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HOOPS 2022 Toolkits enhance manufacturing and BIM workflows

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Tech Soft 3D, a leading provider of engineering software development toolkits (SDKs), announced the release of the HOOPS 2022 SDKs. The enhancements to the 2022 toolkits focus on providing remarkable animation, data access and exchange, simulation and rendering capabilities to enable Tech Soft 3D partners to remain competitive in their industries by developing cutting-edge applications with proven 3D technologies.

With HOOPS SDKs, developers can reduce product development costs and bring desktop, web, mobile, and AR/VR applications to market faster.

Key feature enhancements include:

–Support for Apple Silicon: Apple’s recent shift from Intel-based chips to its new ARM-based architecture requires partners to port applications to provide the best experience for their users. We are now providing an official build of our HOOPS toolkits to enable this process.

–Animation Manager: New animation capabilities, including a new animation manager, are designed to meet various engineering animation needs, ranging from BIM 5D simulations, through Digital Factory animations, and Work Instruction authoring.

–Physically Based Rendering (PBR): PBR has been added to HOOPS Communicator to provide higher quality rendering for web applications and is now also available in HOOPS Visualize for mobile platforms.

–Spatial Relationships: Support for “Spatial Relationships” that are part of the Industry Foundation Class (IFC) model definition enables the ability to navigate in the model, query the model in the context of Quantity Takeoff (QTO) and more.

Enhancements to SDKs include:

–HOOPS Exchange
–Native CAD and standard format support for Inventor 2022, ACIS 2021 1.0 and –Parasolid 34.0
–Accessing mates for CATIA V5 files to help optimize workflows for applications in manufacturing simulation, robotic, kinematics analysis and more.

HOOPS Visualize
–New culling mechanism where front faces can be culled, allowing the user to see inside objects easier, and more easily show the results of analysis.
–Android AR Sandbox application refresh, which includes updating the ARCore SDK, using ARCore to match the 3D lighting to the environmental lighting (as seen by the camera), and adding a broader range of models.

HOOPS Communicator
–Supports assembly level features across different shattered workflows, allows users to view all the parts or a building or mechanical assembly at once and easily switch versions/revisions of individual parts or sub-assemblies without having to reconvert or process the entire set of 3D objects.
–Supports generating multiple output SC files for each body which is affected by an assembly level feature resulting in correct assembly conversion.
–New rendering modes (sketched mode and conceptual mode) based on standard AEC application interactions, enables users to replicate the environment they are used to in AEC workflows.

HOOPS Publish
–Improvements to HTML export regarding quality and fidelity with 3D PDFs.

HOOPS toolkits are also available through the HOOPS Native and HOOPS Web Platforms. HOOPS Platforms combine 3D technologies for CAD data exchange, visualization and data publishing, along with tight connections to popular modeling kernels.

Tech Soft 3D
www.techsoft3d.com

What AR/VR needs to do to for greater adoption

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by Ron Fritz, CEO, Tech Soft 3D

“Perpetually on the verge of a breakthrough.” That might be the phrase that comes to mind when describing the journey of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) towards widespread adoption in industrial settings.

Over the past two decades, there have been several moments when AR/VR seemed like it was ripe to explode. But while there have been some scattered pilot projects and small proofs of concept involving a handful of users, we haven’t really seen the technology become mainstream. It’s not something that most companies are using broadly, or that most individuals are even necessarily familiar with beyond “Isn’t that the Pokemon thing?”

Given its legitimate potential, what are the barriers that are standing in the way of widespread adoption of AR/VR, and what should the industry as a whole be focusing on to try and remove those barriers?

Start with the User Experience
At the moment, user experience (UX) should be near the top of the list. When these technologies were first designed, they sprung more from a spirit of exploration and pushing the boundaries of what technology could do. There was less of a focus on the human being who would actually be using the technologies.

As a result, there’s significant room for UX improvement, and in areas like VR headsets, progress is being made. Frame rates are improving, and the hardware is becoming less clunky and easier to wear for extended lengths of time. Put another way: the VR hardware developers are aware of the issues, and they’re working on it. They’re not standing still.

