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There is a way to determine people’s ability to structure designs. Ask them to arrange virtual furniture in a room:
When they draw rectangles and they annotate them with words like “wardrobe,” “bed,” and “table,” then place dimensions and distances, you are looking at a designer. The designer is a planner solving the “What can and should be done” problem.
When they create perspective views with details like armrests and cushions, it seems that they are “constructors” who would be better trying their hand at mechanical engineering. (See figure below.) Constructors solve the “How to make” problem using original, non-standard solutions. This is welcome in mechanical engineering, which has a pre-production testing stage, which does not exist in the design of buildings where non-standard solutions are risky.
Perspective drawing made by a constructor
“What is a model for, if you already have drawings?” This is the question I am asked during discussions on automatically generating 3D models from 2D drawings. People have no idea that it’s possible to make drawings without first constructing 3D models. For instance, this is the weighty opinion of a developer of one 3D modeling program: “The model is the only source of information for drawings. Drawings are nothing more than views of the model.”
And what do standards and textbooks say? When we consult them, we read terms like “projections,” “sections,” and “cross-sections,” such as illustrated by the figure below.
Orthogonal and other projections of a 3D model
When we read further, we learn that a floor plan is a horizontal section at the level of the window openings, or 1/3 of the story’s height. We might think that this confirms the priority of models over drawings. An example from a real project, however, casts doubt on this conclusion.
Depicted in the figure below is a shop. This is practical, clear, but how can it be called a “horizontal section” when it shows a variety of elevations? Some are at -2.500; there is a rail track at floor level; some platforms at +1.000 and +4.000; many columns and vertical bracings (above the floor, and below the crane rails); walls at level of windows; bridge cranes and a crane landing platform (just under the roof).
Production building plan at a variety of elevations
This exactly is a plan, a schematic representation of what should be built. It is an extremely simplified representation, with all plan objects refined and detailed elsewhere. By the way, sections are the same as plans, except that they describe builds from different aspects.
PROJECT NEWPLEX v2.0
Project Newplex 2.0 is the advanced SHX font designed for technical documents; compatible with every DWG-based CAD program that supports Unicode SHX files.
Features
Advanced character forms for readability & clarity
The synthesis of spatial objects from their projections is called “the inverse problem of descriptive geometry,” and is an unsolved technical problem. Nevertheless, for hundreds of years, designers and builders have been synthesizing mental versions of 3D building models from 2D drawings. Then, builders transform the mental objects into real ones — how do they do it?
It is impossible to build models using projections, but it is possible using conditional images that have parameters tied to them. When we draw a circle (even if it is not perfect), and then write just two words, such as “Sphere d1800,” we create the parametric description of a sphere as a spatial object.
A parametric description consists entirely of conventional signs, and as a result is a linguistic description. Parametric modeling is essentially linguistic modeling. As a rule, parametric descriptions include the following elements:
Object type designations, formatted as text (e.g., “sphere”)
Conditional graphical representations of objects (e.g., drawing of a circle)
Parametric designations as text (e.g., “d1800”)
Conditional auxiliary images (e.g., dimensions and extension lines)
There are cases where the object type designator is not explicitly presented. In such cases, it can be reconstructed from the drawing context. For instance, the context may be provided by the drawing’s name, such as “column layout scheme.”
Any parametric description assumes the existence of an associated execution procedure, such as a mathematical formula, a computer program, or a detailing algorithm linked to detail drawings. From a programming point of view, a parametric description is a function call with parameters passing to it. When executed, the function transforms conventional signs and images into mental or digital models.
We can come to the conclusion that the primary method for analyzing drawings is to establish parametric descriptions for each building element. In drawings, the same building elements are usually described in several different contexts, such as being present in different views, on different drawings, in different drawing sets, and so on.
As an example, let’s try to restore the parametric description of the column located at A-17 in the figure below. The type of object (column) is easily determined from the context: column sections in this drawing are rectangles. There is, however, no other information tied to the object.
Identifying parameters of column A-17 from the equivalent column A-4
So we apply this well-known rule:
If, in a group of objects that are identical in appearance and purpose, there is only one object provided with parameters (dimensions, marking, designations), then all other objects in the group inherit these parameters.
In the group of columns along the A-axis, we see column A-7 is associated with detail #4. (See figure below.) If we were to refer to detail 4, we would see a refined column section with its dimensions, and snaps of the section to the co-ordination axes on the plan.
Detail 4 describing column A-7 and referencing Section 1-1
Using the details of section 1-1, we can determine the column’s top and bottom elevations. We apply the parametric description we obtained from A-7 to all columns (except for the corner ones) of row A, including the column at A-17.
Step-by-step Detailing of Objects
So. We managed to determine the definition of a simplified architectural column. A short parametric description cannot completely define complex structures, as real columns are. Nevermind: during the early stages of planning, our knowledge of objects is very approximate and vague.
During the planning process, structural drawings appear following the architectural ones, from which the columns obtain designations (that will be marked). A separate drawing of an abstract column representative of the columns of this type will appear. The structural elements of this abstract column — the formwork, rebars, embedded items — will, in turn, be detailed.
The essence of step-by-step detailing can be described this way:
Any project detail is itself a project
Any project is itself a project detail
During step-by-step detailing, a hierarchical structure is built by which the types and parameters of the upper-level objects are the context for lower-level objects.
Knowledge and Data
Parametric descriptions and their associated execution procedures are knowledge of what and how the work should be done. As a result of the execution of the parametric description, we get an object’s 3D model, which is the object’s database. Let’s take a closer look at the process.
In the figure below, there is a drawing fragment explaining the principle of reinforcing the floor slab.
Drawing of slab reinforcement as a representation of knowledge
The recipient of the drawing extracts a parametric description from it, applies the execution procedure, and, as a result, gets a mental model of the slab reinforcement. When the recipient is a builder, he will transform his mental model into real reinforcement in the field.
The process of creating a model in a 3D modeling program is, in principle, no different from a traditional drawing. By some means or other, the reinforcement contour is defined; the diameter, steel class, spacing, and possible overlap of rebars are specified.
The end result is, however, different. The execution procedure creates a computer model of a set of rebars with attributes attached to every bar. This model is saved. The figure below represents a top view of the reinforced slab as displayed by a computer model.
Top view of the reinforced slab model as a form of data representation
As mental models are built solely on the basis of visual perception, let's compare the two figures:
Drawing — shows a single abstract bar, with information attached. The bar defines the size, location, and attributes of all other bars in the planned reinforcement slab. We do not see individual bars, but we get a very good idea of the slab reinforcement.
Model — shows lots of bars. Annotations need to be added to all bars, and many dimensions need to be placed. When the slab is large and contains a lot of rebar, we get a messy, poorly readable picture. The result is a poor-quality mental model and, accordingly, a poor understanding.
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Collaboration begins with understanding. Like it or not, we have to do what BIM calls "automatic" extraction of drawings from models.
A comparison begs. We cook borscht according to a recipe, throw away the recipe, and then, using complex algorithms, try to extract the recipe (the drawings) from the finished borscht (the models). This is the wrong way around of doing things.
The parametric drawing style is based on the assumption that recipients of the drawings have a professional set of algorithms for drawing analyses and for building mental models based on the analyses’ results.
In practice, this means that drawings should be made so that for each structural element, its parametric description can be restored. The mental object is modeled by calling the appropriate execution procedure associated with the parametric description.
Parametrics Determine Drawing Precision
In many cases, deviations from the image’s scale and accuracy contribute to the readability of drawings and the ease with which they can be adjusted. Consistent adherence to accuracy prevents this, surprisingly enough. The use of parametrics makes the meticulous precision of graphic images meaningless, and so it makes no sense to measure things on drawings. Indeed, the Russian standard prohibits such measurements.
The geometric accuracy of parametric drawings is determined by the accuracy of the values of dimensional parameters. In most cases, editing is limited to adjusting parameters, without affecting the graphic images. (It should be noted that parametric drawings are difficult to read when the proportions of objects are grossly distorted.)
As we see, this contradicts the autocad-style of drawing with its associative dimensions. The autocad style is based on drawing graphic images with tools that ensure great accuracy; the primary method for adjusting drawings is by editing the graphic images as required.
Machine Interpretation of Drawings
When professional algorithms are transferred to a computer, we get the ability to carry out automatic drawing analyses and building a computer model based on the results of the analyses.
A set of drawings can be considered a program written in a professional language — the equivalent of a high-level programming language. The program is compiled as a whole; a machine interpreter of drawings is in fact a compiler. As a result of the compilation, an overall execution procedure is formed, such as an IFC text file. In the end, a computer model is created. Note that the primary method of programming drawings is the step-by-step detailing of objects, better known as top-down design.
How is this different from the traditional way of creating models with 3D modeling software? All of them use a command interpreter as the input interface for 3D modeling. Complex objects are created by assembling pre-prepared components, whether primitives or parts. This technique implements the bottom-up principle; it simulates the construction process and so has nothing to do with planning.
It is clear that for many, assembling a building from cubes is easier and clearer than creating a linguistic description of a building with help of drawings. Unfortunately, except for the model in the computer’s memory, what’s actually needed are models in our heads. A set of drawings is an algorithm of understanding. It is impossible to replace the reading of this algorithm with something else, such as wandering across a computer model.
Crucially, the delineation of legal responsibility within the framework of this algorithm is also not a problem.
Machine Interpretation of Sketches
The parametric style of drawing allowed engineers with blunt pencils on broken-down Kuhlmann drafting machines to create absolutely accurate (not in the autocad sense) drawings. The independence instrumental to parametrics creates the principled opportunity of interpreting freehand sketches and drawings.
The figure below illustrates an example of such an interpretation. The problem is to turn a freehand line (possibly the sketch of a beam) into an accurate two-dimensional model.
Steps in interpreting the freehand line as a beam
Here are the steps involved:
Step 1. Bridge the gap, created by careless sketching. The extent of the gap is insignificant and is not numerically specified.
Step 2. Straighten the curve. The bend radii and the curve deviations from the straight line passing through the curve endpoints are insignificant and not numerically indicated. From this, we deduce that the curve is a straight line segment.
Step 3. Refine the x coordinates of the line’s endpoints. Horizontal deviations of the line’s endpoints from the A-axis and the 6000-dimension extension line are insignificant and so are not numerically specified. The x-coordinate at the line’s left endpoint is equal to xA (xA is the x-coordinate of axis "A"); the x-coordinate of the right endpoint is xA + 6000.
Step 4. Refine the z coordinates of the line’s endpoints. Vertical deviations of the line’s endpoints from the 3.000 elevation’s extension line are insignificant and not numerically specified, as is the inclination angle of the line. The z coordinates of the line’s endpoints are the same, and both are equal to 3000.
We completely restored the parametric description of the object.
Standards for Preparing Drawings
Current rulemaking in the area of preparing drawings stopped trying to combine the Gaspard Monge legacy with the drafting practice of the 1980s. [Mr Monge invented descriptive geometry, which became the basis for technical drawings.] In my opinion, construction drawings in Russia reached their peak in the eighties. From this, progress regressed, as drawings were made with 3D models and autocad styles of drawing.
Arrested development results in degradation, as shown by the figure below comparing Russian state standards from 1980 (top) and 2018 (below).
Drawing styles from 1980 (top) and 2018 (above)
The Grammar of Drawings
Due to the appearance of 3D modeling programs, a question has arisen about teaching descriptive geometry in technical colleges: Is it still relevant? The crisis in descriptive geometry is a consequence of the same misconceptions about drawings as in engineering practice.
Back in the 19th century, drawings were called “the language of technique,” and descriptive geometry was the grammar of this language. In my opinion, the reasons for misunderstanding were these:
Incomplete awareness that drawings have all the properties of the language in a direct, literal sense
The consequences of not fully thinking this through. For instance, if we speak of drawings as text, then it is not clear what accurate projections have to do with the text
Descriptive geometry can and should develop in the direction of machine analysis of drawings: from classical descriptive geometry to parametric (linguistic) descriptive geometry, a kind of analytic geometry.
[Alexander Yampolsky has designed residential, public and industrial buildings, mainly as a structural analyst. He was an early participant (1982) in BIM at the Minuralsibstroy construction ministry of the Russian government, and developed technology for machine interpretation of drawings. Mr Yampolsky is a graduate of Tula State University.]
Notable Quotable
“The CDC said we can leave the Christmas lights up til January.” - Aubrey Strobel
I keep mourning the passing of CAD as a topic interesting enough to keep producing interesting articles about it. It used to be that you didn’t have to look far to find a great technical topic, or a new way to apply CAD tools. On the Solidworks (desktop — do I really have to specify what the name implies?) side of things, for instance, development has been largely uninteresting.
Developments in design technology seem currently focused on 3D printing: improvements in materials, methods, support structures, finer structures, finishes, and machines to go bigger and smaller. The surge in robotics is related to the hardware side of 3D printing, and also is going gangbusters.
Let’s take a look at what general 3D CAD development has achieved in the last decade or so, and then look forward to what we can hope for in the next decade. The big topics CAD developers have tackled include these ones:
Universal file management
Some CAD systems added file management, but others made it less accessible
Is it possible that Solidworks killed off PDM [product data management] as certain individuals were going out the door to create a new venture with built-in data management?
Alternatives to History-based Modeling
T-splines and related technology
Direct/synchronous modeling
Convergent CAD that combines sub-division meshes + NURBS in the same model
i. Sub-d push-pull ii. 3D scan data iii. FEA meshing iv. 3D print meshes v. Generative techniques for shape optimization vi. Medical, dental meshes
Application Delivery and Data Storage Options
First, decentralizing CAD from mainframes to personal computers
Then, centralizing CAD back to cloud servers
4. CAD in a database
Much data these days is kept in a database format; it makes sense, as it provides built-in data management and turns the idea of file management on its head
5. Various 3D Print Integrations (although most 3D printing advances have been in materials and robotics)
Support structures
Moving specialized functions from specialized software into CAD
Not all of these have been ubiquitous, and not all have impacted all CAD users, but most CAD users have access to these solutions when they need them.
Mechanical CAD with 3D scan-and-print has been a great success in specialty areas like medical and dental. If recent wars have an upside, it in the development of next-generation prosthetics, some strictly mechanical, some with newly developed neural interfaces. Scanning and printing have allowed us to customize attachments to individual injuries, quickly replacing and repairing limbs, and even joints.
Big Ticket Disappointments
When it comes strictly to mechanical CAD, I think we’re in a lull period right now. With all these other interesting things to do, the base technology has been forgotten for a while.
At the same time, some of the big ticket items that CAD developers put on the table haven’t really caught on.
Cloud. I think there was an assumption that cloud computing was going to be embraced in the same way that PC CAD was embraced in the 1990s. But it hasn’t. Clearly, it works for some people, but not for everyone.
This tech will catch on eventually, but too many intransigent engineers have too much invested in overly-complex history-based systems, and so haven’t taken the time to understand the real advantages of synchronous modeling.
Where Do We Go Next?
I’ve made predictions about the future of CAD before. I thought engineer-to-order was the next big thing, as would be synchronous modeling. They weren’t. I predicted CAD-in-the-cloud was not going to be the next big thing; so far, this is my closest to a good guess.
And when is A.I. going to show up, or do we not have the piles of unsorted data required to make A.I. successful?
I really hope the idea of converging different types of data keeps developing, as well as mesh manipulation tools for mechanical CAD. There are so many sub-d tools out there that every big CAD developer should buy one just to understand the data type, the tools involved, their usage, and applications of this kind of modeling. We don’t have to re-develop all of this knowledge.
Another thing I hope gets some play are more specialized tools. We already have tools specific to designing sheet metal parts, frames, piping, and in medical fields. I think more needs to be done with plastic, assemblies, resilience, and local design.
Plastics Design. Plastic parts are so hard to design. The outsides are all minute, custom-made details; the insides, that you don’t even see, can be even more difficult to design. We need a series of functional features that can be applied to models. Maybe this requires a special file format just for plastic parts, as with the other specialized techniques.
Plastic designing and manufacturing need to come closer together. The design of the outside shape and mechanical details, and the manufacturing expertise to make individual plastic parts need to be centralized so that a single person can make the decisions about design and manufacturing. Throwing designs over the Great Wall is not going to be a viable solution going forward.
Assembly Design. And we have to do something about assembly design. Right now, it’s a custom approach every time. We need a tool that follows a process for assemblies, and can reuse information on how assemblies go together. Is it rules based? A.I.? Can it somehow learn about different types of joints, closures, and mechanisms?
We need tools that know how to work with horizontal modeling, resilience, top down, layouts, master models — all these are methods that design software should be able to replicate, and even guide you through. We’re at a point where forcing dumb tools to do smart things is just inadequate. Best Practice rules already exist to help people use tools in poorly structured workflows.
Sustainable Design. Beyond software, I’d like to see product development aim to be more durable and reusable, to get away from single-use products, especially in plastics and packaging. As engineers and designers (and, yes, even marketers), we need to have a conscience. Reject bad ideas.
Throw-away products have always been a bad idea, but someone other than the people for whom this is a religious cause needs to stand up and say so. We need to design stuff that endures, and when it doesn’t endure, it needs to be fixable, and when it can’t be fixed, it need to be recyclable. Not that long ago and certainly in my lifetime, we used to have less stuff, but the stuff we had was more valuable. It lasted longer, because it was built and designed with use in mind, rather than crass consumption.
Local Design. Maybe all of this heads back to more employee-owned companies. I don’t think driving the economy with a bunch of disinterested investors is good for anyone, and obviously centrally-managed economies have shown they don’t work. Globalism is a failure.
Certainly we need to learn to do things locally again. The bigger an organization gets (including government), the more corrupt it becomes, the more disconnected it is from the people who make it work, and should be benefiting from it. Stop sending product development and manufacturing to China. Manufacture molds locally again, make microelectronic chips locally again.
These are things I’d like to see in the next decade.
[Matt Lombard has been working with CAD and as an independent product development professional for 30 years. He is the author of eight books on Solidworks and Synchronous Technology. He blogs at dezignstuff.com/about.]
XVL from Lattice Technologies (part owned by Toyota) is an inbetween format that reads files from most 3D CAD programs, then displays them in an XVL viewer, and used for training and parts lists.
XVL can be exported to 3D PDF, Excel, iPads, and so on. As of 2021, it is native on 3Dexperience; back in 2005, Dassault based its 3DXML on Lattice’s XVL. lattice3d.com/company/xvl-technology
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ARES Commander 2022 from Graebert is now in beta, with an emphasis on the 2D processing of Revit and other BIM models, as well as new features for the Touch tablet and Kudo Web versions of the CAD software.
Desktop beta is downloadable initially for Windows and then later in January for MacOS. graebert.com
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Here is one of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
A.I. projects that attempt to replace humans will fail. A.I. projects that attempt to augment humans have a much more likely path to success. - Randall S. Newton (@RSN_Global on Twitter)
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I recently spent a week working with my colleagues at RIB Software improving the UX and UI in our iTWO software, trying to get a commitment between functionality and usability.
I recall Xerox Parc’s Larry Tesler with his “NO MODES” license plate. I prefer one that reads “NO OPTIONS”, as every option in software is a question to which we programmers have no answer. So we transfer the problem to the user.
I have a new car, the most modern German car, chosen on purpose for being the most digitalized model in its size. It is much more similar to my PC than to my previous car.
You must learn how to use it, as it has lots of options for adapting the car to your convenience. Otherwise, don’t buy this car! Do you really need an acoustic signal when you close the doors? Will you remember that there is a setting for entering car washes? What happens when you forget?
And, of course, it has many “MODES,” which affect my driving. After a day of driving it, I asked the salesman how to stop the car from obeying speed limits, as many of them are nonsense. His solution was completely wrong: he unchecked the “Adapt to road conditions” option; he should have turned on “Ignore speed limits,” which is found in a different menu.
The “Adapt to road conditions” option adapts the car’s speed not only to road conditions, but also to your speed setting and to the car in front. (The car knows the road conditions because it has a GPS; when I tell the car my destination, it reduces speeds in curves, and so on.) Should you think this option is turned on, but it is not, you could easily drive off the road.
Thank you for your insight, your knowledge, and your information. - Fernando Valderrama RIB Spain
The editor replies: I buy old used cars to avoid the electronics shoveled into new ones, which I experienced when renting cars.
The worst was a Ford Edge, where even the heating and cooling required adjustment through a touch tablet, several menu levels deep -- followed by precise 0.5-degree temperature changes that required repeated taps while keeping an eye on the road.
Subsequently, Ford admitted they had gone too far in the digitalization of the car’s UI.
