I am open to doing commissioned pieces until I have created a large enough body of work to approach some galleries. These are all done in Solidworks.

If you like Shane’s work, you can contact him by email, at twoartistic@gmail.com.

Tomorrow, I’ll be following up, and posting an article about how Shane uses CAD, CAM, and 3D scanning in his (more conventional) work.

 

SolidWorks 2014: No obvious surprises

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Bernard Charles, explaining where SolidWorks fits in.
Bernard Charles, explaining where SolidWorks fits in.

There was a time, years back, when SolidWorks users complained because the annual updates of the software included so many major new capabilities that it was hard to keep up.

SolidWorks is a mature product now, and the pace of adding major new capabilities has slowed down quite a bit.

Now the big emphases with new SolidWorks releases are performance, stability, and quality. New capabilities are slanted towards making making existing users happy, and seem, at least to me, to have the common characteristic that they can be added without creating stability problems or regressions. SolidWorks 2013, for example, had a fairly good number of enhancements, but few, if any, of them appeared to be the type of things that that would have required making deep changes to the core of the software.

SolidWorks 2014, due to ship later this year, is likely to continue the trend, with a variety of relatively small enhancements, designed to please existing users. The new version was previewed at SolidWorks World last week. Rather than listing the new features here, I recommend checking out Ricky Jordan’s Blog, where he did a nice job of covering them.

Still, there is one new feature that I find quite interesting: the style spline. SolidWorks splines are not particularly well suited to creating class-A surfaces. Whether it was intentional, or a mistake made long ago, it’s been a problem for users who need high quality surface continuity. I’ve wondered how this could be fixed—my guess was that if the SolidWorks programmers changed the behavior of splines to fix their continuity, they’d introduce incompatibilities with older parts files. It looks like their answer was a good one: introduce a new class of spline specifically designed to give better control and smoothness.

It’s probably risky to predict anything about SolidWorks 2014, since it’s not due to ship for quite a while. But my completely subjective impression is that this may be another good release.

Speaking of future releases: I continue to dig to find information on future plans for SolidWorks. You may know that there’s been uncertainty and concerns among some users about whether Dassault Systemes might eventually “retire” the current SolidWorks generation. Here’s my reading: It’s not going to happen for a very long time.

I figure DS is about as likely to retire SolidWorks as Autodesk is to retire AutoCAD. Neither company is run by people who are dumb enough to kill off products that make them hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

 

Update: Vajrang Parvate, Director of SolidWorks Product Development, recently made this comment on the SolidWorks forum:

“We invested several man-years in changing some of the core components of the SolidWorks source code in SW2013 – the compiler, the VBA engine that drives macros and equations, the .NET version we run on, support for Windows 8… to name just a few. This was done across the product line – Core SolidWorks, Simulation, eDrawings, Routing, CircuitWorks, etc. and we are continuing to do those kind of long-term investments in the SolidWorks source code. SW2014 development is going on right now and our Product Definition and Product Management teams have begun initial planning for SW2015.

“I hope this says something about the longevity and the future of the products from SolidWorks you know and use today. Bottom line: They are not going away.”

It’s a nice reassurance that SolidWorks is going to be around for a long time. But, it begs a question: Doesn’t this kind of investment qualify as “making deep changes to the core of the software?”

No.  This work was certainly tedious and time consuming, but not “difficult,” in the sense that making major functional changes to SolidWorks would have been. It it was likely necessary to insure compatibility with the new versions of Microsoft’s development tools.

It’s hard to give SolidWorks major brownie points for doing something that every software developer who wants to support Windows 8 has to do.

Had Vajrang said that they’d invested the time and effort to add support for DirectX (as an alternative to OpenGL), I would have been impressed.

 

Why Validation is important to SolidWorks users

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What is your product master?

Is it a paper drawing? A digital drawing? a 3D model?

No matter what it is today, it’s likely that, in the future, it’s going to be a 3D model.

According to NIST, there are some big advantages of using a 3D model as master:

  • Faster design revisions
  • Build and test components and assemblies in a virtual
  • environment (do-overs are no problem)
  • Infinite viewpoints and exploded views of assemblies
  • Direct to rapid prototyping
  • Direct to engineering analysis (stress, thermal,
  • interference fit, tolerance stack-up, etc.)
  • Reduced manufacturing lead time and cost
  • Automated generation and update of drawings (when
  • drawings are needed)
  • Generation of technical manuals directly from model data
  • Costing, materials acquisition, marketing, training…

One gotcha in going this route is that your 3D master may be used with different applications, which could make mistakes in interpreting it.

Let’s say you’re importing your 3D model from Pro/E into SolidWorks.  Think there is any chance that the importer could introduce errors?

Or, maybe your CAD software goes through a generational change.  Is it possible that your carefully constructed 3D models might be misinterpreted by the new generation software? It’s happened before.  Like, with the change from CATIA V4 to V5.

 

Could such a thing happen again?  How about when Dassault Systemes SolidWorks Corp introduces its new SolidWorks V6 generation products?

To be fair, I want to give the SolidWorks programmers all the credit possible for making sure that they’ve dealt with compatibility problems between the V1 generation of SolidWorks, and the V6 generation.  But, even with all that credit, I have to fall back to this simple concept: Trust but Verify.

Next Thursday, Nov. 8, at  2:00 pm ET / 11:00 am PT , I’m hosting a free webinar with Capvidia, to talk about data verification in SolidWorks.

Capvidia is going to be talking about how their CompareWorks program can  diagnose the geometry you import into SolidWorks and show where there are differences and/or give you the assurance it is correct. And how you can use it to establish a documented, traceable procedure in your company workflow.

If you’re a SolidWorks user, and you work with imported geometry, or you’re concerned about how to handle compatibility between your existing version of SolidWorks and the upcoming SolidWorks V6 generation, I think you’ll find this webinar to be really interesting.

Click here to register for the webinar.