AR, meanwhile, has UX challenges of its own, starting with the fact that the human arm quickly gets fatigued if it has to hold up a smartphone or tablet for more than a minute or two. Humans, understandably, don’t want to have to use their bodies in unnatural or tiring ways just to experience the benefits of AR.

The good news is the hardware side of the AR industry has received the message. They’re actively developing other hardware alternatives besides mobile devices – witness the continuing iteration and enhancement of the Microsoft HoloLens. As a head-mounted display, the HoloLens is able to nimbly sidestep the fatigue and awkward body mechanics associated with holding a mobile device out in front for too long.

UX, by the way, extends to data preparation. If someone has to sit down and manually prepare CAD data for use in AR/VR, that’s not a terribly good user experience. If AR/VR hopes to be widely adopted, that step of the process needs to be fast, robust, and automated.

To get there, however, AR/VR needs more standardization across the industry. What we’re seeing now is a bit like what we saw with IoT a few years ago, where all the different players have their own initiatives, and the field temporarily becomes a bit of a Wild West. In early tech, that’s just what happens: Everyone’s spinning up their own APIs and standards.

Again, however, we have reason to be bullish on the future of AR/VR because what always eventually happens in the tech development lifecycle is that a winner emerges around standards and frameworks – and this makes things easier for everyone, providing some “common ground” that helps the field move forward.

Make the content relevant
For all the talk of hardware and user experience, let’s not forget content. It needs to be relevant.

This is especially the case if the hardware and/or user experience is still ironing out some kinks: The use case or the value that the AR/VR application provides must be even more prominent and even more valuable.

Achieving this goal requires some creativity. The industry needs to ask itself “what can we do with this technology that we can’t do with other technology?” so that it can really have a completely new perspective on the content that it delivers.

Of course, lots of people are just getting their feet wet and experiencing AR/VR for the first time – so they need to learn to walk before they can run. But we have every reason to believe that with this growing familiarity, there will be a corresponding increase in creativity.

While it did seem for some time that AR/VR was a technology looking for a problem to solve, we are increasingly bumping into well-defined use cases. Industrial customers are recognizing that there are certain scenarios – whether on a factory floor, or on a construction site – where it would actually be highly useful to have content available to them via AR and VR, and that it would help them make decisions faster and do their jobs more effectively.

Beyond manufacturing and construction, there are sectors like mining that could also benefit greatly from AR/VR in a number of scenarios.

For example, say a mine is based in a remote desert in Chile, but the mining company’s executive team is based in London. If 3D data of the mine has been collected, the executives can simply strap on a VR headset and experience that mine in a much more vivid manner than text descriptions, photos, or even video footage ever could. The same benefit applies to company shareholders or potential investors who want to “visit” a mine to see what they’re putting their money into – all without having to travel halfway across the globe to the hard-to-get-to locations where mines are typically located.

Aside from the business end of things, the ability to “stand” in the mine, turn around and get a 360 degree view, and really understand the full state of the mine could be very useful for improving decision-making in the event of a crisis situation like a cave-in or some other disaster. The foreman who is present on site could notify the executive team of the disaster, and the executives could then use VR to more fully understand the situation on the ground and the extent of the damage, helping inform how best to proceed.

AR increasingly has a role to play as well, with the development of items like smart helmets that can overlay information onto mine surroundings. People are already required by law to wear a helmet inside of mines, so AR-equipped helmets are a natural fit – and they provide a good platform for compelling mine-specific content to be built off of.

From factories to construction sites to mining operations, there is plenty of room for AR and VR to lend a hand in industrial settings. Fortunately, the content is increasingly responding to these market needs, creating a virtuous cycle of technological advancement.

The Tipping Point?
Lots of big names – including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, to name a few – are heavily investing in the belief that the barriers around AR/VR adoption are being resolved and that this is an area that is poised for a big breakthrough moment. AR/VR has already made significant inroads over the past couple decades and has a solid foundation to build upon.

Focusing on just two main areas – the user experience on the hardware side of things, and the content itself on the software side – can help accelerate its forward momentum and push it to the next level.

In this way, AR/VR can finally go from being a technology that is perpetually on the verge, to one that has finally reached a tipping point.