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Thanks for your excellent updates, professional dialogues, and information. Even for us non-mechanical guys, it’s valuable. - Michael David Rubin
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Regarding knowledge: I am a huge fan of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, from which we got the term “paradigm shift.”
Regarding interfaces: visiting one of my sons I encountered a fancy toaster with a novel (to me) interface. Push the Toast button and the bread is transported down. As I have aged, I have encountered many puzzling interfaces that were once familiar. Ten-15 years ago I could not open the car window to pay the toll. -Leo Schlosberg
The editor replies: I bought a T-fal toaster, because its designers were featured speakers at a CAD conference. They had slanted the top by 45 degrees, so that we could look into it and see how the toast was coming along. (Turns out I never do that.)
Well, you know the special property of 45 degrees: when the toast is released at 45-degrees, it is launched into the air in an arc to land, most times, on the kitchen floor. Not all design improvements are improvements.
Mr Schlosberg responds: Speaking, as we were, of toasters, a cartoon showed up.
Notable Quotable
“Thankfully, there are still hardware Morlocks* to clean up after the mess the Eloi have made.” - Andrew Orlowski
*) The Time Machine, HG Wells
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine. To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:
With this issue,upFront.eZine takes its annual break to celebrate Christmas, and then returns in the new year. For January, I have the following topics planned:
2 CAD Guys Talk
Solid Edge 2022
Plug-ins or Apps?
See you again on January 10, 2022!
In the meantime, enjoy the best-ever! version of Little Drummer Boy, by For King and Country:
The Complexity of Simplicity
Another in the upFront.eZine series examining complexity
There are a half-dozen or so books that have greatly impacted my thinking. One of the very first was Alan Bloom’s classic The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which launched my decades’-long longing for a better understanding of understanding, and a clearer knowing how we know (epistemology). In brief, Mr Bloom allows us to see that is not necessary to view life through the prism of our culture; it is possible to step outside of it.
Also, he predicted today’s woke bullies by some thirty years.
The book that a year ago really began this upFront.eZine series on complexity in is “Evolution of Scientific Knowledge: From Certainty to Uncertainty” (Edward Dougherty). I didn’t dare review it at the time, as I found it overwhelming. Not to read, but in its breadth. And so a year later, I take a stab at telling you what it’s about.
For a few thousand years now we’ve been trying to understand how we understand. The movie The Matrix popularized the problem: How do we know what we experience (and what we think we know) is truly what is. Or, as Rene Descartes wondered, suppose there is there an evil being fooling us into thinking we exist, when we don’t.
(In Mr Descartes’ case, he figured that if an evil being were fooling us, then we must exist, otherwise why would the evil being bother fooling us? From this, he came up with his famous cogito, ergo sum conclusion that he must exist, if only because he is thinking about these matters.)
While Mr Descartes’ conclusion has since been countered by other thinkers, he nevertheless launched a many centuries effort to explain everything through the portal of rationality. This approach, however, takes us Westerners only so far, and then we hit barriers: not everything can be understood through rational thinking; not all that there is can be known by humans.
And that’s what Mr Dougherty’s book is trying to teach us: we can’t know everything through logic alone. His book as a pretty good introduction to epistemology. He starts with Aristotle with his theories on certainty, and then arrives four chapters later at Bohr, who ruined certainty.
Mr Dougherty’s conclusion is this: although we desire the certainty of deterministic solutions, we’ll have to be satisfied with the vagueness of stochastic models. There is just too much we can’t ever know for sure.
Publisher SPIE considers this book important enough to distribute as a PDF for free, and I recommend it as a start in understanding epistemology.
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The Essence of Software
There’s a reason all cars, toasters, and televisions interface with humans the way that they do. They have, over time, proven to have pretty good interfaces, ones that through practice have made sense to us humans. All toasters have the same interface; as do cars, and so do tvs. To put it more accurately, these interfaces are what humans have come to expect.
Not to belabor the obvious, but when we push down a toaster’s ejector lever, we do so in expectation that the bread will descend into the toaster. Before doing so, we form a mental image of what will happen.
The good thing about cars, toasters, and televisions is that their configuration is relatively inflexible. There isn’t much designers can do to make their operation puzzling to consumers. Not so for software programs and the computers on which they run. They suffer from being just about infinitely flexible.
For computers with large screens, we are blessed to have a standard based on the original prototype developed by Xerox’s famous PARC research facility. For ones with small screens or even no screens, standards also have been developed. For vague concepts like the cloud, standards are still being worked on.
Here’s the problem: a complex standard cannot stand up to customer expectations. A standard makes things uniform, whereas people are not uniform. We each have our own ways of interacting with hardware and software that suits us, but not our neighbor.
One person I know, who has worked with computers for two decades, still has difficulty grasping the Clipboard concept: once he selects an item and press Ctrl+C, it is not obvious to him that pressing Ctrl-V returns the copied item, for the copied item is invisible to him. Interestingly enough, Windows 3.x offered a Clipboard viewer in 1990, while Windows 3 for Networking had a version that allowed copying and pasting between computers. Later, they were removed; not everything advances. It took nearly three decades for Windows 10 to bring back a visual Clipboard history (press Windows+V).
The Great Disconnect
Between the near-infinite variety in the ways by which software programmers can develop their software, and the near-infinite variety in which humans form a mind-image of how software ought to work, there is a great disconnect.
In areas as simple and as frustrating as UX [user experience], should there be more options, or fewer; longer explanations, or shorter ones? Software being unlimited in scope, programmers include more options, and then hide a bunch of them to make it look like there are fewer; provide both longer and shorter explanations.
In “The Essence of Software,” Daniel Jackson explains that the problem isn’t the number of functions; it’s the mental model users adopt, and so users...
Cannot effectively use functions that exist
Assume the functions they need don’t exist, and so do not actively seek them out
Be nervous of making serious mistakes, and so use a tiny subset of functions
And, in the most severe case, suffer loss of data
In short, the users’ mental model is incompatible with the programmer’s mental model.
The cloud makes the disconnect worse. Files that at one time were securely located on one’s computer might or might not still be there. Mr Jackson describes how design flaws in Google Docs and Dropbox cause people to lose files.
The immediate solution that springs to mind — education — is a partial solution for the same reason: Everyone learns differently. “If only there was a book I could buy,” my mother-in-law sighs.
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Evolution of Scientific Knowledge: From Certainty to Uncertainty by Edward Dougherty 155 pages PDF; free ISBN 9781510607354 spie.org/samples/9781510607361.pdf
The Essence of Software: Why Concepts Matter for Great Design by Daniel Jackson 336 pages, of which nearly half are notes Hardcover; US$29.95 ISBN 9780691225388 essenceofsoftware.com
== 3D CAD & DCC Conversion for MAXON's Cinema-4D Animation System ==
Okino (Toronto) and MAXON (Germany) celebrate 20 years of supporting MCAD data visualization through Okino's PolyTrans-for-Cinema-4D conversion software.
MAXON’s Cinema-4D is one of the world's most used and respected animation systems for MCAD data visualization. Okino’s PolyTrans software transforms ultra-massive 3D datasets into highly-refined models for fast, efficient, and optimized animation creation. All conversions are ‘Load & Go,’ with no model rebuilding necessary.
Popular CAD data sources include SolidWorks, ProE/Creo, Inventor, AutoCAD, Revit, Navisworks, DGN, IGES, STEP, Parasolid, and JT. DCC data sources are Cinema-4D, 3ds Max, Maya, FBX/Collada, and many more.
Perfected over three decades, we know 3D data translation intimately, providing you with highly personalized solutions, education, and communication. Contact CTO Robert Lansdale at lansd@okino.com.
A problem in 3D printing is distortion. Parts sag as gravity pulls down on not-yet hardened material; as heated material cools down, it can warp. The solution is to print the part, measure the distortion, and then edit the model. In this regard, Riven has a new Warp-Adapted-Model function that uses full-part 3D data to identify errors in printing, and then produces a new corrected model in minutes that eliminates warp. riven.ai
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IntelliCAD Technology Consortium releases IntelliCAD 10.1a to its member companies, featuring the following improvements:
Siemens lands a replacement contract with Hyundai-Kia, as the car makers switch to NX and Teamcenter for engineering design and product data management. The press release does not name the incumbent; in 2011, Hyundai-Kia implemented Windchill PLM from PTC.
Currently, and so far, Tangerine has no funding for developing TGN as I’ve specified and proposed it as an API, to be made openly available and encouraged for implementation in all 3D digital modeling environments/apps/platforms.
But hope springs eternal. Perhaps willing partners will make themselves known and TGN can move from idea to reality. - Rob Snyder, developer of TNG rigs (via Linkedin)
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My issue with “BIM” is that it tries to be way too many things all at once. Trying to add render-quality components to a model, which already is overblown because of all the data contained, can really explode productivity and file sizes.
I prefer using a much more “hub and spoke” approach. Data is linked to objects in the model, rather than being fully contained in the model. Render-quality components are substituted when renderings are done. In that same manner, construction documents are extracted from the model, and then embellished externally.
What’s often missing is the advantages the model has for external generation of these of parts of the project. Why aren’t details requested or pulled from a library when the model has two different types of wall meet? Or two different types of floor material? There’s much which could be developed for the overall workflow if there wasn’t the need for everything being contained within a model and within a single application. - Dave Edwards, editor PragArchDesignTech newsletter
The editor replies: The dream of BIM was that it indeed would contain all information necessary to design and construct a building. But, as we are seeing, the complexity of the dream is overwhelming us and our hardware/software systems.
I think that one fear BIM vendors have is that, by allowing links to external data sources and apps, they lose monopolistic control of their customers.
Mr Edwards responds: If vendors would just open up their applications so that databases could be linked to unique Component Object Indexes, there’s a ton of things which could be done externally long before they are implemented in the software.
Notable Quotable
“For an app to be secure, you need to trust the hardware, the operating system, the software, the update mechanism, the login mechanism, and on and on and on. If one of those is untrustworthy, the whole system is insecure. - Bruce Schneier
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Joel Gregory (small company donation)
Name withheld by request (small company donation)
To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:
Issue #1,115 | Inside the Business of CAD | 29 November 2021
The problem with 3D models, especially ones with high LODs [levels of detail] like of skyscrapers or aircraft, is that the detail overwhelms us. Rob Snyder notes that focusing attention is the role of 2D drawings we generate from 3D models. But 2D plans, elevations, and details fail to provide immediate context: where are these elevations and floor plans in the 3D model, other than by cross-referencing them with section callouts (as illustrated below)?
A floorplan referenced through section callout 1-1 (image source Autodesk)
So, Mr Snyder developed a focusing assistant, called TGN rigs. Rigs return the focus back to the 3D model through a UI and an API. Rigs lets you see, for instance, elevations in the context of the 3D model.
The key to his rigs is the viewing arc (in red, in the figure below). Arcs guide you to specific parts of the model.
Viewing arc in red, view cube in green, stops along the way in blue
You can specify different kinds of visual styles and viewpoints along the arc. For instance, the blue square in the figure above specifies an elevation section (as shown below), where the view filter is set to Section Elevation and the display style to Blueprint, with a markup added manually.
This stop along the viewing arc shows the 3D model in elevation
A second, horizontal timeline lets you specify properties of the view, such as changes of style (like “Blueprint”) and filtering, such as “Glass Off”.
A project could have many TGN rigs. They look like display cubes (in green in the figure below). Clipping planes are optional; click on a face of the cube to toggle specific clipping planes.
You drag a handle to rotate the view along the path from p1 to p3, during which elements can explode or implode, or even show assembly animations. (The square at p2 indicates a parallel projection at this point.) So, while a 2D drawing is static, the TNG rig is interactive.
Viewing arc (left) with its settings (right)
Viewing arcs can be shaped just like an arc, or tilted in space, or S-shaped. TGN includes a library of default viewing arcs.
Every rig has a name, such as “Section Elevation,” and hosts settings that specify the GUID [globally unique identifier], a link to the model source, model motions, graphical styles, sound toggles, and so on. Some of these are dependent on the software. Rigs are stored in TRE files and can be shared through social media.
Mr Snyder writes, “Digital 3D modeling, as it is used in the design and construction industry (and similar industries), has obvious and great value. However, decades of evidence show that its value is commonly overstated, and that the farther one travels down the path established so far for BIM (or for digital twins), the farther one gets from utility, and the closer one is drawn into a never-ending slough through the muck, the purpose of which seems to be only some kind of competition to see who is more macho.”
He describes two limitations imposed by today’s massive 3D models:
As models are wide and expansive things, they surpass our human ability to wrap our minds around them.
Models by themselves provide no means by which we can assert and affirm that at any particular location that what should be shown there is shown there, and that nothing that matters is missing from there.
Mr Snyder hopes that many CAD vendors will take on his API, to make the attention focusing tool broadly available. tangerinefocus.com
And in Other News
nTopology, who we’ve talked about before, lands a fourth series of funding ($65 million), bringing the total to $135 million to further develop its generative design software for 3D printing, which TechCrunch generously described as “The company effectively offers CAD software.” ntopology.com
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SolidSpac3 debuts SolidSpac3 QA/QC [quality assurance, quality control] analysis and reporting system for commercial construction sites. It compares 2D and 3D models with construction site laser scans, identifying construction errors and problems within 24 hours. www.solidspac3.com
CADLine is offering 15% off permanent licences to its ARCHline.XP line of software until, um, today (Nov 29). As the company puts it, “Say NO to forced software subscription pricing. We offer perpetual licenses — now with 15% off. Pay once, use forever.” archlinexp.com/buy
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Meanwhile, Allplan reminds us that “Section 179 allows businesses to reduce their tax obligation by deducting software (including Allplan) purchased or financed during the tax year.” The email blast does not, however, tell us in which country. (It’s USA. But similar deductions are available in some other countries, too.) info.allplan.com/us_en/tax-deduction-section-179
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AgaCAD is cutting 50% or 30% off the prices of all their perpetual licenses until Christmas Eve for their Revit solutions, like the Smart Assemblies add-on. Get the deets at agacad.com/blog/thank-you-offer-2021
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Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
It’s interesting that technical challenges/opportunities that I explored back in the ’80s are still relevant today, if not moreso. You know that old saying, “The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.” - John Callen
On the almost $500 price on that mouse: as I understand it, a vendor may sometimes jack up the price to a “nobody will pay this” level to preserve the product listing, rather than removing it altogether. The in-stock status (in China) may be more aspirational than real. - Rich Webb (via WorldCAD Access)
Re: Flooding
So sorry to hear of your flooding troubles. Sadly, no stranger to disastrous flooding here in Houston. - Becky Stevens
Notable Quotable
“In the end, the term metaverse will be nothing but a bunch of incompatible messy digital constructs from visions of companies who have no idea what exactly it does to improve human life.” - Avadiax
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Talenting Investments (small business donation)
3DBrains Pte Ltd. (small business donation)
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Issue #1,114 | Inside the Business of CAD | 22 November 2021
C3D Labs produces kernel software, and so can be considered a competitor of Parasolid/D-Cubed (from Siemens) and Spatial from Dassault Systemes.
The C3D kernel was originally developed 25 years ago by ASCON Group for their KOMPAS-3D solid modeler, but then a decade ago spun off the kernel group as an independent company, C3D Labs. The company has been very aggressive at building out functions, such as its new programmable F-curves.
The company has held an annual conference for a while now, but in Russian. Given the modern switch to Zooming conferences, this year it was held in English. (See figure below.)
C3DevCon being broadcast live from St Petersburg
Oleg Zykov, ceo of C3D Labs, reported during his keynote address that the company is doing well, having hired nine more employees and released updates to C3D Toolkit in 2020 and 2021 on time.
The company offers its programming toolkit with five modules for developing software in the areas of MCAD, BIM, CAM, and so on. Each can be used on its own, or together with the others:
C3D Modeler — geometric kernel
C3D Solver — parametric solver
C3D Vision — visualization engine
C3D Converter — data exchange
C3D B-Shaper — polygon mesh to b-rep converter
There are two more modules that C3D is releasing, C3D FairCurve Modeler and C3D Web Vision.
During the conference, customers described how they deployed C3D’s modules, including professor Rushan Ziatdinov of industrial engineering in South Korea (see figure below).
Rushan Ziatdinov describing how C3D FairCurve Modeler works
The C3D kernel has displaced other kernels in nanoCAD, Altium, VR Concept, and so on. It is used by developers at LEDAS Group and is available to members of the Open Design Alliance. c3dlabs.com/en
Thank you to friends and readers checking in to see how we are doing during what is now called “Canada’s worst natural disaster” with thousands displaced by flooding, all Canadian roads out of here cut, and Canada's largest port in Vancouver isolated. The flooding was the result of a tremendous rainstorm last Sunday and Monday, along with warmer temperatures melting snow.
Here is a picture I took last Monday morning of a pedestrian bridge in our local park in which we go for walks. Normally, the water goes under the bridge.
Wrong-way creek
It’s weird: Thousands are stranded by mudslides and wrecked bridges or forced out of homes by flooding. For the other couple of million living in this region, life is normal, other than grocery stores running low on some food staples, gasoline being rationed, and we having to take detours around closed roads.
Restrictions on some grocery items and maximum fills of 30 litres of gasoline
The reason for life being mostly normal is due to our region’s agricultural farmland retention policy: most homes in our region are built on non-agricultural land, which means higher up, and so farms primarily inhabit the flood-prone flat lands, as this aerial photo of flooding at the Watcom interchange of the Trans Canada Highway amply illustrates.
Flooding at the Watcom interchange of the Trans Canada Highway in east Abbotsford, Canada
The unknown is the longer-term impact. While mudslides are being cleared (one highway is already reopened to one-way traffic), the broken bridges on the critical Coquihalla and Trans-Canada freeways will take weeks to get replaced by temporary bridges and then years to fully replace.
Two of the bridges destroyed by flood waters on the Coquihalla freeway
The immediate solution is to work on bringing in goods (food and fuel) through the USA, with which our region has four border crossings and two rail crossings. We are, however, not the EU, so things don’t pass effortlessly between the two countries.
And in Other News
Contact Software launches a new version of its low-code Elements platform for handling digital business processes end-to-end.
Here is one example of its use: If your firm know that parts will have to be replaced at some point in the future due to new DIN standards, then you can define until-when or from-when parts are valid. The new validity takes effect automatically on the specified date, and also updates the parts list. contact-software.com/en/products/integration-platform
It is striking how both Hexagon and Bricsys seem to completely stonewall any mention, or awareness of, photogrammetric reality capture as an essential complement to acquisition by point cloud.
Other firms in the reality capture/digital twins arena, such as Bentley Systems and Autodesk, have a foot firmly in both camps. Point cloud seems to have reached maturity as an expensive technology, while photogrammetry continues to evolve (and democratize) by leaps and bounds. How long can Bricsys ignore photogrammetry? - Tom Foster Tom Foster Architecture
The editor replies: I don’t know that they are ignoring it. BricsCAD has the ability to place images and maps from a variety of sources.
Mr Foster responds: That’s not photogrammetry. Photogrammetry is taking hundreds or thousands of photos of the subject, such as with programs like capturingreality.com.
They identify same object in several images, thus triangulate the object’s 3D position, hence create a 3D model of the subject as a surface mesh (not points), which can optionally be wallpapered with fragments of the JPGs for a solid-looking, photorealistic model, which can be rotated and viewed from any angle.
Photogrammetric models are an alternative to point cloud models. Each is best for different purposes or different kinds of subject. Hybrids using both techniques are possible.
Photogrammetry is widely used in the construction industry. Bentley, for example came to photogrammetry first, then added point clouds later. Bricsys under the influence of Leica has so far done it the other way round. As with point clouds, Bricsys needn’t do the processing in-house (which Bentley does), but can reprocess/display/integrate various proprietary formats of external programs.
Notable Quotable
“Saturday is an adaptive cross-functional work/leisure hybrid day.” - Management Speak (@managerspeak on Twitter)
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Nick Busigin
3dbrains Pte Ltd (small business donation)
To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:
Issue #1,113 | Inside the Business of CAD | 15 November 2021
Re: The State of STEP
Man, that first paragraph was an eye-opener for me!
I worked in the field of MCAD for US Navy surface fleet (new construction and overhaul) starting around 1984. Most general design was still 2D on Mylar film mostly using E0 mechanical pencils. The Navy would not allow any contracts to be done on MCAD until 1985, which were relegated to very specific pilot projects. In 1986 they expanded that to CADAM, Autotrol, and about two others. By 1987, they added Intergraph, Computervision and a few UNIX workstation platforms ( before then, it was all mainframe).