Tech Soft 3D
Tech Soft 3D

A view on where AR/VR is headed, roundtable discussion from those who know

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Recently, Ron Fritz, CEO of Tech Soft 3D, hosted a roundtable discussion with five other industry executives to discuss the current state of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). The core question at hand: whether AR/VR is finally poised for its breakthrough moment – and if so, what barriers might need to be removed to usher in this new era.

The participants included:

– Asif Rana, COO of Hexagon, a provider of sensor, software, and autonomous solutions

– Martin Herdina, CEO of Wikitude, an augmented reality technology company

– Susanna Holt, VP Forge Platform, Autodesk, a provider of 3D design and engineering software

– Thomas Schuler, CEO of Halocline, a developer of VR products for production planning and manufacturing

– Tony Fernandez, CEO of UEGroup, a user experience agency

A lightly edited and condensed version of the conversation and their unique perspectives follows.

Q: At various points over the past decade, many of us have believed that AR/VR was ready to really take off in the industrial setting – but it hasn’t happened yet. What are the barriers that are standing in the way of that widespread adoption, and what should the industry be focusing on?

Asif: One of the fundamental things that we tend to forget when we think about commercializing a technology is the user experience. I think one of the main hurdles of AR/VR in the commercial usage is we don’t think about the full user journey or what the full end-to-end solution looks like.

Martin: For a while, there was such a focus on technical benchmarks that nobody really talked about what could be achieved with AR/VR. Even when people did start to talk about what could be achieved, they didn’t really look at the full picture and at how things could be scaled beyond a single isolated use case. As long as that underlying basis is missing, widespread adoption of AR/VR will be hampered.

Susanna: I think one thing that’s lacking around AR/VR is pre-processing of data and data preparation – from CAD design data, to mesh poly count reduction. That kind of stuff needs to be automated, robust, fast, and scalable. And at the moment, all of that still seems to require too much manual work to really enable this AR/VR takeoff that we’ve been anticipating for the past 20 years.

Tony: I think the core issue is that AR/VR did not emerge from a human-centered point of view. It emerged from a technological exploration point of view. And what that has meant is that the human factors of this technology are terrible.

To take the case of VR: Who thought it was going to be a great idea to duct tape a TV to your head and blindfold you? Meanwhile, with AR, one of the problems that we continually run into is arm and body fatigue from having to hold up a device. Because AR/VR technology hasn’t centered around the reality of the human body, how it gets fatigued, and how people feel motivated to use their bodies, it will continue to have a difficult time breaking through to the mainstream, regardless of the value proposition it may offer.

Q: From what everyone’s saying, it seems that the user experience is one of the big barriers to mainstream adoption. What needs to be different for people to feel comfortable? How can companies remove this barrier?

Tony: I think mobile AR is a really difficult problem to solve. And again, part of the problem with most existing AR solutions is that they require people to use their bodies in unnatural ways. From a hardware perspective, we’re going to be much closer to solving that problem once we get to some sort of compact glasses. Of course, glasses come with their own problems around power and where to place the battery and so on. But I think that’s what AR’s waiting for, in terms of a hardware platform solution.

Asif: I wonder whether there are the same expectations on an enterprise level as at a consumer level for AR/VR. I say that because in the enterprise, you do see technology that’s not so comfortable to use – but it delivers such a high value that it’s used anyways. So, perhaps the AR/VR hardware is “good enough,” and it’s the content side that deserves more focus to deliver applications that can really make an impact and deliver value. Either way, I’d say that if the hardware companies focused on more business cases, that would be helpful to the enterprise sector.

Susanna: It’s true that the enterprise use case may put up with all sorts of inconveniences. But when I think of a use case for us at Autodesk, which might be an architect or structural engineer at a construction site or building site, inconvenience can quickly become a safety concern. AR provides a limited field of vision. In normal life, we don’t just look straight ahead – we’re constantly taking in things occurring on the periphery. Excluding that visual information in a potentially dangerous environment like a construction site does strike me as a risk factor. So, the hardware has to be natural to the way we conduct ourselves as humans in a particular environment.

Martin: I think the most important point that people have hit on is that things have to feel natural. When you wear a HoloLens, it’s cool, but it’s nothing that you would want to wear for 10 hours per day at your workspace. Another aspect that companies should address is the fact that so many AR use cases totally lack context. For example, why would you use AR to project a team roster on your desk when there are so many other user interfaces that make so much more sense for that objective? AR needs to really link reality to a reasonable set of content.

Q: Lots of big names – including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, to name a few – are heavily investing in the belief that the barriers around AR/VR adoption are being resolved and that this an area that is ripe for explosion. All of your companies are, to varying degrees, investing in that belief as well. What makes you optimistic that AR/VR is getting close to a real breakthrough? What drives your confidence?

Thomas: It takes a long time to bring hardware technology from an early prototype to a usable product. You have to really keep at it for quite some time. What makes me optimistic is that the hardware vendors are still investing in it and pushing it forward – they’re not standing still.

At the same time, more and more content is now being produced that makes more sense. I think more people understand now that you need a different set of tools for AR or VR rather than taking the same old tools that you had before, but just manipulating them differently. So, while the progress might be slower than everyone expected, that progress is very much ongoing. That makes me optimistic that we are on an eventual path towards more widespread adoption for AR/VR.

Susanna: Well, let me turn this question the other way around. We’re hearing so much from our customers about how AR or VR is needed and how they’re expecting it to play a bigger role in their workflows. Some of that, of course, is a reflection of hype that they see in the media, but a significant proportion of it is a reflection of real need.

For example, while wearing a HoloLens headset might be uncomfortable today, it does allow you to make those important decisions much faster than having to look at something, take a photograph, go back to the office, think it through, discuss it, and so on. It will speed everything up. It’s about faster decisions, better decisions. There’s a real need in the market – so that bodes quite well for AR/VR, because a lot of technological advancement and evolution is driven by market need.

Tony: I would say AR/VR will break through if it can focus on its fundamental promise, which is to reveal information and perspectives in ways that would be difficult to do any other way. I’m not necessarily a believer that the way most companies have defined AR at this point is necessarily the path forward. For example, AR doesn’t necessarily always have to be visual in nature, right? It can be haptic in nature. It can be lots of other things. But visual is the primary road for now, and I think the need to visualize information that is otherwise difficult to do any other way or get access to any other way is going to drive the solution.

Martin: At my company, we perhaps have a unique perspective, because we have thousands of developers using our tools on a daily basis to create AR use cases, and we can see what those people are working on. The things they are doing today with AR are substantially different from what we saw two or three years ago. There are still people working on proof of concepts, but the number of people who are moving from POC to commercial grade installations – and the number of use cases we see that are no longer for two or three or five users, but 10,000 to 20,000 users – has rapidly increased in the past year.

Also, from a finance perspective, AR is no longer tapping into the budgets of the innovation units – it’s tapping into the budgets of the actual business units. That’s the ultimate sign that technologies like AR/VR are starting to take hold in the enterprise space.

Asif: There are at least three reasons why I’m very feeling positive about AR/VR. The first is the acceleration of digitalization that has taken place as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many, many systems are getting digitally transformed, and digital journeys that might have taken years to complete are now on the fast track. So, the ground is really set for AR to make a move.

The second reason is that digital process management has really evolved. The journey really starts with connectivity first, then it goes to the integration, then it goes to the digital workflows. Once you have the workflow, to augment the workflow with AR is very straightforward.

The third reason is the advent and proliferation of smartphones and tablets that are loaded with the sensors and features that are required for AR/VR. These devices are now at everyone’s fingertips, ready to be used for various advanced workflows. So, really, I think the time is very, very good right now for AR/VR.

 

Tech Soft 3D completes acquisition of Visual Kinematics in continued expansion of CAE offerings

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Tech Soft 3D, a leading provider of engineering software development kits (SDKs), announces that it has acquired Visual Kinematics (VKI), maker of DevTools, a suite of component software development kits (SDKs) for computer-aided engineering (CAE) applications. This acquisition continues the company’s growth plans to scale global reach and increase its product offerings.

“The CAE market is exploding and the applications for simulation will only continue to expand,” said Ron Fritz, Chief Executive Officer at Tech Soft 3D. “Analysing how your design will function in the real world offers such massive cost savings that simulation is already well established in the design process. Tech Soft 3D is focused on adapting our tools to address this rapidly growing market space, as well as taking some of the core capabilities available in these technologies to serve the needs of additive manufacturing, AR/VR, IoT, machine learning, AI, etc.”