Around the time AutoCAD Release 10 shipped in 1988, the folks in NAVSEA issued a letter to contractors that IBM PC-based systems were not considered accurate or reliable enough for modeling design. But they would allow its use for non-design work, such as title sheets, BOM lists, and notes. After a year of that stupidity, they relented, and by 1990-91 we couldn’t move to PC-based AutoCAD fast enough. As we routinely shared model data with other contracts (forcibly by the Navy, and for good reason), we were all in the same situation.
The period from 1996 to 2004 was a fun time. Writing custom apps to run on AutoCAD to automate things was one of the best times of my career. The old “wild west” of CAD is now a suburban subdivision with shopping centers. I left the field in 2004 to transition to Windows systems admin work and Web development.
Oh, and about IGES and STEP. I remember when all the buzz was around STEP support for each of the MCAD products. They would “support” it alright, but almost always made sure to have some feature or data that was so specific to their product that STEP would lose it when importing into competing products.
I was on a committee once for a government agency doing round-trip integrity testing. We would build a reference model in 2D and another in 3D, then export/import through everything they had at the time — IGES, STEP, DXF, and so on — and then score the results to rank products as being most compatible. That era seems like the 1800s now. - David Stein
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Interesting about STEP. In the ’90s I worked for the Industrial Technology Institute in Ann Arbor MI. Its Center for Electronic Commerce did early STEP work and built early tools for conformance testing of CAD systems to STEP.
Famously, one of my colleagues authored a report citing a Detroit-based automotive supplier that had to manage 17 or 18 different CAD systems to deal with all of their customer relationships.
The number of solutions is fewer today, but the problems remain and it is a tough problem. It is hard to innovate within the bounds of standards, which often lag technology and business process. - Stan Przybylinski, vice president CIMdata
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In the construction industry, we have the same problem of data transfer, with possibly a wider range of conflicting needs (or maybe I am just more familiar with construction than mechanical).
While IFC has ruled the roost for the last decade, it is showing its limitations. It is optimized for transferring physical data and some metadata, especially architectural, but has proved hopeless for transferring engineering design data. Yes, it could be extended, but it has taken two decades of argument and compromise to get to its current state and we cannot afford to wait.
Any transfer of data is done so that it can be enriched, but also (invariably) some data must be left behind. The CNC machine, for example, has no interest in the wind pressure on the facade that led to the design of the bracing, only the resulting number and locations of bolt holes.
Similarly, each program has its specialties, which a neutral file can not be expected to handle. Neither IFC nor STEP can possibly handle all project data, ever, without bloating to an impractical size, and without decades of more committees. They will always be behind what the industry needs, and can only be expected to transfer most of the data, not all.
Due to the limitations of IFC and because most engineering design programs now have an API [application programming interface], data exchange systems are being used more and more, especially by the bigger consulting companies. At Arup, we helped to produce Speckle[for exchanging AEC data in real-time], which is open source so that it is free to grow as needed. There are other, similar offerings.
The BIM [building information modeling] ideal of a centralized database is becoming a reality, but is not centered on IFC, as that, by necessity, can never store everything. Instead we now have federated databases, where each product stores its specific data, and then products like Speckle transfer and coordinate what data is needed between the individual consultant models.
IFC might still be used for transferring data to models outside the system. What was BIM is now becoming digital workflows. - Peter Debney, senior consultant Arup Digital Technology
The editor replies: When Autodesk released AutoCAD Release 13, they added the ability to create custom (user-defined) objects. This made AutoCAD incompatible with itself, and so Autodesk provided two solutions:
Object enablers, which understand what custom objects are. This approach failed to catch on industry-wide, as every DWG editor would conceivably need every object enabler ever written.
IFC, which transmits data between incompatible AutoCAD drawings in the form of neutral format. Autodesk quickly handed responsibility for maintaining IFC to an industry group, and then in a reversal earlier this year joined the IFC part of the Open Design Alliance.
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I was gobsmacked by the upFront.eZine article on STEP files. I write a monthly column for The Fabricator that dances around CAD topics. Your article with Martin and Neil on STEP is a gold mine of interesting and possibly useful trivia regarding same.
I remain devoted to Solidworks. It’s been the tool I’ve know for a quarter-century. Scanning heresy of other brands of CADs is useful and keeps me humble. - Gerald Davis, owner GLD Designs
The editor replies: My entry into the world of CAD was AutoCAD v1.4, and then writing about it in CADalyst magazine, starting in 1985. When Intergraph ran an ad with CADalyst headlined “Follow the Leader,” we were gobsmacked. Other CAD dare say that? As you note, it is important to peer above the ramparts from time to time.
Mr Davis responds: We punched paper tape with a PDP-8. My first CAM was OptiPlot running on a Textronix vectorscope. My first CAD was AutoCAD v2.5 running on a Tandy 2000. Color! Luxury. When I saw Solidworks 98 my love of wireframes vanished. My excellent keyboard shortcut skills gave way to yanking a 3D puck.
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Isicad has translated your recent posts about STEP and the ODA Summit into Russian:
I have been dealing with CAD conversion for over 40 years and for many years was a member of the IGES/PDES Organization. I led the development of the IGES converter for CATIA V5 as a joint Boeing/Dassault project in 1986.
In those days we referred to IGES and other formats as “write-only formats,” because converters from CAD companies were good about writing proper IGES (or PDES) files but were horrible at reading other CAD systems IGES files.
The marketing groups of the various CAD companies liked to talk about how good their “round trip” conversions were — going from CAD system A to IGES and then back to the same CAD system A. What they were bad at was going from CAD system A to IGES to CAD system B.
That was infinitely more important, and they were usually pretty poor at that job. At times, it seemed intentional. When I formed Tailor Made Software in 1990, most of our business for the first several years was in IGES flavoring: taking the flavor of IGES produced by CAD system A and massaging it so CAD system B could read it properly. - Scott Taylor, president Tailor Made Software
Re: From Facets to Solids to Facets
The period of time that I was at Evans & Sutherland (’81-’91) really could be seen as the golden years of the computer graphics industry. So much technology was being developed that never really saw the light of day (at least not at E&S). I’m sure this is true with many other companies, but E&S barely gets a mention in most histories of computer graphics or modeling systems.
Dave Evans should really be considered the Father of the Digital Twin. His vision for E&S was to create digital models that would allow you to do things that you normally couldn’t do in real life cost-effectively, like pilot training, mechanical design and analysis, and molecular modeling.
E&S’s graphics systems were only developed because there were no systems capable of displaying the various models. There was a famous ‘Fireside Chat with Dave’ where he announced to the company that “E&S was not a computer graphics company,” totally confusing most employees. He later explained to me his vision of creating digital models, which totally jives with his statement. - John Callen, Director of eTools Marketing Lutron Electronics
== Converting 3D CAD & DCC to Virtual/ Augmented Reality ==
With the explosive growth of VR/AR, the ultra-massive 3D datasets produced by CAD and DCC programs need efficient conversion to the popular Unity and Unreal development platforms. Okino of Toronto is the long-time provider of the PolyTrans|CAD translator, which easily handles the interactive datasets required by VR and AR for Microsoft HoloLens, HTC VIVE, Oculus Rift, Meta, and other VR headsets.
PolyTrans provides you with
Massive dataset handling
Node compression
Adaptive CAD tessellation
Intelligent polygon reduction
Popular CAD data sources include SolidWorks, ProE/Creo, Inventor, AutoCAD, Revit, Navisworks, DGN, IGES, STEP, Parasolid, and JT. DCC data sources are Cinema-4D, 3ds Max, Maya, FBX/Collada, and many more.
Perfected over three decades, we know 3D data translation intimately, providing you with highly personalized solutions, education, and communication. Contact CTO Robert Lansdale at lansd@okino.com.
EngineeringPaper.xyz solves complex mathematical expressions through documentation cells and math cells, while keeping track of units conversion. To display results in different units, specify them in square brackets. Also, it plots.
You can share your sheets with others through shareable links. Try it out free at engineeringpaper.xyz.
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Agacad comes up with Panel Packer in Revit 2020-2021 for sorting, packing, and loading trucks with prefabricated wood and metal panels. Free demo at agacad.com/products/tools4bim/dock/download.
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IronCAD LLC ships IronCAD 2022 today, and here is some of what’s been added:
Place multiple ordinate dimension at once, and edit more than one dimension at a time
Specify snap increments on parts, and set limits to sizes
Generate structured bills of materials with collapse/expand sections
This 3D design software pioneered concepts common today, such as drag and drop smart parts and 3D at-cursor interactions. IronCAD is most popular among metal fabricators and custom machinery manufacturers. A free trial version is available, following registration, from ironcad.com/free-online-trial.
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The Spatial division of Dassault Systems announced the general availability of Release 2022 1.0 of its geometric kernels. Just skimming the surface, here is one thing new for each module:
3D ACIS Modeler extracts sheet bodies at mid-surfaces between faces of solid bodies
CGM Polyhedra smoothly blends between boundaries of two meshes
CGM Modeler automatically detect cylindrical bends and then unbends them
3D InterOp imports large-scale models whose dimensions range from 1 to 100km
3D Precise Mesh’s Hybrid CFD mixes prismatic and hexahedral elements in boundary layers
SimScale, the first engineering simulation cloud platform, lands an extra €25 million in Series C funding (now totaling US$60 million) so as to add rotating machinery, electronics, and automotive simulations. The press release says the firm has 300,000+ users. www.simscale.com
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Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
Issue #1,112 | Inside the Business of CAD | 8 November 2021
Guest Editorial by John Callen
In the upFront.eZinearticle on Solid Edge 2022, Dan Staples makes the following comment: “I do think [convergent modeling] is a final frontier here, because meshes for a long time were the domain of the film industry and character modeling.”
It turns out that faceted models were the very first b-rep [boundary representation] structures, referenced in 1977 by CMU’s GLIDE, a polygonal modeler.
The Start of It All
GLIDE stands for “graphical language for interactive design” and was a research program in the architecture department at Carnegie Mellon University. The GLIDE program was funded by the Army Corps of Engineers who wanted a system to model their various facilities.
It was headed up by Chuck Eastman, who is generally acknowledged as the father of BIM [building information modeling]. Kevin Weiler, who originated non-manifold topology b-reps as his PhD thesis at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was one of the members of Eastman’s GLIDE team. I was a member of the GLIDE team 1979-1981, where I was responsible for implementing the Euler operations from the original BDS [Building Design System], which were written in BLISS, to GLIDE’s Pascal.
Defining polyhedrons with GLIDE
GLIDE was an extension to the higher-level programming language, Pascal. Solid modeling operations were incorporated into an interpretive version of the programming language. Procedural constructors were developed to model aspects of buildings.
GLIDE pre-dated non-polygonal surface representations. Booleans were performed with the faceted representation; the intersection code was relatively straight forward. Later on, b-rep modelers introduced non-polygonal surface types.
GLIDE subtracting polyhedrons (left) to arrive at a new shape (right).
Romulus. Being developed in parallel to GLIDE was Ian Braid’s BUILD project at Cambridge University in the UK, another b-rep program. The BUILD research was commercially spun off into Shape Data, which was the precursor to ACIS and Parasolid.
Romulus introduced analytics and had discrete intersection routines to do surface/surface intersection calculations based on surface type.
Only later were NURBS surfaces introduced and there was a big debate over whether analytics should be converted to NURBS equivalents and all intersections done in NURBS — or whether to continue to maintain the discrete surface types for precision and efficiency.
Performance and Interactivity
Kepler. After graduating from CMU, I joined the Kepler project at Evans & Sutherland. Kepler was an application development environment front-end to Romulus that provided a design space, giving designers a degree of interactivity not possible with solid modelers at the time. (Kepler really wasn’t an acronym; the project lead chose the name due to the historical individual’s role in astronomy.) Objects were built in the Kepler environment, and then the corresponding modeling commands were passed to Romulus to instantiate the design, often taking many minutes to calculate on a DEC VAX 780 mini-computer.
When the Kepler project’s proof-of-concept was completed, it was decided to no longer pursue the approach.
D-Cubed. Shape Data Ltd was the company that originated Romulus and later Parasolid. John Owen at Shape Data developed his dimensional constraint technology, which is the basis of D-Cubed . It can trace its roots to the earlier D/T-D [dimension/tolerance-draughting] work in Romulus.
After Kepler, I ended up relocating to Shape Data and led a project to implement encoding dimensions and tolerances in Romulus and automatically generating engineering drawings, easily a decade or more before PMI. The D/T-D function was released with Romulus v5.2.
During a design review I had with Bob Sproull, Bob pointed out that the D/T-D framework we had implemented in Romulus could be extended to be a parametric modeling system.
The company, unfortunately, had some very strong positions on how a solid modeler ought to be used and, as a result, did not realize advances like parametric modeling and PMI when they presented themselves. The D/T-D function was later removed from Romulus.
Evans & Sutherland was a distributor of Romulus, and then later acquired Shape Data. This was just the first of a long series of acquisitions passing Shape Data from one company to another, ultimately ending up at Siemens.
ACIS. The managing directors of Shape Data split off to form Three-Space Ltd, the company that created ACIS.
The Continual Development of Representations
Gradually, b-rep modelers expanded their geometry classes to support analytics (cylinders, spheres, toroids, and so on), and eventually a variety of surface representations, such as NURBS.
Facets became the primary method of representing scenes in image generation, such as for flight simulators, where the image generation pipeline was built on facets for performance. This need for image generation performance then moved over to the film industry and character modeling. Highly detailed visuals required many, many facets, though. Eventually facets were replaced by texture maps with which image generation reached new levels of realism.
Non-manifold topology (NMT) b-reps introduced the next level of representation, which allowed for interim Boolean results to exist (but not necessarily persist). ComputerVision’s Liberator project of the early 1990s, headed up by Gary Crocker, implemented NMT and supported mixed model representations — wires, sheets, and solids. An example was a chair with wire legs, sheet back, and a solid box seat.
Unfortunately, a real-world application never materialized. At one point, I proposed that NMT be used to model machineable models and associated machining processes, but CAD companies were only focused on design, not manufacturing.
Meshes are again making a resurgence with 3D printing. Again, this is based on the basic technology used to process STL files for 3D printing. By the way, most CAM systems operate off of a faceted representation. This is, again, due to the nature of the algorithms not operating directly off of the source geometry and the fundamental geometry of most CNC controllers, which are predominantly lines and arcs. The ability to specify NURBS curves to a controller is a fairly recent and limited advancement.
Defining a spiral staircase with GLIDE
Interestingly enough, it seems that modeling systems cover the two representation extremes (b-reps and facets), but to my knowledge have pretty much skipped over cellular (homogeneous or adaptive) representations, such as voxels [3D pixels] and dexels [depth pixels]. These are gaining some pickup through today’s scanning and 3D printing technologies.
Through all this time, it has been interesting to see the advances on-going in modeling technology. Probably the most compelling is advancing the model beyond just a geometric representation, but also encoding all the corresponding product data. Who knows where this all will lead? Maybe someday geometric tolerances might be encoded in the solid model similar to how RESABS [numeric precision] and RESNOR [angular resolution in ACIS] are maintained.
- - -
There is so much that isn’t known about the early days of the industry. And there was so much shelved back in the day, because the hardware wasn’t up to it. Imagine if someone dusted off that stuff and migrated it to today’s hardware so that, as the saying goes, “Everything old is new again.”
[John Callen is an architect by training, and spent his 40-year career in marketing and engineering positions at high-tech companies. Much of his career was with mechanical design and manufacturing systems, and now he has returned to his architecture roots as Director of eTools Marketing at Lutron Electronics.]
And in Other News
Companies like PTC and Facebook just know that moving to the next level of abstraction gives them an advantage over competitors. They’ll be spending years and billions on Atlas and Metaverse. Companies should understand what their core is, according to Daniel Jackson.
They’ll fail, because full MCAD doesn't belong on the cloud and people don’t wear shoes on their faces. Better technology is not better humaneness. As technology becomes more abstract, Romanticism is the natural backlash.
Take, for example, the natural technological superiority of ebook readers over dead-tree books: even so, ebook titles now cost more, and the digital format is sinking in popularity to paper.
- - -
Cubic Orb’s plugins for land surveying work with most CAD programs, including those based on AutoCAD, IntelliCAD, ARES, Microstation, BricsCAD, and TurboCAD:
KaliBro - georeferences, edits, manages raster images in CAD
GeoView - operates on sets of coordinates in CAD
Wms2Cad - displays maps from WMS/TMS and WMTS services
TranMap - transforms CAD drawings between coordinates systems
And more.
Demo versions are available to download at cubicorb.com.
- - -
Lantek celebrated its 35th anniversary and reported that Q3 sales of its machining software were 30% higher than a year earlier. It has big plans for the future: increase R&D spending by 70% (from what, we don’t know), and adding 130 more employees from the current 260. www.lantek.com
- - -
Open Design Alliance adds a validation engine for IFC [Industry Foundation Classes] files to its SDK [Software Development Kit]:
Performs multi-level validation on IFC models
Customizable for a range of tasks
Supports simple low-level syntax checking
Custom validation defined in IFC files
Higher-level checking specified by the IDS [Information Delivery Specification] and MVD [Model View Definition] standards from buildingSMART.
The validator is part of Open IFC Viewer v22.9, which is available free from openifcviewer.com.
You wrote that the BricsCAD acquisition was “For Hexagon to get deeper into the AEC space.” Did you choose not to comment on this, to give us readers time to mull this over?
I’m interested in knowing what you think about that statement. It's been three years since the acquisition [of Bricsys by Hexagon] and nothing has really jumped out at us yet. - Name withheld by request
The editor replies: Here is my initial take on the statement. From what I see (I am a beta tester of BricsCAD), Hexagon is putting a lot into BricsCAD, and that is the good news.
Hexagon’s origin is in CCM [computer coordinate measurement], which is a post-MCAD process, so they don’t have experience in AEC [architecture, engineering, construction]. They see BricsCAD as the path to entering the market, surrounded by all their other products, like point cloud acquisition and plant design software
Their mirror is Trimble, which started with surveyor’s equipment and is also trying to get into AEC, starting with the acquisition of SketchUp nearly a decade ago. We’re not, however, seeing any impact on the industry, as SketchUp is not a great entry point for a corporation trying to target a discipline dominated by Vectorworks, ArchiCAD, and Revit; SketchUp began as conceptual design software, not as design design software.
BricsCAD has a reasonable chance of making an impact in AEC, but continues to suffer from the same problem it’s always had: lack of mindshare.
I would say the most important aspect of BricsCAD is that it also works as a DWG platform, which is why the CADWorx division of Hexagon fostered the acquisition of BricsCAD in the first place. I am watching to see if BricsCAD-as-platform spreads to other areas of Hexagon, keeping in mind that Hexagon already owns several other CAD packages.
Re: Rådgivende Ingeniørers Forening
Your conclusion could also be “forming purchasing pools” to buy stock in the design software companies, because those companies listen far more to shareholders than to users.
I would guess that the Norwegian government has sentiments similar to the RIF, so perhaps they could pool resources to buy a larger share of Autodesk stock, which would give them a louder voice in how things work at that company. - Peter Lawton
The editor replies: Good idea, but.
There have been suggestions in that past that users buy up a majority of ADSK stock, but that would never happen. Sovereign wealth funds do not interfere with the running of companies.
Mr Lawton responds: Some of the stock-purchase suggestions to which you refer have come from me, as I have been championing that cause for the past 15 years, at least. 😎
However, to state flatly that it ‘would never happen’ is rather defeatist and I would respectfully submit that big companies count on that very attitude to continue to get away with being poor corporate citizens. “What are those two million frustrated users gonna do about (our latest rip-off maneuver), hunh? Fire the board?!”
Well, if those two million frustrated users are also shareholders, the board will be far less dismissive of our requests. Does that make sense? Not everyone connects those dots.
It will take time, perhaps a decade, but if enough of Autodesk’s corporate victims pool enough resources to purchase a significant portion of Autodesk stock, the company will have to listen.
Also, it may be true that sovereign wealth funds don’t deliberately ‘interfere’ with corporate governance, but they do influence it, if only by virtue of their purchase of stock. If RIF writes a letter to Autodesk, and Norway’s SWF (in conjunction with RIF) is holding 5% of shares (about $3.4B today, or 2.6% of the SWF), how do you think Autodesk will react? It’s just a matter of time and money, and there are many parties interested in getting Autodesk to change its ways. All those parties need is organization and patience.