Based in Saratoga, California, the team at VKI has spent more than 30 years developing a component software product line that addresses a spectrum of CAE simulation technology needs: from mesh generation and interoperability tools to solvers, visualization and graphics. VKI’s tools provide developers with the ability to import/export of the analysis results from the vast majority of the world’s most widely used simulation solutions including those from ANSYS, Siemens and Dassault Systèmes. VKI component tools have been installed in analysis products including mechanical, fluids, electro-magnetic and multiphysics applications. With a reputation for delivering innovative, commercially robust products, VKI is relied upon by the CAE industry’s largest and most respected software companies such as ANSYS, Dassault Systèmes (SolidWorks), Siemens, Autodesk, Hexagon (MSC.Software), PTC, Ceetron and ESI Group to deliver applications for structural analysis, heat transfer, computational fluid dynamics and electromagnetics.

“We have been committed to providing the absolute best solutions to our customers, enabling them to build integrated, customized, end-to-end CAE analysis solutions, and we couldn’t be happier knowing that our customers will now have even more tools at their disposal,” said Gordon Ferguson, Chief Executive Officer at VKI. “The commitment that Tech Soft 3D has to building the strongest suite of CAE development tools in the industry is unmatched, and we are excited to be joining the team.”

Tech Soft 3D has long been a provider of data access and engineering graphics SDKs to the CAE market, working with partners such as ANSYS, Dassault Systèmes (EXA) , Altair, Numeca, MathWorks and Siemens (CD Adapco).

“The VKI portfolio is the perfect complement to our HOOPS toolkits, as well as our recently acquired Ceetron SDKs for visualization of CAE results,” said Gavin Bridgeman, CTO at Tech Soft 3D. “We will be working hard to integrate our tool sets, offering the most complete and robust CAE component technology solution on the market. It’s an exciting time, and I look forward to building the future with our new colleagues.”

Tech Soft 3D intends to continue to maintain and support VKI’s existing customers and partners that are using its market-leading SDK offerings for CAE, and will retain their staff. Details of the acquisition are not disclosed. Tech Soft 3D is backed by investment firm Battery Ventures.

Tech Soft 3D
www.techsoft3d.com

Found Faster: How searchable databases speed CAD design

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Searchable databases do away engineers’ need to recreate CAD files. As for importing models, CAD translators keep costs down.

Jean Thilmany, Senior Editor

Engineers spend nearly two hours each day searching for or recreating parts that already exist, according to a survey done by Cadenas PartSolutions, a Cincinnati maker of parts management software. That number represents a significant loss of time engineers could otherwise be spending on more valuable projects.

By doing away with the need to search or recreate, engineers could get back those 1.8 hours each day: an obvious financial win. The key is to give engineers an easy way to find already-existing CAD models that can be dropped into assemblies. That way, they don’t have to recreate the wheel each time they design. If a company can standardize and reuse simple parts like fasteners, it can save a huge number of engineering hours.

But part reuse can be difficult if locating designs is a problem to begin with. How can engineers know if the CAD design for a part already exists if they don’t know where, or how, to begin looking?

The answer is a searchable database. In the past, these types of parts libraries were the purview of large companies with many decentralized parts databases that sprawled across divisions. But within the past decade or so, the search technology has increasingly become available to companies of all sizes.

In 2013, IBM implemented what it called a strategy for the reuse of assets.

“Developing an orchestrated process to maximize the reuse of assets across the product lifecycle increases design efficiencies and tames product complexity,” according to the 2014 IBM article “Strategic reuse and product line engineering” authored by Eran Gery, IBM distinguished engineer, and Joanne Scouler, IBM curriculum architect.

Companies that make products like vehicles, medical devices, and consumer electronics make multiple products that share common elements, which results in “product lines” or “product families.” Reuse of assets across a product line or family is a major efficiency improvement for easing product design pressures, the authors say.

In the article, they outline the reuse system IBM has put into place, which is built upon the company’s IBM Rational systems and software engineering platform.