Notable Quotable
“A model is not evidence. It is a theory expressed in arithmetic terms.” - John Hinderaker
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Stephen Schuller
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Issue #1,111 | Inside the Business of CAD | 1 November 2021
There was no need, in the early days of mechanical CAD, to exchange files. MCAD was rare enough that it did not matter that systems were incompatible. But by 1976, MCAD had become common enough for the US Air Force to demand a way to reduce costs associated with moving files from the design floor to manufacturing contractors. The solution was found in a common format named “initial graphics exchange specification” — IGES, for short.
From IGES to PDES to STEP
IGES became verbose and unwieldy as over time it supported more and more data types specific to the increasing number of MCAD systems. In Germany, the automotive industry came up with its own widespread standard for exchanging surface data of the skins of automobiles, VDA-FS. What was needed as a modern replacement.
So the IGES Steering Committee began work on a new file format, PDES (product data exchange specification), to do a better job at defining an all-encompassing format: “PDES is envisioned to support all aspects of product description, from initial conception through product design, manufacture, support, and disposal,” said the US Department of Commerce, sounding a lot like PLM today.
In 1985, the committee contributed PDES to an ISO initiative that was creating a universal file format flexible enough to handle “anything from a microchip to a battleship.” This became known as STEP, the “STandard for the Exchange of Product model data.”
STEP was an extensible format, one that could be extended as new technology came along. It handles inheritances, such as a spoke inheriting the properties of the steel wheel in which it resides. Definitions are determined by an object-oriented data programming language, EXPRESS.
The first release of STEP came out in 1995. Sometimes you also see it referred to as “AP203” (short for application protocol level 2). Today, STEP consists of 800 standards (see figure below), of which four are for end users, with the remainder a library of reusable definitions.
To learn where STEP is headed next, I spoke with Martin Hardwick, CEO of STEP Tools, and Neil Peterson, president of the Open Design Alliance.
STEP for Machining
The original purpose of IGES was to make it easier for manufacturers, like General Electric, to deal with 3D models arriving from suppliers using incompatible MCAD file formats. The process looked like this, and today still looks a lot like this:
CAD operator makes drawings with no regard for the manufacturing process
CAM operator designs the manufacturing process
Postprocessor in CAM software generates the G-code that instructs the machine
CNC operator closely supervises the machining to make sure the initial parts were made correctly
The desire today is to go direct from CAD to CNC, Martin Hardwick told me.
CAD operator makes the 3D model suitable for manufacturing
Postprocessor in CAD makes the STEP-NC file
CNC machine uses STEP-NC for automated, optimized machining (see figure below)
STEP has been extended to parts machining, where it is known as STEP-NC (numerical control):
AP238 version 1 for precision machining (2005)
AP238 version 2 for precision assembly (last year)
It was the addition of AP242e2 tolerances that allowed STEP to expand into automated manufacturing. When you know the tolerances that manufacturing needs to meet, you can machine parts to those tolerances. Before this, machines controls worked blindly, not knowing what was allowed.
A NIST-created test file showing AP242 presentation and semantic geometric tolerances
There is complexity inherent in CAM. “Before, the operator figured it out; now software has to be rewritten to figure it out,” said Mr Hardwick. The change means a massive rewrite of CAM software, something not all firms can afford. Partly as a result of this industry change, many CAM firms — like Cimitron, GibbsCAM, MasterCAM, SigmaNEST, and Vericut — have in recent years sold themselves to larger companies, like Sandvik.
Year by year, STEP-NC is adding more to the process data needed to know how to mill, drill, or lathe a part, how to lead in, the speed at which to run, and so on. The key is to know which operations have to be done in which order with the minimum viable tool path. When the data is rich, intelligent software on the controller should be able to figure out the rest.
Each year since 2017, STEP-NC has been used to machine millions of 5-axis parts for commercial aircraft, such as the Boeing 787. Now STEP-NC is being prepared for direct-CAD-to-CNC 2.5-axis milling for features on airframes. As well, it is getting ready for 3D printing, leading Mr Hardwick to call STEP-NC “the PDF of machining.”
ODA Expands to STEP
The Open Design Alliance develops code, such as for reading and writing DWG and PDF files, that is used commercially by its CAD software member companies. By developing the code on behalf of them, the 1,200 members don’t need to develop it themselves.
Five years ago, the organization expanded its offerings dramatically. It moved from offering individual SDKs (since 1998) to a complete technology package for working with CAD and BIM files, including Web collaboration, version control, and visualization on any platform, supported by a natively developed solid modeler and constraints engine.
Then earlier this year, the ODA announced support for STEP based on a strong demand from ODA members, because existing STEP libraries are expensive and are royalty-based, ODA president Neil Peterson told me in an interview. In some cases, STEP is not licensed as an individual component; rather it is bundled with a larger group of converters. Some libraries are in the public domain, but suffer from insufficient development. So there is no economical, high-quality library on the market that’s affordable for small firms, he said.
How STEP fits into the APIs/SDKs offered by Open Design Alliance
Some ODA members just want access to STEP files. Other members, who make use of the ODA’s IFC APIs for architectural design, want both: IFC for building designs, STEP for machinery that goes inside the buildings. ODA is taking on STEP support as a long-term priority.
With STEP files and the EXPRESS programming language being hugely complex, I wondered how the work could get done so fast. PDES, after all, had been working on the problem for nearly three decades.
“We gained expertise by developing IFC,” said Mr Peterson. “Similar to IFC, STEP is defined using EXPRESS schema, and so we can reuse the automation framework we developed for IFC to quickly build a high-quality STEP solution.” As well, the ODA is a member of PDES, the group that maintains the STEP standard, just as it works with buildingSMART on IFCs. From PDES, the ODA gets test data and works on committees that establish extensions to the standard.
The ODA’s timeline looks like this:
By the end of this year, it plans to release an initial version of the STEP SDK (software development kit) with read/write support for AP203, AP214, and AP242 (all conformance classes).
By the end of 2022, the ODA plans full visualization support for the same three APs running on desktop, mobile, and Web, including a free-to-all, commercial-grade STEP viewer similar to the ODA’s IFC and DWG viewers.
The alliance plans to offer publishing of STEP models to 2D/3D PDF, and conversion of STEP to formats, such as Navisworks and DWG.
The cost of getting the STEP APIs from the ODA will be “free.” That is, members, who pay an annual membership fee to the ODA starting at $1,800 a year, pay nothing extra once STEP becomes available, and there are no royalty payments involved. This presents the possibility of undercutting other STEP suppliers, such as STEP Tools in USA, EPA in Sweden, and ProSTEP in Germany.
Longer term, the ODA is interested in AP238 STEP-NC, and the conversion of model data to formats like IFC and Revit. Mr Peterson notes that “Priorities in these areas will be based on requests from our members.”
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
The MCAD/CAM industry needs a universal file format to minimize the cost and inconvenience of translating data between CAD systems, and for the machines that do the manufacturing.
Other industries like AEC/BIM have found, however, that arriving at universality is a terribly complex problem. That’s because every CAD vendor desires to maintain unique advantages over competitors, and so prefers to stay with its unique file formats.
Lip service is given to data interoperability, so while data flows easily into CAD systems, it emerges rather reluctantly. There is, after all, a programmer cost to implementing exchange standards like STEP and IFC, both of which are increasing in complexity as they expand in capability.
The 2020s find the STEP standard expanding in two directions, towards greater complexity with STEP-NC, and towards lower cost with ODA STEP. The toolkits provided by the ODA, one can hope, ought to make implementing data exchange universality in architectural and mechanical worlds easier.
Rådgivende Ingeniørers Forening represents 140 Norwegian engineering consulting firms with 500 offices and 13,000 employees. RIF is unhappy with “major software developers hiking up prices by 30% annually with only a few months warning.” The one vendor mentioned is Autodesk, for its disparate country pricing.
It seems to me that organizations like hospitals and design firms ought to be forming purchasing pools to negotiate rock bottom pricing from suppliers.
- - -
Nanosoft launches release 21 of nanoCAD as a CAD platform supporting five modules:
3D Modeling — direct, sheet metal, mesh, and parametric 3D solid modeling with 2D/3D constraints
Mechanica — mechanical drawing, engineering calculation utilities, and library of parametric parts
Construction — AEC drafting utilities and library of parametric parts
Raster — (new) import, correct, and vectorize raster images
Topoplan — digital terrain modeling
nanoCAD 21 starts at $200/yr; each module is $150/yr. Permanent licenses are provided with a three-year subscription. nanoCAD 5 is available free. https://nanocad.com/
[Disclosure: I produce training videos for Nanosoft.]
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At the Bricsys conference last week, Hexagon answered the question that puzzled executives when I asked them two years ago: Where does the BricsCAD acquisition fit into Hexagon?
We have the answer from ceo Ola Rollén: For Hexagon to get deeper into the AEC space, and for BricsCAD to get into the discrete manufacturing market.
[Disclosure: I have written books and produced training videos for Bricsys.]
- - -
Stratasys turns GrabCAD into a software pipeline for 3D printing (aka additive manufacturing). Its new GrabCAD AM Platform manages multiple 3D printers at multiple locations, monitors output quality, automates materials management, and integrates all this with the enterprise.
The platform is a combination of GrabCAD software, software from partners, and an SDK. Wannabe partners pay an SDK licensing free, following approval. https://grabcad.com
[Disclosure: Following the launch of GrabCAD as a 3D part sharing site, the founder joked he named the site after me.]
- - -
Here is one of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
For most attendees (at least for non-media, but I suspect also for media) the real value of conferences is the networking and informal discussions that take place during and outside the conference. After attending dozens of AU and a few other CAD conferences for many years in different capacities, it became clear to me that the best conferences are
a) in-person, with at least one or more organized social event
b) small enough that individuals don't get lost in the crowd
c) with wide coverage area (i.e. national or worldwide, not local)
d) including vendors and their cool new tech (plus free swag)
It surely is not easy (nor inexpensive), but if I was running a CAD company I would pounce on the opportunity created by the pandemic to capitalize on the natural human hunger for fellowship. - Owen Wengerd (via WorldCAD Access)
The editor replies: I suspect the difference between small conferences (which we like) and monster conferences (which we don’t) is that it’s the staff of the small company that puts together the small conference and who are in touch with the needs of users. I’ve had organizers of small conferences ask me what I would like to see.
The giant conferences put on by giant companies are, I am guessing, organized by marketing departments, whose day job is to promote the company. Hence the disconnect.
Notable Quotable
“With a few exceptions, most previously successful founders rarely replicate their success in their second company. Financial success weakens determination and fighter mentality.” - Don Dodge
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Novedge LLC (small company donation): “Keep up the great work!”
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Issue #1,110 | Inside the Business of CAD | 25 October 2021
We’re all too familiar with big-spending CAD vendors like Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, and Siemens and their millions of users. We might even have some familiarity with smaller CAD vendors, who are content to serve tens of thousands of customers.
Then there’s a class of CAD vendor that never made it big – or at all. For instance, the years 2012 to 2014 were the start of a fresh era that saw the birth of a brand-new style of design software: collaborative, cloud-based CAD.
Companies had names like Onshape, sunglass.io, TinkerCAD, and To3D. All took advantage of the power granted by then-new WebGL and JavaScript APIs that made interactive 3D CAD graphics possible in Web browsers. None did well.
One that you may not have heard of is SolidFace. (See figure below.)
User interface of SoldFace
I was alerted to this MCAD vendor when a reader told me of the company’s odd condition for getting their free 30-day demo: before downloading, you need to provide a credit card number.
Typically, demo software simply de-activates after 30 days or significantly cripples the available functions. What isn’t immediately apparent is that downloading SolidFace represents acceptance by the potential customer of the software’s terms and conditions, a link to which is alluded to during the download process. Within those terms is a paragraph revealing that using the software past the 30-day demo period incurs a monthly charge.
Searching around, I found others caught off guard by the company’s terms. In online forums like Reddit, SourceForge, TrustPilot, and Better Business Bureau and as recently as in May of this year, users complained of credit cards being charged for amounts ranging from $65 to $89. Said one complainant, “I requested a refund and they said it would take 1-3 months for it to be processed due to the COVID situation.”
The Many Pivots of SolidFace
Curious, I spent two weeks digging deeper. The history of SolidFace appears to have begun in 1994 with the launch of a Brazilian 2D CAD program named UniCAD. Over its life, it gained 4,000 customers, primarily in Latin America. According to tech startup community site F6S, SolidFace co-founder Oscar Leite spent more than 20 years at UniCAD before exiting the company in 2008 with $2.8 million. He describes himself as a back-end programmer and UI/UX designer, obtaining his university training in Germany
In 2013, Mr Leite formed SolidFace with Rafael Lima, according to Linked-In. Mr Lima, then 28, had spent his first post-university years dabbling in Bitcoin mining. “During the dark days of BTC [bitcoin] as a younger, savvy tech teenager, I was looking for something different to do with my computers and found BTC in the corners of the Web or dark-Web,” Mr Leite wrote on Linked-In.
The idea developed by Messrs Leite and Lima was to release a collaborative 3D parametric CAD program by combining Mr Lima’s knowledge of bitcoin mining with Mr Leite’s CAD experience. The program would be free of charge, making money through the novel idea of mining bitcoins in the background on the computers of SolidFace customers, with their permission. According to Austin Business Journal, the company could make 4 cents/minute per user through this technique.
At the time, Mr Leite described the new software as “Google Docs for 3D models”, even though SolidFace would run on the desktop, save files to the desktop (for intellectual property protection), and use the cloud to store files and to collaborate. Today, this hybrid approach is common among CAD programs.
According to its Tumblr account, the company spent $2.5 million developing SolidFace, releasing the first beta version in the middle of 2012.
By 2014, the company was working to attract dealers and looking to advertise in publications, such as upFront.eZine. Potential dealers were told, “SolidFace’s growth is in the mid-range CAD market. SolidFace is fully compatible with SolidWorks, Solid-Edge, AutoCad and others through SIEMENS-Parasolid core. The core also allows us to use full 3D modeling power.”
An overseas dealer approached by SolidFace told me, “I tried SolidFace once. For me it wasn’t worth the extra learning curve compared to Rhino and BricsCAD, and also no money in it as far as I could see.”
Pivot to Solid Share
Nor was SolidFace itself making enough money: “Bootstrapping both of our CAD companies, UniCAD and SolidFace, has proven to be a significant challenge. During this period we’ve invested over $1.5 million in research and development...” So in 2015, the company pivoted to services by launching a Kickstarter campaign for Solid Share.
Solid Share was to be a 3D printing, scanning, and modeling service that used SolidFace as the CAD engine. Users would design models with the CAD program for free, and I presume Solid Share would collect a fee on the services accessed by customers.
The campaign failed, raising just US$1,823 toward its US$385,000 goal. (See figure below.)
Solid Share’s page on Kickstarter
That same year, the company took a stab at selling SolidFace 2015 through Steam, the online computer games portal. For the first and only time, pricing was on a non-rental basis; the student version went for US$199, while commercial versions seemed to range in price from US$500 to $1,000. This sales channel fell through after the company decided the software was “considered not profitable enough to warrant bringing [version] 2016 to Steam.”
By 2017, SolidFace had sold just 600 licenses. Of these, 100 were paid for by bitcoin mining, making the company $1,400 a month, according to the Austin Business Journal. The non-mining version was $29.99/month.
The same year, the company looked to raise $500,000 as a seed round. According to CrunchBase, it landed $50,000 from four venture capital funds, lead by growth accelerator firm Turn8. (See figure below.) I contacted Turn8 about the investment, but received no reply.
Funding report on SolidFace by CrunchBase
Pivot to Solid Network
In either 2018 or 2019, Messers Leite and Lima formed Solid Network for distributing software packages. “We partner with software companies to distribute their software for free in our marketplace using their user’s hardware (GPU) to monetize it while the device is online,” Solid Networks reported on its Linked-In page. I found a solidnetwork.com domain, which appears to have been set up in early 2020, and today resolves to an empty placeholder site.
I contacted Mr Leite about the software, but received no reply. I wrote to SolidFace company, and also received no reply. The SolidFace Web site still lives today. (See figure below.)
A page on the SolidFace Web site today
The site offers these software packages:
SolidFace PTV — 2D CAD at $89 per quarter with “30 days free and cancel anytime.”
SolidFace 3D Pro — 3D modeler at US$129 per month and listed as “coming soon.”
That the 3D version is not available could perhaps be due to this possibility: I speculate that the firm could no longer afford to pay Parasolid’s royalties.
While the company’s software does not seem to have found success in the marketplace, the training materials it provides are very good. There are lots of 2D and 3D tutorial videos on Youtube (some of which which I watched) and the user manual (which I skimmed) is well written. The most recent video was posted in July of this year.
To test SolidFace, I downloaded a 2015 version from C|Net, installed it in Windows 10 Sandbox, but it did not run. So, I cannot attest to its abilities, but in videos it appears to have supported advanced functions like parametrics.
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
The story of SolidFace is a remarkable one, as two founders, flush with cash and full of ideas, launch a CAD program, and then pivot repeatedly in multiple attempts to succeed.
As the founders of Onshape, sunglass.io, TinkerCAD, and To3D discovered, launching a MCAD program as new does not predict success.
Onshape, for example, spent $100 million on development to gain just 5,000 paying customers, and then sold itself to PTC. Sunglass.io was acquired by Wikineering, a engineering knowledge sharing platform. TinkerCAD sold itself to Autodesk just as it was running out of funds. To3D, as best as I can determine, disappeared.
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Virtual reality/augmented reality metaverses are bound for failure with consumers, because VR/AR demands increased inconvenience, the face goggle. Consumers don’t do inconvenience. Smartphones replaced digital cameras slung around the neck not because they were better, but because they were more convenient.
VR/AR does have a niche in environments in which inconvenience is expected, such as with safety gear in workplaces, or spending what it takes to get an edge in gaming.
“One day son, all this will be yours” (cartoon by Matt Percival)
- - -
TestFit is algorithmic configuration software for optimizing the design of “commodity buildings” — like apartments, offices, hotels, industrial buildings, and parking structures — during the feasibility phase, which I wrote about in upfrontezine.com/2020/02/upf-1040.html. The software is now integrated with Enscape for real-time visualizations; TestFit in turn is Enscape’s first SDK partner. More info from testfit.io/lp-enscape-in-testfit/.
- - -
EnSuite-Cloud ReVue from CCE always has been a Web-based viewer of 3D models, and now the software has taken its first step into the realm of 2D.
The first to be supported are CATIA V5 2D Drawing viewables, with 2D drawings from Solidworks and NX coming in the next few months. You can try it out free for 15 days at viewer.cadcam-e.com/EnSuite-Cloud/Login/index.html.
- - -
Matrox celebrates 45 years in the business, having been launched in 1976 with the VideoRAM alphanumeric display controller as its first product. In 1979, the Canadian firm released the first ever video board to handle four monitors. More on the history of the longest-lasting graphics hardware company in the world at matrox.com/en/corporate/history-of-innovation.
- - -
CIMdata reports that “…with free registration to Autodesk University’s virtual live content and streaming sessions, they expected over 100,000 global participants. According to Autodesk, the first three days attendees watched more than 51,000 hours of content.”
Notable Quotable
“We need to find an emotion that hasn’t been hijacked by one of the big brands.” - Management Speak
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Denis Senkinc
Rod Levin: “Thanks for your consistent attention to this industry that has seen so much change over the last 30 years.”
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Issue #1,109 | Inside the Business of CAD | 18 October 2021
This issue is sponsored by CCE:
EnSuite-Cloud ReVue:
The Zoom Alternative for Online Engineering Meetings
Hold visual conference calls with your team and suppliers to review 2D/3D CAD designs in real-time. It’s secure with no software to install, no proprietary design data left on a server. Our online meetings support models made in CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, NX, Inventor, Creo, and more.
The Open Design Alliance may well be one of the most important organizations in the world, for what the ODA develops is then implemented by many of its CAD member companies. And we use CAD to design the world.
Producing the ODA Summit
Some of the 1,200 members are well-known CAD vendors, but most are corporations who develop CAD viewing and editing tools for internal use. Members save time in not needing to develop code themselves.
At last month’s ODA Summit 2021 (sadly online, not in Munich as first planned — darn you, coronavirus!), we got a deep dive into what the ODA is working on. The ODA works on a lot of new stuff. I found myself on the drench end of a fire hose of information.
With the ODA’s founding in 1998, it first offered individual SDKs [software development kits] for DWG and DXF, and then DGN, general formats used by the CAD industry. During his keynote address, ODA president Neil Peterson described how much has changed in the last five years. (See figure below.) The first shift was for the ODA added SDKs that read and wrote PDF and 3D PDF files.
From there, it went to offering complete sets of interoperable technology packages for members working with CAD or BIM on any platform, including the Web. We see this in the recent explosion of CAD programs reading IFC [industry foundation classes] and/or Revit files; this is not the result of Autodesk being open, this is the Open Design Alliance opening things up.
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With so much information at the conference, I decided for this article to focus on just a few areas, and then present info about STEP support in a later issue. The conference is available as a four-part video at youtube.com/opendesignalliance:
Complete CAD Interoperability
Complete BIM Interoperability
Beyond Data Interoperability
Scan-to-BIM Panel Discussion
ODA president Neil Peterson during his keynote address
How Autodesk Helps Make the ODA Popular
Mr Peterson stated that 3Q 21 was the strongest quarter in the organization’s history for membership growth. Part of the reason for this is Autodesk’s changes and lack of changes.
Autodesk has had a tumultuous history with the ODA, from initially insisting there was no need for open access to the DWG file format (DXF was good enough, it declared), to a FUD campaign over the un/trustworthiness of DWG, to blocking use of “DWG” through the registered trademark process (it failed), to suing the ODA, to mimicking it with RealDWG, and then partially capitulating by become an ODA member, albeit on the IFC side of things.
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MicroCAD Software produces kitchen design software, where the quality of renderings and walkthroughs is crucial. The company had been an AutoCAD OEM customer for 23 years, but felt constrained by its limitations. To see where to go, MicroCAD made a list of pros and cons.
The advantages to using AutoCAD OEM is that it “transmits trust and is instantly recognized by designers”; it has a powerful and reliable ACIS-based modeler. MicroCAD told us that the disadvantages to AutoCAD OEM include
Limited rendering that has not changed since 2016
A walkthrough module that is the same as in AutoCAD 12; the technology is 30 years old
A form of GDI that prevents AutoCAD from showing rendered print previews as they will be printed
Shadows in fast-shade mode that cannot be updated with the kinds of normal computers used by MicroCAD’s clients
Response time for technical service that is long
Cost of royalties that has risen more than 50% in the last three years
With little development by Autodesk in recent releases of AutoCAD, MicroCAD had no ability to improve renderings of kitchens and other interior designs.
So, three years ago they began the switch to the ODA’s platform, which afforded them access to high quality renderings, speedy fixes, higher quality technical support, and an affordable fixed fee not based on sales. Improvements and fixes to ODA offerings are based on what programmers need, and not the wants of AutoCAD end users.
AutoKitchen running on the ODA-based DWG engine
Switching to the ODA, however, had its drawbacks:
Programming took MicroCAD longer, as tools available in AutoCAD had to be developed for use with ODA; DLLs (dynamic link libraries) could, however, be re-used with minor changes
Rendering isn’t great, but this drawback allowed MicroCAD to use a third-party renderer better suited to its needs
Solid modeling kernel is not as powerful as AutoCAD’s ShapeModeler
Most blocks worked correctly in ODA, but some had to be redrawn to work correctly
Most of MicroCAD’s time was spent on making the new UI look like the old UI (see figure above)
It took about two years for MicroCAD to make the ODA-based AutoKitchen run like the AutoCAD OEM-based one.
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Graebert GmbH is working with a special interest group inside the ODA to overcome the problem customers face when Autodesk stops supporting some software. (For instance, I have a side service in which I covert Actrix drawings abandoned by Autodesk to DWG.) For instance, this year the ODA added new internal classes to its MDT-compatible Mechanical SDK for converting mechanical objects to older versions.
“New product design has migrated away from DWG-based solutions,” said Graebert cto Robert Graebert. (See figure below.) Mostly, product design is now accomplished on proprietary systems from PTC, Dassault Systemes, and Siemens. “But drawings continue to be a key workflow in the industry.”
So, at the conference, Mr Graebert announced that his company was taking on the challenge to maintain Mechanical part information, “maintaining legacy drawings in the product design market.”
Customers tell him that there still a need to maintain part information in drawings. “In our estimation, there are billions of DWG part drawings that need to be updated for products still being manufactured or in active maintenance.”
Graebert GmbH cto Robert Graebert introducing ARES Mechanical
This led Graebert GmbH to write ARES Mechanical to handle custom objects originally created with AutoCAD Mechanical, such as part information, bills of materials, standards-compliant parts and annotations. “These objects are all inter-related and contain a lot of hidden complexity,” Mr Graebert said.
The ODA’s DWG support is insufficient, as it cannot update part information. “The part information in these drawings is not static. It is not sufficient to visualize balloons and bills of material; it is also important to access and edit all properties of referenced parts.”
So, the Mechanical SIG [special interest group] has import, export, and rendering (display) of mechanical objects working well. But not all versions of AutoCAD Mechanical are supported yet; more will be added. DXF export/import is missing; public APIs are being extended.
Q&A
Q: Is ODA planning to develop a DWG server engine to allow several users read and write the same DWG file? It seems like multiple editors could use merging similar to what software developers do with Git, by adding a visualization layer to help with conflict resolution.
A: At the moment we have no plans to develop such a fully functional server engine. But we have developed DWG Revisions technology that supports collaborative editing and can be used on servers.
Q: With ODA software, can you change the camera type to orthogonal? Do you have an example?
A: Yes, it is possible. Here is a code snippet (GS API):
From the DWG database side, it is also possible to use command PERSPECTIVE = 0.
Q: In which version will these new improvements and features mentioned today come out?
A: Most of new features presented are available in the latest release 22.8. Some feature may be in beta state, but in any case they are going to be ready this year. We have a release every month, and the last one this year will be 22.12.
Q: Were can I find documentation about all the features supported by the newest IFC format?
Al Dean, co-founder and former editor of Develop3D magazine in England, is now Global Communications Content Manager at Siemens Digital Industries Software.
Cyrena Respini, former editor-in-chief at CADalyst magazine, is now in marketing for Graebert GmbH.
You’re right, in that Intergraph patented OLE4DM [object linking and embedding for design and modeling], but you’re incorrect (by my recollection) on why the technology never went far. The OLE4DM Consortium was really starting to gain broad adoption and people were beginning to realize the potential of the technology.
It was then that Intergraph announced their submarine patent with a licensing agreement that was unacceptable to the consortium. It was this licensing deal that really killed OLE4DM, not the validity of the technology.
At the time that it all went dormant, multi-system demonstrations were being held involving multiple CAD vendors demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach. To this day, I still maintain that providing encapsulated data with associated evaluators is really the preferred way of exchanging data between systems.
This approach avoids translation and the even bigger issue of mis-evaluation of geometric data between systems. Boeing advanced this in their procedural surfaces where they “black-boxed” their representation and associated evaluators of their surfaces so that they could be seamlessly incorporated into other modeling systems.
Parasolid also introduced this notion of user-defined, procedural surfaces, though it’s unclear who all makes use of this function. Most people look at ACIS- or Parasolid-based systems as examples of how to avoid translation, but even more importantly, using a common kernel supports identical evaluation of the geometry.
Based on what is being said about CAD Direct, there aren’t corresponding evaluators being carried with the foreign geometry, but there is a B-rep “equivalent” created and maintained.
It sure is unfortunate that the OLE4DM approach never had a chance to really address multi-system interoperability. It would have made a considerable impact on the industry. - John Callen
The editor replies: I vaguely remember something about a consortium, so thanks for reminding me of it. In my experience, I never found OLE to work well, including my tries with OLE for D&M. Maybe the problem is that CAD vendors seemed to implement OLE only half-heartedly.
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I would say that Solid Edge is playing catch-up with CAD Direct. Solidworks (3D Interconnect) and Autodesk Inventor (AnyCAD) have had the ability to reference other native CAD models without conversion for years. - Mike DeKoning
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Dan Staples spotted the Solid Edge article that went out on the upFront.eZine and the caption for the first slide with him pictured, where it reads, “Dan Staples announcing that CAM Pro (for 2.5-axis milling) and Simcenter Flomaster (for fluid and thermal analysis) is available to any Solid Edge 2022 customer with a subscription.”
Solid Edge 2022 does not actually include Flomaster; it is in fact an extra-charge product.
Convergent modeling is proprietary Siemens technology, tightly integrated into Parasolid. It is available to third parties to license at extra cost, above a standard Parasolid license. This is unlike Synchronous Technology, which Siemens has chosen not to license. - Alice Bonasio, global public relations Siemens Digital Industries Software
Notable Quotable
“It’s not creative destruction, like the car taking over the horse and buggy: Google and Facebook have not replaced news; they don't make news.” - Rod Sims
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
KCL (small company donation): “Keep up the good work!”
Business Advantage Group (small company donation)
To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:
Issue #1,108 | Inside the Business of CAD | 11 October 2021
This issue is sponsored by CCE:
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Solid Edge 2022 began shipping last week, boasting of 500 new functions and improvements. I spoke with Siemens vp of mainstream engineering Dan Staples about the new features I found the most interesting.
Dan Staples announcing that CAM Pro (for 2.5-axis milling) and Simcenter Flomaster (for fluid and thermal analysis) is available to any Solid Edge 2022 customer with a subscription
New: CAD Direct
CAD Direct inserts CAD parts into Solid Edge assemblies from certain other systems, without translation. Changes made to the model in the originating CAD system are reflected in the copy stored in the Solid Edge assembly.
Ralph Grabowski: I’ll start right away with CAD Direct. It reminds me of the ’90s when Intergraph championed the use of OLE for D&M to place CAD models in other documents without translation. So I’m interested in the mechanism CAD Direct uses today.
[Intergraph patented OLE for Design and Modeling in 1993; the technology never went far, because Microsoft did not implement OLE well. At around the same time, in 1995, Intergraph first released Solid Edge. — Editor]
Dan Staples: OK, yeah, so, funny Ralph, that you should go back so far as the whole OLE [object linking and embedding] craze back in the ’90s. It is an interesting analogy to that.
The CAD Direct technology is not really a Windows technology, per se. I think the key piece of it is our ability to keep an intermediary file inside the assembly, so that you never have any external files.
I think that’s one of the biggest problems with data management. It’s kind of been this untold secret that when you translate a file you end up with a new extra file. When it comes to making an update, you’ve got this new extra file to deal with, right?
With CAD Direct, you don’t have that anymore and it does updates live. It’s all just done using internal technology.
A CAD Direct component inserted in a Solid Edge assembly being copied (shown in green)
Grabowski: It’s not translated, so is it some sort of visual or facet format where you grabbed the info out of the other CAD system?
Staples: No, it doesn’t use facets, because you actually treat them like b-reps. I think the easiest thing to think of is that the b-rep from the other CAD system is embedded inside our assembly, in a way that’s not visible to the user.
There is some intermediary geometry inside the assembly that’s managing that. When the originating system changes the model, then the internal b-rep changes.
Grabowski: Is this a function of Parasolid?
Staples: No, not particularly.
Grabowski: Where you say that it works with NX and SolidWorks, they both have Parasolid in common.
Staples: That is going to be your most reliable path, because they’re using the same format. But I would say that broadly it doesn’t matter what format you’re importing.
Grabowski: From the software launch video, it looks like Solid Edge interacts quite a bit with the imported object -- through handles, mates, constraints, and so on.
Staples: From the end users’ standpoint, they won’t be able to tell the difference between this or if they are using a Solid Edge file. It’s like you’re assembling a part file. Users won’t really be able to tell the difference other than it’s flagged in Pathfinder slightly differently. You hit the update links button to update the CAD Direct-linked file.
Grabowski: Then this leads me to the question of how the associative links are created and maintained?
Staples: We treat it very much like native solid geometry, which I think is probably the easiest way to think of it. This isn’t exactly technically correct, but it’s close enough. Solid Edge has a thing called “internal components,” which are part files embedded in the assembly. They’re treated just like an external component, but they never appear on disk.
You were talking about OLE before, where you used to have the notion of embedded or linked Excel files. Solid Edge has the ability to embed part files. This is largely the same. The body is available to us, the facets are available to us. We just don’t need a file on disk to deal with it.
Grabowski: I’m trying to understand how the link works for updates. If the external part is updated in the other CAD system, then there is some notification that this is happening. Where can that other CAD system be -- on the same network?
Staples: It will be like a link. That link in Windows can be anywhere, as long as it’s a fully resolvable, qualified path name. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be on your local drive as long as it’s a file system link that we can understand and run through, it would know the information.
Grabowski: So the source CAD system does not have to be available. Because Visio translators need to have Visio, they actually launch Visio in the background to do the translation.
Staples: The source CAD system does not have to be available now with CAD Direct.
Let’s take it even further with a diesel engine in a locomotive. You get the engine from Cummings or somebody, and you do not want to create 2,000 part files on your disk for that engine, because honestly you don’t care about the 2000 part files. You just care about the engine.
And yet you also don’t necessarily want to treat it like a part per say, because it’s not. It has moving parts. It’s a real thing.
And so our internal components let you take either a part or subassembly and put it in your assembly, and it acts just like the same thing. There aren’t any external files made, and so that actuator or that engine fully exists within the assembly in what’s called an internal component. It has structure in Pathfinder [model tree], you can see how it’s composed. You can articulate the parts, but you don’t have all that gloop on disk or in your PDM [product data management] system to manage. It’s treated like a part that came along for the ride.
Grabowski: So ‘gloop’ is a technical term then?
Staples: It is. I’m glad you recognize that. I’ve been using that since the ’90s as well.
Improved: Convergence Modeling
Convergent modeling from Siemens lets you mix and match solids and meshes in a single model. (Dassault has in its ACIS kernel something similar.) Convergent modeling lets you interact with meshes imported from scans (and other non-CAD sources) with solids (b-reps).
During the launch video, we saw a solids cutout added to a mesh handle, followed by an array of solids in the mesh and a Boolean operation to cut a hole. See figure below.
Hole with solid fillets cut in a part made of meshes
Grabowski: You’ve been working on hybrid modeling for a number of years now, as an offshoot of Parasolid. With this new release of Solid Edge, have you arrived at doing all that hybrid modeling needs to do? Or is there is there more to develop?
Staples: Let me answer that in two parts. Typically, we have been using the term ‘Convergent Modeling’, which is the Siemens term for the merger between facets and b-reps.
And yes, it’s enabled by Parasolid technology, but it’s not a part of our Parasolid modeling kernel. So it is something unique to Siemens and not necessarily available when you license Parasolid. [Updated:}Convergent modeling is proprietary Siemens technology, tightly integrated into Parasolid. It is available to third parties to license at extra cost, above a standard Parasolid license. This is unlike Synchronous Technology, which Siemens has chosen not to license.
Grabowski: That’s like synchronous technology then.
Staples: Yes, it’s exactly like synchronous technology [in that ST cannot be licensed even when you license the Parasolid kernel].
You’re never complete, but I’d say we’re very close to completion. The big nut to crack was Booleans. In the past, when you did a Boolean between a b-rep and a facet mesh, the result would be that everything became facets, whereas now everything stays in its native form.
So when you do a Boolean between a b-rep and a facet, you end up with all the b-reps staying b-reps, and all the facets staying facets. It’s super efficient in terms of the way it’s done and stored. I do feel like it’s closure to the story we’ve been building over the last couple years.
Grabowski: I’m not super familiar with what else you’ve done in Convergence Modeling. Do you also convert facet meshes to b-reps?
Staples: We do have some facet mesh to b-rep conversion as part of our reverse engineering. In terms of functionality, it’ll find planes and cylinders, and cones, and so on.
The other thing we do that’s really cool and unique is that we can do almost all operations on faceted models with Synchronous Technology: move facets, we can round edges, we can do shells or thin walls -- so we don’t care whether they are facets or b-reps or a combination of the two.
I do think it’s a final frontier here, because meshes for a long time were the domain of the film industry and character modeling.
Grabowski: What happens when a hybrid part is exported to another CAD system?
Staples: It is all converted to meshes before being exported.
New: Point Clouds
Grabowski: Point clouds, are they new to 2022?
Staples: They are. We had done a prototype of this a year or two ago.
What we mean by point clouds? So it’s been possible to have lots of points in Solid Edge for a very long time, but they had to be displayed as triangles or b-reps. Now they stay points.
When you scan a plant, each point carries the color and spatial [x,y,z] location, and so you literally have at a minimum millions of points and sometimes billions of points. During rotation, Solid Edge renders them in real time at high speed.
That’s the thing that’s so interesting and is still amazing to me: that the points are so dense that you can even zoom in and it still looks good. It’s just amazing, the density of these point clouds. This is kind of ‘secret sauce science’ stuff. And that’s also the technical term, by the way.
Point cloud inserted surrounding an assembly (lower middle of the image)
Grabowski: The part I found interesting was you taking a measurement between a solids component and part of the point cloud. So I was curious: where on the point cloud is that measurement taken from?
Staples: So it’ll be taken from the point itself.
Grabowski: But which point? is it a rough measurement or? I’m curious about the accuracy.
Staples: Well, it’s only as accurate as the laser scan is accurate. But they are extraordinarily accurate. If you were to measure to a rusty water tank, you would be able to tell the difference between the rusty part and the not rusty part. I mean the lasers are super amazing these days.
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I’ll close what’s-new in Solid Edge 2022 by describing one more feature that I found interesting: component colorization. See figure below.
Coloring parts according to designers’ names.
To color parts, you assign colors to properties. This lets you visually identify which supplier or designer made the part, or the materials from which they were made. Siemens calls this “dynamic visualization.”
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
Solid Edge 2022 is a remarkable upgrade, with some catch-up features (I’m looking at you, point clouds and Xcelerator Share) but also some really important new technologies, like the solids-mesh editing and CAD Direct.
Blogger Matt Lombard feels Siemens is aiming Solid Edge at big engineering: “There’s a lot of stuff aimed at plant design, large assemblies, fluid flow processing, framing, and piping. See the theme?”
Windows 11 became available for download last week. There was one prime reason for Microsoft to invent a Windows 11: to force corporations to replace 11-“incompatible” hardware with new gear, boosting the profits of the HPs and Dells of the world. Today's hardware pretty much lasts forever (well, a decade or two anyhow), which is a problem for hardware makers, so we can think of 11 as hardware on subscription.
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Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
I’ve said for a long time that the only difference between human intelligence and machine intelligence is that humans make random mistakes. That is only partly tongue-in-cheek. - Owen Wengerd, ManuSoft
The editor replies: It is random mistakes (chaos) that makes progress possible. Think penicillin and sticky notes.
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It should be mentioned that any article on A.I. instantly becomes hilarious when you replace the capital “I” with a lowercase “L.” E.g.:
How dangerous is Al? Can Al ever be stopped?
Can Al turn my savings into millions?
Our extensive use of Al to make our product better failed miserably.
Etc. - Matt Stachoni
The editor replies: Eliza should’ve been named Al!
Some of my judgments and feelings are due to my many years of active work in an academic A.I. lab where we dealt with expert systems, machine understanding of natural language, sub-definite calculations (something more general than today’s generative design), and more.
On the one hand, I do not like widely spread today’s hype and vulgar simplification of problems. On the other, I do believe that much more fundamental R&D can implement much more in the area of A.I. advances.
From what I have heard, BricsCAD applies machine learning for classification of BIM elements based on geometry to understand what is a wall and what is a window, as well as analyzing whether parts can be produced as sheet metal.
The title on isicad’s September cover is “A.I. Engineer.” In Russian at least, “И. И. Инженер” is definitely interpreted as “initials + last name.” - David Levin
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Concerning the 4th statement, systems with natural intelligence have a standard set of basic goals of functioning, survival and procreation. They develop behavioral goals by analyzing the state of their own body and the environment. In the process of achieving various goals of behavior, they solve many different problems.
It would be strange if an artificial system, which does not have the basic goals of functioning at all and receives goals of behavior from the outside, would be a complete analogue. We can only talk about a way to solve specific problems. - Sergey Perovskiy (on isiscad)
Notable Quotable
“The rule of the tech economy is that everything must eventually get bought by one of the monopolies.” - Paris Marx
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Warren Cross: “I’ve been a faithful reader for almost 1/3 of my 75 years. While I am no longer an instructor of computer-aided drafting and design, I still enjoy learning of the expansion and of the capabilities of design software. AutoCAD 2. 5, I hardly remember you. Thanks for your many contributions and books to the industry.”
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Issue #1,107 | Inside the Business of CAD | 4 October 2021
You’ve probably seen CAD demos that start with a square box covered with grid lines, which are then prodded and pulled to arrive at a curvaceous shape. This is sub-d (sub-division) modeling.
XShape modeler from Dassault Systems interactively editing the body of a remote control with sub-d modeling (image source SolidApps).
In the figure above, the vertical and horizontal lines on the body lay out the subdivisions. The lines in blue are being interactively pushed (by 5.24mm), much like in clay making. The body is a surface model, which can be converted to a solid, if not too complex.