The company found that without a part-reuse system, companies:
• Waste time and money developing components that already exist in other company products.
• Needlessly change and recreate assets that already exist.
• Compromise product quality by following an error-prone manual process.
• Make needless changes to existing assets.

While IBM was able to implement its program on its own software engineering platform, other companies don’t have a home-grown platform in place. They can, however, use third-party applications to create searchable parts libraries that help do away with needless part recreation.

For example, Parker-Hannifin, the maker of motion and control systems, recently implemented Cadenas Part Strategic Part Management software to streamline the reuse of 3D parts across several of the company’s divisions. The software is comprised of a searchable, centralized database of 3D parts and data that engineers use to find the component they need. They can search based on part geometry, topology, text, sketch, or dimensions.

The project’s payoff is the capability to reuse internal components across all Parker divisions and in the reduction in time spent finding parts, says Tim Thomas, Cadenas PARTsolutions chief executive officer.

All Parker-Hannifin’s divisions were brought onto the common parts management system, which included an enterprise part-numbering strategy, he adds.

Going Up? Coming Together
When a company grows by acquiring other companies, it often must fold in different IT and CAD environments along with the purchases. Because those systems don’t “talk” to one another, they prevent engineers from finding all parts that exist in the company’s CAD systems. This is another way a centralized database hastens CAD file reuse.

Take the example of The Wittur Group, a German company that makes a range of elevator components that include gearless drives, slings, safety gears, cars, and braking systems. Customers are global elevator installers including Kone, Otis, Schindler, and Hitachi as well as smaller, independent installers.

Through the years, as Wittur grew to become an international company, it brought newly acquired businesses’ IT systems onboard as well. It also maintained the acquired company’s CAD files of existing parts, says Markus Aichinger, corporate CAD manager at Wittur.

Soon, the company’s diverse CAD environments prevented engineers from easily finding those parts, he adds. Data was stored in different legacy databases, each with its own material codes, norms, and structure, which had to be sifted through individually, he says.

Not surprisingly, the process of discovering whether a CAD part already existed or needed to be redesigned took a lot of time.

In addition to making the search process easier, Wittur also wanted to reduce the number of duplicate parts to avoid confusion, Aichinger says.  “Our engineers were having difficulty finding existing parts for new projects, so they preferred redesigning them, even though, in many cases, a similar part existed. The continuous duplication of parts also required additional storage space.”

In addition to time spent designing a new part, engineers also spent time prototyping and testing the part, adding further costs, he adds.

Wittur officials at the company knew what they needed: a searchable system that linked company databases and eliminated duplicate parts.

“This system would help us find existing parts for reuse in new projects and provide global users with a single point of entry to find up-to-date production drawing information,” Aichinger says.

To search 3-D CAD geometry, Wittur implemented the Exalead OnePart application from Dassault Systèmes. The system includes a shape-search feature, which locates parts that match the original shape and also displays close-matches in the search results. The tool identifies master parts for reuse to ensure engineers select the preferred part without recreating a part that already exists in the design library, says Gian Paolo Bassi, chief executive officer at Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks.

To find 2-D drawings, the elevator-parts supplier created a drawing information system that runs on the Exalead platform.

“We’re not only able to find the 2-D drawings themselves, but all the metadata—part tolerances, material information, and where drawings are used— associated with each drawing. We can also display a component’s design history and show the latest revisions,” Aichinger says. “Before we had this, our engineers would have to search for this information in different sources.”

Bassi calls Exalead OnePart a “borderline artificially intelligent product” because it recognizes and flags part similarities, he says.

When an engineer finds a particular part within the CADSeek Polaris system, they also find other information associated with the part, including cost, supplier names, manufacturing information, and analysis results, says Rick Mihelic, a former engineering systems manager at Peterbilt Motors, which stores searchable part information on the CADSeek Polaris platform from iSeek of Ames, Iowa.

CADSeek searching parts to find matches

The tool locates existing parts and assemblies using shape alone, text-based attributes alone, or a combination of the two. It also identifies duplicate parts, which allows for cost savings through parts consolidation, standardization, and part-number reduction, Mihelic says.