We are so used to working with the precision afforded by profiles and solids (b-rep modeling) that the slapdash nature of subdivisions seems like an unhelpful distraction. Nevertheless, it has its place in the designer’s toolbox.
Here Jonas Kunze looks at the pros and cons of using sub-d modeling for our design work.
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Brilliant concepts need brilliant tools. Otherwise, creative and innovative ideas can fizzle out soon after they emerge. This raises an important question: do designers today have tools that match the creative flair inherent in design as a discipline? I examine the question with reference to sub-division (sub-d) modeling.
What Is Sub-D Modeling?
Subdivision surface modeling is a concept with which designers may well be familiar, since this technology represents the state-of-the-art in digital modeling. The technique comes from character design, and was originally introduced by animation studio Pixar as a faster way to model animated characters and CGI [computer-generated imagery].
With sub-d modeling, shapes are achieved by manipulating control points through several kinds of push and pull actions. The technology is incorporated into a number of software tools used in design, such as freeware Blender (see figure below) and Dassault X-Shape (see figure above).
Sub-d modeling in Blender (image source Konstantinos Karvouniaris)
Advantages to Sub-D Modeling
Sub-d quickly gained popularity due to the time-saving it offers. Its use then expanded beyond character animation (such as in computer-animated cartoons and games) to other industries, such as industrial and automotive design.
The technique includes the following advantages:
Time efficiency. Subdivision modeling is a quick approach to sketching. Once users are familiar with the software, results can be achieved with substantial time savings, especially when compared to other tools like NURBS [non-uniform rational B-splines].
Uniformity. Sub-d performs well when designing organic shapes (such as cartoon dinosaurs) and where little variation is required; this is why it was created originally for animated cartoons. This makes it a fitting tool where overarching symmetry and uniform design results must be created fast.
However, results may be less than ideal when wanting to imprint a unique identity on a product.
Convenience and familiarity. The intuitive nature of sketching in sub-d makes it a convenient choice for designers who are familiar with NURBS tools in CAD. Sub-d is similar to polygonal modeling, making the familiarity factor a plus. For many designers, sub-d is the go-to solution whenever objects cannot be easily modeled with NURBS in CAD, for example in the case of styling surfaces (see figure below).
Overall, we can say that subdivision modeling is suited to tasks where quick visualization results are more important than precision.
Automotive styling with sub-d modeling (image source Adobe)
Disadvantages of Sub-D
We cannot forget that this modeling system was originally developed to recreate organic shapes (a.k.a. human and other non-prismatic shapes). This is very different from the kinds of inanimate objects common to mechanical design, explaining sub-d’s short-comings:
Fast to Slow. Speed is not a constant in subdivision modeling. While getting an initial model takes little time, there is often a speed mismatch between the subsequent stages of the design process; progress in later stages slows down. Sub-d eventually falls short in automotive design, where renditions of concepts become increasingly detailed as ideas are discussed, worked on, and reworked.
Lack of Precision. Speed is important in commercially-oriented processes, but there is a price to pay for sub-d’s time savings: lack of precision. Control and precision are paramount in automotive and other designs as they play a crucial role in defining value and impact the product’s final price. When it comes to using sub-d, there is an implicit assumption that designers will have to accommodate a certain degree of inaccuracy.
Non-iterative. Subdivision modeling does not lend itself well to the iteration loops needed in the automotive design process, because every change requires starting from scratch. As others have stated, one of the shortcomings of this technique is the lack of continuity. So, to add details or make changes in later stages, designers resort to other tools. In this sense, sub-d inserts disconnection and fragmentation into the process.
Many designers agree that modeling tools currently available have important limitations. In the case of sub-d, we cannot deny its usefulness, especially for first-stage visualization purposes. But given its shortcomings, can this technology be enriched, complemented, or replaced? One area where sub-d works well is in interactive virtual reality modeling.
In the absence of a better option, sub-d is the fastest way to generate the impression of an idea. It is certainly handy for visualizing concepts to assess their feasibility. But since this technology is admittedly lacking in dimensional accuracy, is it possible that it has outlived its usefulness?
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Siemens last week expanded its Xcelerator offering by launching “Xcelerator as a Service” or XaaS, software based on MindSphere, Mendix, Supplyframe, and TeamCenter X. It offers collaboration, mechanical design, electronics, and software development on the cloud. sw.siemens.com/en-US/digital-transformation/cloud
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QuadriSpace releases Document3D Suite 2022 consisting of Pages3D for technical documentation and Publisher3D for technical illustrations. The new Detail View Markup creates illustrations with zoomed views of 3D models.
A new part filter sorts and identifies parts meeting user-defined criteria. Part metadata can be imported from and exported to Excel for access to ERP and PLM data. Thirty-day demo (after registration) and more info from quadrispace.com/products/whats_new_2022.
Letters to the Editor
I’ve been watching the consolidation of the CAM [computer-aided manufacturing] industry with great interest.
Companies have acquired an extensive portfolio of CAM products, but for the most part have been unable to consolidate them, due to their inherent proprietary nature. The proprietary approach ensures that manufacturing knowledge encoded into each resides solely in each.
Much like CAD systems of the past were faced with a similar proprietary representation which locked users into their platform, which encouraged [intermediary] data exchange formats, this CAM consolidation could also be the motivation for a CAM interoperability standard. Such a standard does exist in STEP-NC, an ISO standard which would provide a neutral file format to exchange process data between CAM systems.
Maybe the time is right for STEP-NC -- depending on whether the acquirers are looking for ways to consolidate their CAM assets. - John Callen
The editor replies: Software companies that are acquiring CAM software would want something like STEP-NC, but I am finding that data integration between acquired companies (under the larger entity) is an inexplicably slow process. (Nemetschek Group might be the poster child for this.) Perhaps this is why Autodesk rips its acquired software apart!
Investment companies that acquire CAM software would not care about integration.
Mr Callen responds: You're right. Investment companies that just want to milk the cash cow, and would not care about interoperability within their portfolio.
Though STEP-NC could provide interoperability across a vendor’s CAM portfolio, it would also potentially allow migration to a CAM product outside the portfolio. MCAD went through a similar cannibalization scare, which really didn't materialize. Users still like to use what they like to use.
Re: A.I.’s Fatal Flaw
In upFront.eZine issue 1,105, you wrote “The blackbox crutch executives can say decisions were made by AI, and so deny culpability.” This is the Sergeant Schultz Defense (“I know nussink”) and it usually fails. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_defense - Don Beaton
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For all my techie friends: a great article by CAD’s equivalent of Gandalf the Grey. What is AI, and what has *really* been accomplished so far? - MattyKUSA via Twitter
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You wrote: “We see obsessiveness over AI because it is the ultimate computing problem.” This is truly a factor, but so are economics. Investments in technology are made in hopes of strong returns on capital. Technology has profitably replaced a large chunk of the muscular tasks that were once the province of humans.
The big economic opportunities now lie in replacing intellectual labor, which is generally expensive labor. Computers replaced plenty of intellectual work already. I once worked in an insurance company; by 1980, the sea of clerks of the earlier era had largely been replaced by mainframes and a lake of programmers. Now the less repetitive, more complex intellectual labor is where the opportunities are.
As for CAD, while I am sure that AI will power certain tasks, AI is far from being able to do the core work, which is design. Certainly in AEC, we are far from organizing all the disparate knowledge that underlies a design in a manner such that AI can use it.
We already see this problem in BIM, where BIM evangelists and salespeople want to credit BIM for benefits that substantially arise from Integrated Project Delivery (IPD). IPD is the only current way we have to get all the needed knowledge into the design, which is not to ignore things like automated checks for building code compliance.
Lastly, as a species, we are going through plenty of changes of what it means to be human. A few years ago I was astonished to read that significant numbers of teens were more comfortable texting their friends than speaking with them face-to-face.
Back in 1976, Joseph Weizenbaum published Computer Power and Human Reason. In the mid 1960s he had invented (designed) what we today call a chatbot. ELIZA was a very early piece of AI (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA for details.)
At that time it operated using a teletype machine interface. In one version ELIZA acted like a psychotherapist. Weizenbaum was struck, and alarmed, when his secretary developed a strong emotional attachment to the program. Thus his book, which raises the now-old and still unresolved question of how we will be changed by what we have created. - Leo Schlosberg
The editor replies: I remember running Eliza on the university mainframe computer at in the late 1970s. It very quickly became repetitive in its answers.
I don’t think that humans change in reaction to new technology; we adapt. For instance, our fingers gained muscle memory for touch typing, and then for typing on small glass screens.
Mr Schlosberg responds: What got Weizenbaum going was the secretary’s (and other people as well) reaction and attachment.
The specific version was one that mimicked Rogerian therapy (pioneered by Carl Rogers, also known as “nondirective therapy” or “client-centered therapy,” and based on pretty much rephrasing what the person said in an affirming way or asking modest questions, like “How did that make you feel?”). That may be the ELIZA you met but possibly it was a different version.
I almost wrote you today after seeing a few articles on AI. One was in an archaeology magazine about an application in which the AI was better than archaeologists at matching pottery shards. That, plus your article got me to checking in on radiologists, who surely are ripe for substantial displacement/replacement by AI.It was in a professional publication and not very incisive.
The editor replies: Humans yearn for non-human attachments, because they are faithful and cause no problems, the way that other humans do — like a dog, but without the problems dogs create.
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Nobody is better than Ralph Grabowski at telling the emperor of software he has no clothes. Worried your job will be replaced by a computer? Take 5 minutes and read Ralph Grabowski’s "AI's Fatal Flaw" and you’ll feel a lot smarter. - Roopinder Tara via Twitter
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With Minsky, perhaps we just misinterpreted his “Within a generation.” Assuming the human race survives, it will happen within a generation. We just have no idea which one! :) - Robin Capper
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I've been relying on Ralph Grabowski's commentary on the CAD industry for nearly three decades just myself. He never fails to provide something new. Here, I learned two new terms that describe the AI crutch:
The Black Box Crutch
The Boombox Crutch - Darren Young via Linked-In
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Is today’s AI just a collection of rules and parameters, that the computer uses as boundaries and never forgets? If so, should we not call it artificial ‘intelligence’, but just ‘artificial rote memorization’, or “ARM” ? - Peter Lawton
The editor replies: True AI would make inferences from data presented. Problem is, if it were to do that, we would have no idea how it arrived at its conclusion, and so would be unable to confirm if it was correct.
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Another eloquent and insightful piece of writing. Common sense in this industry is getting to be uncommon. - Jess Davis
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I agree with most of what you say about AI. I do believe that advances are being made. I saw this on a blog and thought it was pretty amazing: “OpenAI Codex Live Demo.”
- Conan Witzel
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A friend of mine said around 1990 the ultimate sentence about AI, which has been true since then, and always will be, more so than Moor´e’s Law: “Artificial Intelligence is everything computers still cannot do.” - Fernando Valderrama
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I have enjoyed reading your upFront.eZine for most of its 21 years. Having corresponded with you previously, I feel you will find the discussion linked below to be interesting and informative: Online Conversation: Understanding Transhumanism.
Best line in your article: “What is AI’s fatal flaw? It cannot replicate human metaphysics; the rational cannot conceive of the irrational.” Many thanks for your excellent journalistic efforts. - Harold Chaney
The editor replies: The video notes that an alternative name proposed for AI had been “complex information processing,” which would be more accurate, but that “artificial intelligence” was considered more aspirational. “There is something about a term about something that we can’t achieve that inspires people to think beyond existing constraints.”
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Your writing about AI in your latest issue is excellent. Thank you for your voice of human rationality (or is it human irrationality, or both?). A much needed dose of whatever it is (intelligence). - Rob Snyder
Notable Quotable
“If people yelling on Twitter can cause policy change at Apple, imagine what will happen when nation states exert pressure to increase the scope of on-device searches.” - Diogo Mónica
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Michael Kuzmik
Jeremy Powell at Vectorworks (large company donation): “Keep up the great work on upFront.eZine, Ralph!”
To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:
Issue #1,106 | Inside the CAD Business | 27 September 2021
Guest editorial by Dave Edwards
Back in the day, most CAD output was done on pen plotters driven by DOS-based software. Yes, there really was work done before the advent of Windows and the Mac, done with real pens and real ink. This was long before PostScript printers and standardized font formats.
The font format developed by Autodesk for AutoCAD, for instance, is named SHX [short for “compiled shape”]. This is a vector-based font format, which uses only lines and arcs in character (or “glyph”) definitions; no fills. See the figure below.
To get different font weights on the output, specific pen numbers were assigned. To draw a thicker line, you specified a thicker pen, and then the CAD program literally instructed the plotter to pick the specific pen from the pen carousel. See figure below.
Carousel holding pens of various weights (image source softsolder.com)
A typical carousel held up to eight pens of different sizes placed in numbered locations. The sizes were based on standard drafting pen sizes: 0.25mm, 0.35mm, and so on. In the CAD software, you placed all entities that needed to be drawn by a specific pen width on their own layer. It was very restrictive, and pens running dry were a royal pain. This changed so much for the better when inkjet plotters came on the market.
C3DevCon 2021
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Join C3D Labs at its software developers’ conference, October 14 at 10:00am CEST. See the latest developments in the C3D Toolkit SDK, designed for engineering software developers.
As font technology developed, the need for WYSIWYG — What You See is What You Get — displaying of fonts became standard. But it was still a while before you could see the effect of adding a pen weight to a font on the screen. VersaCAD was an early exception, as it had a system by which the user could select the output scale and it would display the desired pen weights on the screen.
Special Character Standards
When the first CAD systems came out, there was only the ASCII standard for character codes. This was carried over from teletype machines: when a letter was pressed on one machine, the same letter would be printed out at the receiving end.
But ASCII had specifications for only 128 characters, of which the first 30 were for controlling the teletype machine. In CAD, the immediate need was for special characters, such as degree, plus/minus, and diameter. What Autodesk did was add these characters to specific locations in their font definitions.
Later, when the ANSI code was developed for handling 255 characters, it added mostly foreign characters and still there was no location for diameter. (Don’t get me started on using “O-slash” for diameter!)
The advent of modern font formats, such as Postscript and Truetype, permitted large sets of international standards and so Unicode was developed by an international committee. The committee determines character locations for foreign, technical, and graphic characters. Using this system, a font developer can create a font with special characters in these defined locations; applications that want to display those characters know which codes to use when calling a font.
How Many Characters? Where’s the One I Want?
Unicode originally had about 62,000 characters; the latest version has specifications for over 143,000. But this doesn’t mean that all fonts have all characters. The Unicode version of the “universal” Arial font, for instance, has only the original 62,000.
Having been a member of the Unicode Consortium in the past, I’m familiar with the process of adding characters to the standard. Applications are submitted each year and then they are voted on. If you ever have the chance to go through the Unicode standard, you’ll see enormous character sets for language systems, such as Japanese Kanji, and even more for “artist” systems like Klingon. (It was never approved.)
The current version of Unicode covers most of the characters needed for architectural projects, but not all of them. This is where it gets hard for users and for CAD/BIM applications. What happens when the font I need to use doesn’t have the character I want?
Most of the “big name” fonts should have most of them. When they don’t, the CAD application handles things in a couple of ways:
First, fall back on characters that look similar. For years AutoCAD had the error of using the “null character” location for the diameter symbol. Many fonts had diameter, but not the null character; in this case, AutoCAD punts on one character location and uses another. Often, this has to be done for several characters and rolling back to several other lookalikes.
Next, fall back to characters in a different font known to have the characters needed. AutoCAD does this with ISO fonts, but this can look terribly strange.
There’s a major problem when the character you need has no Unicode specification and so is not found in any major font. This is the case with the 1/16 and finer fractions. Unicode specifies fractions up to 1/8 and related fractions, but not 1/16. What most CAD systems do is fake fractions by drawing them using individual characters — but that can look weird too.
The Real Issue is Height
The real problem with fonts in CAD and BIM software is scaling. This is especially important when going from one CAD system to another. SHX fonts are still used frequently in DWG programs, such AutoCAD; these fonts use a different scaling method than Truetype fonts.
As SHX characters are composed of just lines, the height of characters are set to the exact height of uppercase letters. See figure below.
CAD defines the size of text by the height of capital letters
This is, however, not the case the desktop publishing fonts. To understand why not, let’s look at how typography works.
A Bit About Typography
There’s an ancient history that sets standards for typography, which poses problems for the CAD world. When it comes to sizing characters, what is important is the distance from line to line, and not the size of the uppercase letters. In laying out text for printing, the lengths of columns need to be maintained, no matter which typeface is used. In fact, font designers can make the size of uppercase letters any height they wish.
When the size of a font is specified for printing, point size is used (72.72... points to an inch). But this determines the spacing between lines and not necessarily the size of the characters. Huh??? As a CAD font designer myself, it took me years to wrap my head around why it is done this way.
Go into any word processor and pick a handful of typefaces and insert a few capital letters. I created the text seen in the figure below in Microsoft Word, setting the size of the large letters to 72 points. Notice that each one has a different height.
Microsoft Word drawing the capital letters of different fonts at 72 points
So how do you create Truetype text at the correct size in CAD when a contract requires all text be 1/8" tall? This is the trick most CAD and BIM application use that causes the problems:
They inspect the curves that make up one of the characters to determine its actual size. AutoCAD uses the character “A” but the letter “M” should be used, as has been historically done in typesetting.
The application then scales the text slightly up or down so that the size of the characters are at the right size. The figure below shows how the same text appears in AutoCAD:
Autodesk AutoCAD drawing the capital letters of different fonts at 72 points
This poses the next problem when drawings with text are imported into other CAD systems that use different scaling mechanisms. You most likely see this when you use SHX in one application and an equivalent Truetype font in the receiving application. Because Truetype fonts are created using boundaries, CAD often scales them down the text to account for the height of uppercase characters.
The good news is that it has gotten better over the years. For instance, the developers of Revit first used a different scaling system than did AutoCAD. A few years ago, Autodesk changed the font scaling in Revit, which made for loads of fun fixing all the files.
(Years ago I created a system for converting SHX fonts to Truetype format. It’s a very long progress with many steps. The biggest issue is getting the math correct when a boundary is added to characters to correctly compensate line lengths as heights of uppercase characters are reduced. I created a Truetype set to substitute for standard SHX fonts RomanS and Simplex. If you’re interested in them, contact me.)
So, What’s the Point?
I just wanted to get this information down so that whenever a question about fonts arises, users will have the information at the ready.
BIM is supposed to collaborative, yet text fidelity is a stumbling block. The round trip of CAD to BIM to CAD can be a nightmare.
This is why most users landed on using something like Arial for all their work. (It is a modern clone of Helvetica, and it’s a boring-looking font.) Arial has some disadvantages when used for technical documents, but it’s become a standard.
Just know that in most applications, you no longer have to be worried about how the fonts are created to get the correct size.
Industry Musings
Having fought the good fight and lost over much of this, I naturally have opinions about all this.
In all these years, too much has been just a patchwork-kludge. We have Unicode characters for much of what we need. Why are they not being used? Feet and inches marks used in dimensions should use the prime (') and double prime (") characters, not curley quotes (’ or ”). AutoCAD’s SHX fonts don’t have copyright, registered, or trademark character — just to name a few.
There needs to be an industry committee that specifies font standards for CAD and BIM. Its role would be to brand fonts approved for having specific sets of characters and sets of internal heights, so that scaling no longer is an issue.
There’s a section in Unicode called a “Private Dictionary,” which AutoCAD uses for locations of needed characters not found in Unicode. There needs to be an effort to get more of these characters to have set locations and then get them published, so that font designers can create their fonts with these characters. This is already being done for fonts needed in music publishing.
The Bottom Line
For BIM really to be a collaborative venture, it needs to put into place several standards, and fonts is one of the basic ones that has been overlooked. CAD firms felt that by simply adopting Truetype (and not even OpenType) they covered the issue — not so!
I did what I could while I was still more active, but it fell mostly on deaf years. Vendors have had more important functions to get into BIM, such as handling big projects and multi-user collaboration. Some of the nuts and bolts have, as a result, been left in the dust.
END RANT
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Dave Edwards develops Project Newplex, an advanced SHX font for technical documents. He is an application feature consultant and technical documentation writer. You can contact him through pragarchdesigntech@substack.com.
[This article was reproduced with permission from PADT, the Prag Arch Design Tech newsletter in which Mr Edwards explains how to make BIM work. I find it very useful. View his articles at pragarchdesigntech.substack.com.]