Typically, CAD models are only classified based on text-based attributes, which are rarely complete or uniformly applied. But even if attributes could be complete and uniform, two items labeled as “valves” can be so different that applying analytics is a waste of time. With the CADSeek system, each time an engineer searches a dataset, such as valves, they can apply similarity thresholds. For instance, an engineer might ask the system to show all models with at least 91% or greater similarity to the valve used for the search, says Abir Qamhiyah, iSeek Corp’s chief executive officer.

But engineers aren’t company employees that reuse CAD parts. For other personnel, who aren’t always at their desktops, iSeek recently introduced CADSeek Mobile, that lets users take 2-D photos of parts on their Android, IOS or Windows mobile device and to use those images to automatically search their company’s 3-D CAD databases for the piece pictures or for a similarly shaped part.

Manufacturers like Moen and Embraer use iSeek’s original shape-based search application, CADSeek Polaris. At those companies, designers and supply chain personnel use the application to find CAD data for part reuse, to standardization opportunities, for vendor price analysis, should-cost estimation, automated quotations, mergers and acquisitions, and for data cleanup and consolidation, Qamhiyah says.

Small parts in particular often lose their identifying numbers, no matter whether that inventory is housed in an assembly plant, distribution center or out in the field. When those vital identifying numbers disappear and parts can’t be easily reordered, perfectly good parts are scrapped or time is wasted, he adds.

Getting the Design Inside
Now let’s take the opposite problem: how to best bring a CAD design into a system so that it can be used to create a part.

a CAD assembly and part on the Hoops CAD translation platform from TechSoft

The additive manufacturing industry needs to get manufacturing data into their systems. It’s traditionally used stereolithography files, though they can be error prone, says Gavin Bridgeman, CTO at TechSoft 3D, which makes CAD translation software. By directly reading both native and standard CAD file formats, products can increase their ease-of-use and ultimately their print quality.

Techsoft 3D’s Hoops Exchange toolkit does this for engineering-specific applications including many in the 3D printing market, he says. “We’ve seen a lot of growth recently related to people creating new software to solve problems in engineering data markets that didn’t exist a few years ago, like additive manufacturing service bureaus,” Bridgeman says.

The bureaus import 3-D CAD data from creators, use HOOPS Exchange to translate those files, and then print from them.

“People can put more manufacturing information into their 3-D files, but they also know how they want something to look visually,” Bridgeman says. “Service bureaus have to meet both manufacturing and visual needs.”

Whether an engineer wants to find a CAD model within a huge system or needs to import a model to create a 3-D printed part, search and translate technologies step in to slash engineering costs.

Cadenas PartSolutions
partsolutions.com

Dassault Systèmes
www.3ds.com

iSeek
www.iseek.com

TechSoft 3D
www.techsoft3d.com

Virtalis uses HOOPS Exchange to create rich data

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Tech Soft 3D, a leading provider of software development toolkits to engineering software companies, announced that Virtalis is using HOOPS Exchange to create rich data sets that fuel enterprise data models that serve as the visualization backbone for multiple types of applications across the enterprise. Virtalis is a pioneer in the AR/VR industry and provider of immersive visualization solutions that cover the full lifecycle of the product, from conceptual design to distribution.

Visionary Render is Virtalis’ flagship platform for importing and visualizing large datasets from a range of sources, while maintaining all the geometry, naming hierarchies, metadata, and product & manufacturing information (PMI). Virtalis is focused on supporting industrial applications and manufacturers creating large complex products for aerospace, defense and automotive, as well as construction, geoscience, consumer goods, and more. Accurately supporting the formats used in this wide range of industries is critical because companies need to visualize large amounts of data from diverse sources. Being able to review the data in an immersive environment on a one-to-one scale, rather than seeing a 2D view of a 3D object is effective for communicating to people who aren’t skilled in CAD.

“When we import CAD data with HOOPS Exchange, we get the data that we expect,” said Barry King, Product Owner at Virtalis. “Our customers expect to see reliable data when they’re making important decisions based on visualizations and having reliable and dependable data is one of the most important things for them. What’s great about HOOPS is that it supports almost all the formats, including VRML. Our customers have legacy data, and we rely on the fact that HOOPS Exchange supports those formats. Often our customers will challenge us with data and we can say, ‘no problem.’ We can support this wide variety of formats because we have HOOPS behind us.”