GT-SUITE from Gamma Technologies performs 0D/1D/3D multi-physics CAE simulations of the physics of fluid flow, thermal, mechanical, electrical, magnetic, chemistry, and controls. It includes 3D modeling with built-in structural and thermal 3D FEA (with in-situ meshers), 3-D multi-body dynamics with flexible bodies and 3D CFD. gtisoft.com
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Vectorworks launches the 2022 editions of its software:
Architect
Landmark
Spotlight
Fundamentals
Braceworks
ConnectCAD
Vision
Vectorworks Designer has been renamed “Vectorworks Design Suite.” Vectorworks is the first major BIM application to run natively on Apple silicon processors, running some processes 4x faster. vectorworks.net/en-CA/2022
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Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
I thought you might find this interesting, if only to illustrate how some in the academic corner of the computing world view CAD: “A New Era for Mechanical CAD” at queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3469844 by Jessie Frazelle
A few eyebrow raisers, such as “instances” vice “blocks” and missing things like the Blockify command in BricsCAD or any mention of LISP, etc. The author is evidently not a CAD-slinger. - Richard Webb
The editor replies: Her primary concern appears to be that because CAD is so old, it is not capable of modern computing, such as multi-core. The problem with her argument is not the age of the code (which has been refreshed over the decades) but CAD’s inability to predict user operations, and as a result cannot run on multiple CPU cores.
I have a similar problem with my M720 Logitech Triathlon mouse. Initially I connected with Logitech’s Unifying USB receiver, when it started doing awkward things in clicking and dragging. Sometimes it didn’t respond with click, but after a while it jumped like I was rapidly clicking.
After I read this thread, and found the comments by H. R. Puffenstuff, I tried switching the connection to Bluetooth and discarding the wireless Unifying USB plug. Then it worked right. It works well, like my first use of wireless USB.
Hence I conclude this is the USB receiver’s problem. Thanks for the inspiration. - Adi Dewanto (via WorldCAD Access)
Congratulations Ralph, this is a VERY impressive body of work which helped (hundreds of ?) thousands of people become proficient in CAD! - Malcolm Davies
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I wish that Bricsys would team up with you again. Not a fan of the current documentation. Web pages are a pain to navigate and, of course, impossible to highlight and add notes to. The auto-generated (apparently) off-line help files are... not good. - Richard Webb
Notable Quotable
“So when big corporations accuse you of copyright infringement, you can get fined, lose your Internet access, lose all income from your videos, be blocked from the platforms where you make your living.
“But when big corps infringe on our copyright, the war on piracy is forgotten.” - Nytt år, samme Børge
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
R L Capper
Stanley Przybylinski
To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:
Issue #1,105 | Celebrating 36 years writing about CAD | 20 September 2021
Another in the upFront.eZine series on problems posed by complexity
In the 2020s, artificial intelligence’s (AI) changed from a technology to a crutch:
The blackbox crutch — executives can say decisions were made by AI, and so deny culpability
The boombox crutch — marketing departments can claim their products employ AI, unlike competitors, and so you ought to buy the AI-enabled ones
How did AI sink so low?
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Earlier this year, Boston Robotics released a promotional video of three robots “flawlessly and soulfully dancing in rhythm.” An awestruck digital evangelist exclaimed, “Imagine what AI-powered machines will be able to do in the next 5-10 years. 1 ”
We can’t know if the digital evangelist believes his prophecy as he is, after all, an evangelist mandated to spread good digital news.
Predictive vision modeler Filip Piekniewski2 pointed to the reality behind the staged dance: “A machine is performing a set of pre-programmed moves assisted with a bunch of PID [proportional integral derivative] controllers, just like any better CNC [computer numerical control] machine 20 years ago. In this case the machine is made in a form of a humanoid to fool naive people into believing it has a shred of intelligence in it.”
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Join C3D Labs at its software developers’ conference, October 14 at 10:00am CEST. See the latest developments in the C3D Toolkit SDK, designed for engineering software developers.
‘Imagine what AI could do in the next x years’ has been a rallying cry of AI [artificial intelligence] proponents since the 1960s. In 1967, cognitive computer scientist Marvin Minsky asserted that “Within a generation... the problems of creating artificial intelligence will be substantially solved. 3 ”
The birth of AI in the late 1950s is now closer to the start of World War One than it is to today, to misquote a meme. Rather than having solved the problems of AI, we are arriving at a better understanding of why AI doesn’t work well.
Melanie Mitchell in her paper “Why AI is Harder Than We Think” 4 proposes that the thinking of AI researchers are infected with fallacies.
Fallacy: Narrow Intelligence Is On a Continuum With General Intelligence
After we saw DeepMind’s AlphaGo win a game of Go5 (apparently the hardest game of all for humans to win), AI enthusiasts used the event as proof general AI is plausible. Then Watson went on to do poorly at predicting cancer diagnoses 6, while GPT-3 wrote lots of nonsensical articles 7.
Small advances are no proof of eventually arriving at an ultimate destination. The engineering brother of philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, Stuart Dreyfus, wrote in 2012, “It was like claiming that the first monkey that climbed a tree was making progress towards landing on the moon.8 ”
Elon Musk had promised Level 5 (unattended) self-driving by 2020 to purchasers of Tesla electric cars. Then in 2021 he lamented, “Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. I didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect. Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality. 9 ”
I’ll rewrite the fallacy as reality: AI completing one task does not lead to AI completing all tasks.
Fallacy: Easy Things Are Easy, Hard Things Are Hard
When proponents boast of how AI is better at playing Go or at diagnosing health problems than we humans, they are stating of the obvious. Computers are supposed to be better than us at carrying out boring and complex tasks. I expect software FEA to be faster than me using long division.
AI is, however, terrible at tasks we humans find trivial, like walking through a crowded subway station or playing Charades. Psychologist Gary Marcus notes that Charades “requires acting skills, linguistic skills, and theory of mind — abilities that are far beyond anything AI... 10 ”
What blocks AI from arriving at its ultimate destination is its lack of common sense. Mitchell urges AI researchers to target the abilities of one-year-old children, instead of members of Mensa.
I’ll rewrite the fallacy as reality: Simple tasks performed by AI do not lead to AI completing complex tasks.
Fallacy: The Lure of Wishful Mnemonics
“Work on AI is replete with such wishful mnemonics, terms associated with human intelligence that are used to describe the behavior and evaluation of AI programs,” writes Mitchell. She gives examples:
“Neural networks are loosely inspired by the brain, but with vast differences.
“Machine learning or deep learning methods do not really resemble learning in humans (or in non-human animals).”
IBM boasted in 2011 that “Watson can read all of the health-care texts in the world in seconds” and “...understands context and nuance in seven languages” (emphases added). 11 This fooled us into believing Watson thinks better than humans do and shaped the way AI researchers thought about their field.
If machines learned the way humans learn, then they could apply it to a wide variety of experiences — called “transfer learning.” But machines cannot. What AI software does learn are “shortcuts, statistical correlations to achieve high performance without learning the skill,” kind of like when we memorized facts just to pass a test in school.
I’ll rewrite the fallacy as reality: Calling AI “human-like” does not make AI human-like.
Fallacy: Intelligence Is All In the Brain
Whether influenced by the story of Frankenstein or prodded by philosophical materialists of the Enlightenment, AI proponents assume that rational thinking occurs exclusively in the brain.
The goal is the Brain In the Vat: reproduce the brain as AI, and then replace our brains with hardware/software in our human bodies, or else place them in lifelike robots, as fictionalized by television series like Picard and Battlestar Galactica.
The flaw to the brain-in-a-vat approach, Mitchell points out, is that there is nothing physical to the brain that is unique to the brain. The rational part has one job: processing inputs from all of the rest of the body. Isolated in a vat, the brain fails to operate as it was designed to do.
Deep-learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton flippantly predicted in 2017, “We have trillions of connections [in our brains], but the biggest networks we have built so far only have billions of connections. So we’re a few orders of magnitude off, but I’m sure the hardware people will fix that.” 12 Declaring AI solved after throwing more hardware at the problem is myopic.
This may explain why enthusiasts have been pushing the date of the Singularity out into the future. (The Singularity is the date when technology exceeds human ability.) First proclaimed to arrive by 2029, then around 2039, and now by 2045 or later. 13
I’ll rewrite the fallacy as reality: AI replicating the functions of living brains does not bring AI to life.
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
We see obsessiveness over AI because it is the ultimate computing problem. Once AI is solved, there is nothing left for us to solve; AI will then go on to solve all other problems for us.
As humans, we benefit from a litany of perceptual twists that help us cope with what we don’t know, irrationalities like linear predictions, rationalizations, cognitive dissonances, confirmation biases, intuitions, group thinking, free will, common sense, bigotry, and analogies.
So AI researchers face this question: do they incorporate our irrationality into their computer code, or do they leave it out? Judging by the outrage expressed when AI results show race and other biases 14, the current sentiment is to edit out human irrationality.
For Singularity-level AI to work, it needs to incorporate the irrationality of human metaphysics; but it can’t. Yet, if it could, the Singularity would find itself becoming like the fictional Cylons, who launched a war to destroy humans just because we were too war-like 15 .
In the 1960s, we were promised better brains. Instead, in the 2020s we are getting better emoji-picking: “Your Chromebook is getting a new emoji picker this month and 992 new emoji later this year” (Chrome Unboxed 16).
What is AI’s fatal flaw? It cannot replicate human metaphysics; the rational cannot conceive of the irrational.
Can CAD Do AI?
Some CAD vendors state that their software employs AI. In my opinion, I don’t think it does. Here are some of the claims.
MRU. One CAD program says it uses AI to predict the next command(s) users will want to choose. Let’s take a example in which the user has just drawn a circle. What would AI suggest as the next command? It doesn’t take a computer to guess:
Draw another circle, or draw a different entity.
Edit the circle, or erase it (undo).
Print the circle.
This is not AI, in my view; this is a variation of MRU [most recently used], which keeps records of commands commonly employed by users.
S&R. Another CAD system says it uses AI for mundane tasks, such as replacing junctions with details, like bolts and cuts to connecting beams. You choose one junction containing the detail, and as the software finds similar junctions, it adjusts them.
This is not AI, in my view; this is search and replace.
MRU and S&R reduce tedium and so are useful to CAD users. Just don’t call it AI.
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There appears to be a match between AI and parallel processing. Neither works well in CAD, and for the same reason.
Parallel processing cannot be used in most areas of CAD, because user actions cannot be predicted. Prediction is required before the software can split the command being processed among multiple CPUs, then merge the results together afterwards. It is the nature of CAD that the software cannot predict the outcome of our actions. The same holds for AI: the actions of users cannot be predicted sufficiently for AI to assist.
(Parallel processing is indeed used in areas of CAD outside the control of users. Examples include loading files, performing renderings, and calculating finite element analyses.)
Creativity is chaos, as George Guilder brilliantly exposits in “Knowledge and Power.” AI can only take over the design process after human creativity is exhausted.
PS: 1950s AI’s Link to 2020 CAD
The inventor of AI, John McCarthy, wrote in 1958 the specifications for LISP as a programming language that could operate on its own source code as a data structure. LISt Processor was an early attempt at AI. 17
LISP subsequently appeared in many DWG-based CAD programs, after Autodesk embedded and extended XLISP — the free version written by David Betz 18 — into AutoCAD in 1985. It still runs today 19.
[You can download the 12-page paper “Why AI is Harder Than We Think” by Melanie Mitchell as a PDF from arxiv.org/pdf/2104.12871.]
And in Other News
Sadly, most conferences are still online. Here are six I plan to watch in the next six weeks:
Issue #1,104 | Inside the Business of CAD | 13 September 2021
Press Releases Of the Summer
FORAN ship design and construction software
Acquisitions that were (and weren’t) made while we were off vacationing:
Autodesk gave up on its attempt to acquire Altium, after the EDM firm purportedly wanted too much. Altium makes software for designing printed circuit boards. “While we did verbally improve our initial proposal, we were unable to agree on the basis to advance discussions,” Autodesk said.
In July, Sanvik acquired GibbsCAM milling and turning software, Cimatron molds and die design software, and SigmaNEST nesting software from Battery Ventures. Then in August, Sandvik, which has 100,000 users, purchased MasterCAD and its 270,000 users.
Epic Games acquired SketchFab, which will keep its name but drop its store fee to 12%. SketchFab’s Web site offers four million 3D models.
Siemens bought FORAN from Spain’s SENER for its ship design and construction software. FORAN is used by 150 shipyard and design offices in 40 countries.
Vectorworks established its Australia office by acquiring 20-year-long distributor OzCAD Pty. OzCAD manager Annabel Carr stays on to run operations for the new Vectorworks Australia office.
- - -
In financial news, we have…
Ansys, the simulation people, reported Q2 revenues of $447 million, up 16% from a year earlier. The company plans unspecified acquisitions with its “growing cash horde.” Details from Monica Schnitger at schnitgercorp.com/?p=18783. If Ansys were a CAD vendor, it would be the 4th biggest.
PTC had Q3 revenues of $436 million, up 23% year over year, of which over half came from its oldest lines of software, Creo and PLM. “Sales of ThingWorx [Internet of things] are still growing more slowly than expected,” reports Monica Schnitger at schnitgercorp.com/?p=18730.
The toolkit also gains a Web Vision module for client-server viewing of CAD models in Web browsers. A no-charge evaluation version of the entire toolkit’s SDK is available by making your request at c3dlabs.com/en/evaluation/.
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Graphisoft shipped ArchiCAD 25 at the start of the summer. At 37 years old, the company has the longest-running BIM program in the world. This year’s release has these features:
Custom-shaped openings and custom stairs designed according to regional standards
Import and export of 40+ file formats, including Revit MEP 2021
Surface textures on section and elevation views
BIMx viewer and BIMcloud collaboration integrated, with BIMx handling 100K files and now working with Android
Open Design Alliance is holding its annual ODA Summit 2021 this year on September 21. It is, sadly, virtual again, but I hear in-person next year might be in Munich, if possible. Details of the two-hour event and free registration are here -> conference.opendesign.com
As well, the ODA is working on a STEP [STandard for the Exchange of Product data] SDK so that ODA members can incorporate the translation standard in their software. The software development kit is due to ship by year’s end. opendesign.com/blog/2021/july/oda-starts-development-step-support
- - -
Lots of companies that employ visualization are jumping on the DLSS [deep learning super sampling] system from nVidia.
Enscape is using it for improving performance of its virtual reality walk-throughs for architects, such as going from 20 frames per second to 60fps. They call it “visualize as you design.” enscape3d.com
- - -
Hexagon updated MSC Apex Generative Design to v2021.2 with these new functions:
Simulation with 3D transversely isotropic and 3D orthotropic materials
CAD Exchanger from CADEX now supports 30 CAD formats with the addition of 3D XML and Solid Edge import, mesh colors for Solidworks, asynchronous model loading in Unity, and more. Try the desktop program 30 days free (after registration) from cadexchanger.com/products/gui/try.
- - -
Siemens updates Parasolid 33.1 with more commands for working with integrated models that mix B-rep designs with facet-based shapes: blending, tapering, offsetting, hollowing, and thickening mixed models. The company notes that its geometric kernel is in software used by four million people. plm.automation.siemens.com/global/en/products/plm-components/parasolid.html
- - -
IntelliCAD Technical Consortium in mid-summer released a beta of IntelliCAD 10.1 to the general public, and then in mid-August did the full release.
Some of the new features include the following:
Supports 3Dconnexion devices, like 3D Space Mouse and CAD Mouse
Inserts geographic maps from Esri shapefiles, Autodesk .sdf, and Spatial .sqlite
Clones existing entities to activate their command and draw new entities
Adds sheet sets, tables, enhanced grips, real-time spell checking, dimension breaks, layer filters in ribbon and toolbar droplists, and layer states.
Member company progeCAD plans to release an IntelliCAD 10.1-based progeCAD 2022 Professional software in the second half of October, 2021. www.progecad.us
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Nemetschek Groups owns about 14 companies that run largely independently of each other, and refers to them as “brands.” Now the company has merged two of its brands: Graphisoft (BIM design software) with Data Design Systems and its MEP design software.
The reason given for the merger is this: “The merger of Graphisoft and DDS in the Planning & Design Division is another strategic step in harmonizing the Nemetschek portfolio.”
- - -
IFC.js is a JavaScript library for reading and writing IFC [industry foundation classes] files, with its parsing engine based on WebAssembly and C++. The library is designed to allow compatible Web browsers into BIM viewers. Developers are looking for coders:
If you know C++, WebAssembly, or the technical part of IFC — work on the parsing engine
Three.js coders — work on the geometry side of the library
PROSTEP’s OpenCLM [configuration lifecyle management] is a Web application for generating digital threads. The software creates a web of relationships between objects in their domains, throughout a product’s life. openclm.prostep.com/?L=1
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Voxelmaps has the modest goal of creating a digital twin of the entire planet to 10cm-position accuracy with its MRVOGs — multi-resolution voxel-occupancy grids. voxelmaps.com
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An ABI Research headline made my eyebrows bounce: “Manufacturers to Spend US$2.6 Billion on Simulation Software by 2030.” The number seemed low, given that ANSYS alone generates nearly $2 billion/year in revenues selling its line of simulation software.
So I asked them if their headline perhaps had the decimal in the wrong place. They replied, “We are only considering simulation software supporting industrial and manufacturing firms designing their products and looking to optimize their production lines. We are not considering construction or firms in the defense sector nor automotive firms using simulation in the work on autonomous vehicles.
“In addition, the forecasts covers software license revenues and not any maintenance or service revenues. I see in the latest annual report for Anysys that the firm’s $1.7bn 2020 revenue is split between software license ($780mn) and service & maintenance ($900mn). Ansys is certainly a leading player in this market.” abiresearch.com/market-research/product/7779549-simulation-software-in-a-manufacturing-set
- - -
In other bad news from Autodesk, it found that one of its servers was part of the supply chain attack on SolarWinds’ Orion software. The good news is that no customer operations or Autodesk products were disrupted. The bad news is that this shows that making customers dependent on servers isn’t safe over the long run.
Shown below is Autodesk’s new logo looking like sheet metal.
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I was thinking about how different the coalescence of CAD vendors/products was from the ’80s and ’90s, into maybe 2010, compared to cloud vendors. Rather than a pool of many cloud vendors, it started as basically three, maybe even two, from a shareholder aspect. What happened? I’d say it was the incredible initial investment costs that immediately cut out all but the biggest players.
Cloud never really started with the same organic base that most every other software category has been through: word processing, spreadsheets, databases, graphic editors, publishing, Web platforms, CAD/CAM, even operating systems. Most of them grew to six competitors or more before narrowing down through mergers or strategic annihilation.
I like competition. It benefits the masses, usually. But, as you mentioned, the CAD playing field has reached maturity, maybe even saturation. What will happen when cloud competition reaches that point? I find it weird how most assume the big players will remain forever, when tech history has shown otherwise. - David Stein
The editor replies: I think the difference is due to the nature of the two types of technology.
One person can write a CAD program; only a regular computer is needed. Here the focus is on the software, which is cheap, and so anyone can write it.
The cloud needs thousands of computers right off the bat. Here the focus is on the hardware, which is expensive, so only a very few can afford it.
The cloud came about when Amazon, which already had server farms handling its online shopping network, realized it could rent out its machines during off-peak periods. Things grew from there.
What is interesting is that Google didn’t clue in until too late, and so it, of all people, is running a distant 4th:
This is absolutely spot on. Your point about design intent resonated with me especially, as does the point about getting BIM data into the right hands. Interoperability is what will make or break BIM ultimately.
I also wonder whether reality capture data might help designers to create more construction-friendly plans. - Mark Senior (via WorldCAD Access)
Notable Quotable
@merbroussard: How would you define “AI ethics” in 1 sentence?
@MadamePratolung: Marketing device for some, pressing social and technical challenge for others.
@kbish: Balancing between cool & creepy all the time.
@neilturkewitz: An unfortunate anthropomorphic expression that suggests that questions of ethics may be addressed in a silo, divorced from the world in which they operate, & that AI is capable of possessing intent, whether good or bad.
@MLeiser: A waste of time. The only thing corporations will respond to is a law backed up by the threat of sanctions for non-compliance.
@AndrewOrlowski: Job Creation Scheme
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Ross Goulter
Steve Hunter
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Issue #1,103 | Inside the Business of CAD | 5 July 2021
OSArch [open source in architecture] provides access to free and open source software for the AEC and BIM markets, as well as an umbrella for developing the software.
I interviewed Duncan Lithgow, who is one of several active community coordinators of OSArch. His passion for open source and libre software comes from the conviction that sharing is good, and that grassroots collaboration gives better results than boardroom talking points.