Virtalis goes beyond visualizing CAD data from an external view by immersing users in the environment where the model may live, allowing them to experience the product.

“We’re looking at products in the context of where they sit,” said Gavin England, Product Marketing Manager at Virtalis. “We could be looking at a product installed inside a factory, or a building structure coming from building information modeling (BIM) data. In addition to the core formats, being able to bring in data like Revit is key as well.”

HOOPS Exchange provides access to a broad range of data including B-Rep geometry, metadata, PMI, model tree, views, persistent IDs, styles, construction geometry, visualization and more – all without depending on any CAD system. This wide-ranging access proved to be an important element in Virtalis’ decision-making process.

“When we initially were getting to grips and integrating it, Tech Soft 3D was really responsive and collaborated with us to get the results that we needed,” said King. “When we communicate an issue, we always get it fixed in the next release, and the releases come out steadily and reliably.” That’s very important and a real benefit for us. Whether they’re working with engineering or science data, a lot of customers are learning how much time and money they can save by leveraging immersive visualization and not having to build physical prototypes. This helps them make better business decisions – and Tech Soft 3D plays a critical role in supporting those workflows.”

Tech Soft 3D
www.techsoft3d.com

Tech Soft 3D Announces New Product Suite

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Over the next four weeks, Tech Soft 3D will introduce a suite of products to help engineering software developers build cloud and mobile compatibility into their applications. Focused on leading the charge into new environments for engineering applications, this new set of tools will enable developers to deliver robust, graphic-enriched software on a faster timetable than ever before.

Tech-Soft-3D-Announces-New-Product-Suite

“The engineering software industry is rapidly moving toward mobile and web environments,” said Kathleen Maher, Vice President of Jon Peddie Research. “The shift has been inspired by the arrival of the iPad tablet, which has stimulated a vibrant community of developers creating point tools for design and engineering. Tech Soft 3D’s expertise and leadership in this area will help the industry meet this growing demand.”

Developers currently have to code mobile or web applications from the ground up. Tech Soft 3D’s upcoming toolkits allow developers to start one step ahead, and focus their attention on core competencies rather than supporting high-performance graphics on different platforms.

“Our customers demand a solution that provides end users with an experience that will accelerate design and ultimately get a product to market faster,” said CEO of GrabCAD, Hardi Meybaum. “Partnering with Tech Soft 3D and building on their proven HOOPS technologies has enabled us to do this with ease and elegance. Now we have the time and freedom to focus on what we do best.”

Key products within Tech Soft 3D’s mobile and web product suite include:

  • HOOPS Visualize: The industry’s most widely used visualization toolkit becomes even more robust in an update that focuses on the high-performance handling of large models and assemblies.
  • HOOPS Visualize for Mobile: This new product allows engineering software developers to develop mobile applications that work across all iOS and Android devices.
  • HOOPS Communicator: Radically updated, this true plug-in technology enables advanced 3D visualization and model inspection in web and mobile applications for developers without any 3D expertise.
  • HOOPS Exchange: This upcoming release of HOOPS Exchange will be available for licensing in cloud/server environments, putting proven CAD data access tools in the hands of next-generation application developers for a customized final product.
  • HOOPS Publish: A new version of HOOPS Publish will be available for licensing in cloud/server environments to enable a variety of 3D data workflows, allowing for production of unique software that is untethered from the desktop.

Developers have used Tech Soft 3D’s advanced tools for over a decade to extend engineering solutions and products, ranging from venerable CAD solutions such as PTC’s CADDS5, to more recent applications from companies like Autodesk, SolidWorks and Trimble. Tech Soft 3D’s experienced software development team understands what developers want and need today (and tomorrow) in their mobile and web environments.

“We have always been focused on helping software teams achieve their goals quicker than they could before,” said VP of Products for Tech Soft 3D, Gavin Bridgeman. “This upcoming suite of products allows our partners to license reliable technology from a company they trust to be their long-term strategic technology partner.”

Pricing and Availability

These products will be launching individually throughout October. Customers will be able to purchase them individually or as part of a package.

Tech Soft 3D
www.techsoft3d.com