BlenderBIM in architectural design
Ralph Grabowski: What position do you see OSArch having in the architectural design world — supporting role, minor player, major actor?
Duncan Lithgow: OSArch is about bringing a more ethical approach to the software we use in architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO). We support moving the industry toward more openness and more collaboration.
At our core we support and encourage projects bringing professionals together to develop the software tools we need to do our job well. This means developing and supporting software developed as free/libre and open source (a.k.a. FLOSS) [see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software] and the use of open standards, such as those developed by buildingSMART, the W3C, and others.
Grabowski: How much open source software is available to the CAD world?
Lithgow: Our Free Software Directory at wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=AEC_Free_Software_directory lists over a hundred projects, covering everything from computational fluid dynamics (such as OpenFOAM), structural analysis (Code_Aster), to presentation and document editing (Scribus and Inkscape).
My knowledge is what happens in architectural offices. There you see growing use and support for FLOSS solutions like Speckle to fix the industry’s interoperability problem.
In building physics, FLOSS projects, such as Radiance, EnergyPlus, and OpenFOAM, are tried and battle-tested as the reference standard.
Ladybug Tools and its Pollination platform sees increasing support, pulling many tools together. Those are just some of the superstars of the movement in AECO.
Grabowski: At what point are major software pieces, such as LibreCAD, Code_Aster, and LibreDWG?
Lithgow: Some projects are very mature and stable, and some projects are in rapid bleeding edge development.
Grabowski: Tell our readers about some of them.
Lithgow: QCAD Community Edition is libre software and is a quite capable 2D CAD package. They sell a commercial version, which adds some non-core functionality, such as DWG support, and help fund the development of the community edition.
Code_Aster is one of the few FOSS tools that is being developed and completely backed by a multinational company, Électricité de France, a French electric utility company largely owned by the French state. It has been developing Code_Aster over the last 30 years and then released it as a FOSS tool in 2001. At Électricité de France it is used to analyze, design, and verify new and existing infrastructure assets along their whole lifecycle.
The first part of this workflow is the definition of the OpenBIM Structural Model (OSM). The project is being developed within the BlenderBIM add-on, and is 30-40% complete.
The second part of the workflow relates to the conversion of the OpenBIM Structural Model to a Code_Aster structural model, and then performing structural load analysis. This part was developed as IFC-to-Code_Aster (ifc2ca, presented at community.osarch.org/discussion/99/) and is currently 20-30% complete.
Other parts of the structural analysis pipeline are not developed yet, such as
Visualization of structural results in Blender and other OpenBIM-enabled tools. I should note that there are FLOSS tools such as Salome_Meca that are designed for visualizing Code_Aster results.
Verification of structural members according to specific structural codes. This last task is quite broad and challenging to address holistically.
A special mention should be made for Adapy, a FLOSS python library, released a few months ago. It has the potential to work with Code_Aster but also other FLOSS structural solvers to be considered in the structural workflow. Adapy is still in early phases of development, yet features complete “proof of concept” examples and specific development for a user-friendly procedure to install all needed packages for performing the structural analysis on a desktop computer.
LibreDWG supports DWG, DXF, and SVG. It is just starting to be integrated into projects, so I’m not sure how much testing it has seen in real-world scenarios. It works for me inside FreeCAD. It looks like 3D DWG is really going to be a challenge. LibreDWG is not the only FLOSS-oriented DWG project, but it is the most advanced. Some solid testing and support for LibreDWG could make a huge shift in the industry opening up a whole world of legacy files to FLOSS projects.
It might sound like lots of little tools. That’s how things work outside the monoliths with their walled gardens of proprietary solutions and poor interoperability. The “little tools” approach means that as projects mature and as your needs change, you switch out parts of the workflow with something else.
Grabowski: How much of open software is being used by corporations and universities?
Lithgow: Examples of software in very rapid development are FreeCAD and the BlenderBIM add-on. We have some great examples of how companies like OpeningDesign and Open Source Ecology use free software on commercial projects. Larger companies also use both FreeCAD and the BlenderBIM add-on in aspects of their workflows. Universities are starting to introduce the software in their courses and in BIM academic research.
In their current state, they are not yet drop-in replacements for average users who want to replace an entire suite of tools offered by Autodesk, Bentley, or Dassault. However, depending on the scale of the project, the use-case the user has, and the technical abilities of the team, certain features are more mature than others and are already creating commercial value.
In other aspects, both FreeCAD and the BlenderBIM add-on have far surpassed proprietary solutions and are pioneering in areas such as native support for international BIM standards, semantic drawing generation, and cross-disciplinary support.
These technical feats, contributions to the cross-platform OpenCAD ecosystem, and forays into uncharted territory were recognized by
At this point it is very difficult to be specific on exactly what’s ready and what isn’t, as it is so context-sensitive, but development in both projects are accelerating, and we are excited to see where they go.
Grabowski: What about IFCs?
Lithgow:We have several IFC based projects: lossless round-tripping IFC files between software packages, implementing energy analysis, structural analysis, implementing cost planning, construction sequencing, and projects drawings.
All of this is working directly inside the IFC schema, deeper than any other project that I know of. We are working with buildingSMART to make it all work smoothly.
Grabowski: How is OSARCH funded?
Lithgow: At the moment we cover our costs for digital infrastructure via donations to the Liberapay platform. We plan to join a fiscal host so we can start fundraising and accelerate our work with corporate sponsors.
We do have a list of financial sponsors ready to support us, but we don't yet have a legal structure to make this possible. We’d love to hear from anyone who wants to support our efforts. We’re also happy to help anyone find projects that they’d like to support directly.
Grabowski: Where does the programming prowess come from?
Lithgow: In contrast to how I imagine most software companies work, we are not staffed by software experts from outside our field. Most programmers who support our aims are AEC professionals first and programming is either part of their work or a passion on the side.
However, being open source, programming contributions can come from anywhere. Increasingly, it makes business sense for AEC tech startups and power users within larger AEC firms to reuse free software instead of reinventing the wheel, and as a result we see many commercially funded contributions as well.
Being open source, it is easier for us to share resources and coding expertise across projects, so a little programming can go a long way. OSArch helps act as a medium through which these synergies across projects can be formed, so that together we can solve more complex problems, knowing that all our projects are interdependent in the AEC ecosystem.
Grabowski: What do you see for the future of OSArch?
Lithgow: Where this will all go is hard to know, but we’re not a organization reliant on backers or income. Maybe we’ll end up with huge influence and a generous budget to support and coordinate projects that challenge the status quo. Maybe not.
What’s clear is that the ideas we represent are not going away, and are increasingly acknowledged by industry. More and more, the most tech-savvy people in AECO rely on FLOSS to do their jobs and to develop in-house solutions.
[Duncan Lithgow was educated in architecture and construction management in New Zealand and Denmark. Now he works for a Danish architectural and engineering firm, and is learning programming.]
And in Other News
Lantek’s speciality is software for designing, costing, and cutting sheet metal parts. For its Global Release 2021, it has updates to these packages:
Lantek Expert CAD/CAM
Lantek Flex3D
Lantek MES and Integra
Lantek Analytics
iQuoting and Metal Shop
One of the new functions represents the new direction CAD software has been taking. Forget cloud, AI, and other topics that are trendy. Instead, less work for designers is the way to go, like this new function: Assembly to Nesting importer unfolds all the sheet metal parts (taking into account the bending tool being used), making them ready for nesting and cutting.
Other new functions include the following:
Import CAD files by drag’n drop, and then detect duplicate parts
Clean cut avoids lead-ins and micro-joints
Spiral cut destroys material within holes to eliminate the manual removal of scrap material
Canon’s new Arizona 135 GT flatbed plotter plots on rigid media that roll-feed plotters cannot handle — glass, aluminum, wood, MDF, ceramic tiles — and with with an optional roll media attachment it also plots on regular media like paper.
C3D Labs adds Class F (fairing or functional) curves to their geometric modeling kernel. F-curves are like Class A curves, but with added optimization, such as a plough designed to minimize soil adhesion.
As a supporter of open source software for AEC, I was disappointed to read in issue #1,100 your comment about SMath Studio that “Being free, it is not as advanced as MathCAD.”
One of the sad consequences of people thinking “You get what you pay for” is that cheap and free are synonyms for poor quality. That’s simply not true. It’s probably more accurate to say that you can’t know what you’ll get if you don’t do your homework. Researching potential solutions, free or paid, is what’s important. - Duncan Lithgow
Re: 2 CAD Guys Talk about the Cost of CAD
The conversation with David Stein is exactly on-point.
As we’ve discussed before, mechanical CAD is a commodity in that the dominant products function alike, do an adequate job, and have no impact on a manufacture’s profit margin. Development and innovation is nearly non-existent, and there seems to be no huge need for it.
The fact that all competitors in the business are scrambling to develop new business models — instead of new products — is indicative that the products have matured (or stagnated, depending on your outlook), and become a commodity.
Companies that were created and grown on rapid innovation always find it difficult or impossible to convert to a commodity business, and they generally abandon markets that have gone that way. Mechanical CAD is $500 to $1500 software, and I don't see companies like Dassault, Siemens, or PTC having any interest in such trivial stuff.
As always, your newsletters are insightful. - Jess Davis, president Davis Precision Design, Inc.
The editor replies: At user conferences, CAD vendors like to show off how their software was used to develop a special product, like the Square payment module or prosthetics for children, and I think to myself, “Yes, but all of your competitors can do exactly the same design.”
Notable Quotable
“Nigeria has banned Twitter entirely, which is a different way to go on Big Tech.
“Twitter responds that this is a denial of Nigerians’ human rights, which doesn’t apply to those whom Twitter decides to ban.” - Michael Every
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate to the operation of upFront.eZine:
OzCAD Pty Limited: “Thanks for your efforts Ralph.”
William Doran
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Issue #1,102 | Inside the Business of CAD | 28 June 2021
David Stein: I’ve been preoccupied with non-CAD work for too long and only recently checked in with your newsletter to catch up on things.
The more I read about big-name CAD producers, the more it seems they chase bigger spenders, rather than focus on customer needs, especially small and mid-sized customers, who can’t justify selling their homes, kids, and pets to buy super high-end hardware and insanely expensive products.
Catchy names, rehearsed speeches, coached hand gestures, and overblown claims during keynotes are boring. It’s become like CGI [computer generated imagery] in action movies: nobody jumps in their seats anymore, because they know it isn’t real. Keynotes are all aimed at the executives, not the engineers and designers.
I never rooted enough for the underdogs; many have come and gone. But I hope to see a new generation of CAD products priced lower than a new home roof. I’ll gladly try something that can model a house deck, or custom-furniture piece making, if it's inexpensive (or even free).
But right now I’d rather draw my 3D plans on paper than pay thousands of dollars. I don’t need to collaborate with a marketing team, or to print parts in outer space — just basic machine shop stuff, the people they seem to have forgotten about.
Ralph Grabowski: You are seeing this frantic behavior because some publicly-owned CAD vendors are getting financially desperate as they run out of revenue boosters in what is a mature market. We saw prices increasing steadily through a variety of tactics:
Some CAD vendors forced users off one-time permanent licenses and onto all-the-time subscription fees.
They skyrocketed subscription prices for big enterprise customers, who typically renegotiate licence fees every third year.
They increased the effective cost of networking licenses by changing them from floating to per-person.
In the last fiscal year, they received a one-time big bang by being allowed to report deferred subscription revenue differently, in a way that makes it look like they goosed revenues during the pandemic.
One editor, who has his pulse on the industry more than me, thinks the next step is consumption-based use. The more cloud-CPUs your drawing needs, the more you pay — possibly through tokens, which some CAD vendors have already implemented in a limited way (such as for renderings and generative modeling).
In a perverted way, the money grab make sense, as certain CAD vendors have painted themselves into a corner. After convincing themselves that the cloud was to be the Next Big Thing, they forgot that they are the ones footing the bill 24/7 to Amazon AWS. Now they are scrambling to figure out how to cover their sky-high server bills. The answer: squeeze the customer.
CAD vendors who are keeping their software on the desktop are smart. They don’t incur the AWS tax.
David Stein: Oddly enough, I left the world of CAD (add-on developer, actually) for IT infrastructure, and then cloud — mostly Azure and the Microsoft stack. It’s interesting to me that for all the touting of “consumption-based pricing” by Microsoft that they don’t follow their mantra completely. There still are upfront costs like Security Center. Azure Log Analytics features, such as Change Tracking, incur a node fee.
I think that both markets, CAD and cloud, desperately need more competition. It’s shaping up to be like the big three TV networks from the ’50s to the ’70s.
Ralph Grabowski: Big shifts promoted by CAD vendors today inevitably become minor components tomorrow. There was a time around 2000 when we were so bombarded with collaboration-as-the-future marketing that we began referring to it as “the C-word.”
The ceo of a CAD firm one said something along the lines of, “If you’re not giving me money I don’t want you as a customer.” He did not seem to understand that it goes both ways: if CAD vendors aren’t giving value for money, then customers don’t want them a suppliers (cf. the Revit letter).
And in Other News
Open Design Alliance is looking for companies to work on a general purpose scan-to-BIM SDK [software development kit] that would do the following tasks:
Convert point cloud data to segmented meshes
Remove interference objects
Classify meshes into objects like walls, doors, and windows
Convert classified objects to BIM formats like IFC and RVT
Even though some CAD vendors have already implemented scan-to-BIM functions on their own, this collaborative effort is meant to provide it faster and more cheaply than doing it from scratch. Members will write the source code and determine the usage fee. More info about the initiative is at opendesign.com/scan-to-bim.
Epson is launching six new models this year of its SureColor T-Series inkjet printers in 24-, 36- and 44-inch sizes. First up is the T7770D (US$6,945) 44"-wide printer that holds two rolls of paper, a take-up reel, and an optional stacker. It prints monochrome CAD drawings at speeds of up to 1,400 square feet/hour.
Issue #1,101 | Inside the Business of CAD | 21 June 2021
ZwSoft is pivoting from traditional CAD software to an all-in-one CAx platform meant for design work in both manufacturing and buildings. During its annual user conference held last month online (see figure below), the company gave attendees initial details of its long-range plans.
Stage of the ZwWorld 2021 online conference
ZwSoft’s “all-in-one CAx” phrase appeared two years ago. Initially, it involved integrating CAE [computer-aided engineering] applications into the company’s Zw3D MCAD program through a new ZwSIM platform. The first solver was for electromagnetic simulation.
ZwSoft is now expanding the meaning of All-in-One CAx to be “model-defined and data-driven collaboration,” and to be developed over quite a few years. It has been tagged “Project Wukong,” possibly named after the fast, zoomorphic Sun Wukong character in a Chinese novel from 1592, Journey to the West.
More specifically, Project Wukong is ZwSoft’s next-gen 3D CAD platform meant to expand its traditional market of general and mechanical CAD to AEC [engineering, architecture, construction]. ZwSoft plans to reorganize the data, technology, and functions found in their three base programs — ZwCAD, Zw3D, and ZwSIM — to a single platform (see figure below).
Overview of ZwSoft’s future
The company’s three base programs currently are the following:
ZwCAD. The 19-year-old ZwCAD 2D/3D DWG editor is like many other AutoCAD workalikes on the market. It had been based on IntelliCAD and uses the ACIS kernel, and now the company says it is again developing its own kernel.
Zw3D. The solids-surfacing CAD/CAM program began in 1999 as Varimetrix, better known as “VX” and has its own Overdrive kernel. It was acquired by ZwSoft in 2010, and continues to be based in Florida, with co-founder Mark Vorwaller still heading it up under the title of president of ZwSoft America.
ZwSIM. The platform for simulation was launched in 2018 with a geometry engine, pre-processor, solver, and post-processor. ZwSIM so far handles structural and electromagnetic simulation, and is due to receive acoustic, thermal, fluid, and optical solvers in the future.
About Project Wukong
Project Wukong involves big changes in how ZwSoft develops software:
Files become databases
Serial workflows become parallel ones
Offline collaboration becomes real-time
At first, it seemed to me that conference presenters were saying that Project Wukong would become the future of all ZwSoft software. Then the lead developer stated that Project Wukong will be the company’s new cross-disciplinary platform and that its primary purpose is to expand ZwSoft’s market into BIM. ZwCAD-Zw3D-ZwSIM would continue on the desktop, and would gain links to software running on the Wukong platform.
ZwSoft plans that Project Wukong-based programs offer the following functions:
Concurrent execution of cross-disciplinary applications, including BIM, shipbuilding, and aerospace design. (ZwSoft calls all these verticals “AEC.”)
Multiple clients accessing a single data source.
Cloud-native (private and public) databases that “will not rely on local file storage.”
Top-down product lifecycle management.
Large-scale assembly modeling that can handle tens of millions of parts (needed more for BIM than MCAD).
Programming APIs that are more extensible than those from competitor CAD systems.
A hundred programmers have been working on the Wukong platform for a year now, which is scheduled to be “realized” three years from now. (See figure below.) A demo of Wukong was not given during the presentation.
Timeline for Project Wukong
ZwSoft plans to have BIM as the first application running on Project Wukong. It is meant to handle design in the areas of massing, structures, HVAC [heating, ventilation, air conditioning], and electro-mechanics. More distant plans include pre-fab design, and construction planning and management. The initial release of “ZwBIM” won’t, however, be ready for five years.
Zwsoft promises to keep updating its file-based desktop software “for as many years as it serves your collective needs.” In any case, file-based software gives ZwSoft a fall-back position, should unforeseen roadblocks change the path it had planned to take towards its future (c.f. Solidworks V6).
Zwsoft Stats
Earlier this year, the company went public with an IPO on the Shanghai STAR exchange, China’s NASDAQ for science and technology firms. From what I can tell, ZwSoft has a market capitalization of approximately US$5 billion at a very high P/E [price to earnings] ratio of 210 (20-25 is considered normal). Bloomberg documents that ZwSoft had 2021Q1 revenues of US$13 million (approx.).
During the online conference the company provided us with no financial picture, other than to report that it spends 30% of revenues on R&D [research and development]. ZwSoft indicated it is interested in looking at acquisitions.
The 1,000 who took in the online conference learned these other statistics:
900,000 users
90 countries with customers
Annual growth rates:
2018 - 39%
2019 - 42%
2020 - 26%
260 business partners and 200 application developers
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
As with a few MCAD programs like Solidworks and Inventor, the doomsday clock for desktop-based ZwCAD and Zw3D has begun counting down. One presenter stated that the timeframe to continue developing Zw3D in parallel with Wukong is 10-15 years. This discouraging news is tempered by the good news that ZwSoft sells permanent licenses for its desktop software.
The Project Wukong strategy is not uncommon among a few large (c.f. PTC) and new (c.f. Onshape) CAD vendors nowadays. It is, however, a task that’s unusual for a medium-sized (defined by me as around a million users) firm to take on, given the immense scope of work involved. Extrapolating, it could cost ZwSoft 600 person-years to program the first release of “ZwBIM.” Perhaps the IPO [initial public offering] is funding Wukong development.
ZwSoft’s timeline for releasing an initial version of their new BIM software is five years from now, a long time given our industry’s changing priorities during such a period — never mind the additional years that will be required for ZwSoft to add catch-up functions. Here is how I imagine the programming is being scheduled:
By 2026: ZwBIM attains basic BIM functions
By ????: Attains advanced BIM functions
By ????: Adds the BIM functions competitors added since 2021
On the other hand, ZwSoft benefits from learning from competitors the function needed by today’s BIM programs, such as intersections of multi ply walls and slabs, and facades of irregular arrayed shapes. It won’t be wasting time stumbling down dead ends.
BIM in China. The American Revit dominantes in China. From Chinese government-agency documents I perused, there appears to be a desire for China-developed BIM authoring software. There are, however, none in BIM (as best as I could determine), other than support software like project management and add-ons for localized disciplines.
For example, ZwSoft’s closest competitor is Caxa. It has a general/electrical CAD program and an American-developed MCAD system (IronCAD), but no BIM aspiration. Having the field to itself, ZwSoft has plenty of incentive to build BIM.
When the Open Design Alliance first announced it was creating APIs to access, edit, and create data for Revit and IFC files, I wondered if CAD vendors might jump on the chance to develop a Revit of their own. In the years since, we’ve seen lots of CAD systems incorporating RVT/IFC data handling, including ZwCAD. But no one has built a BIM system from scratch, as ZwSoft plans to do. It’s a tough job.
Going beyond Project Wukong, ZwSoft has a vision of becoming the world’s leading CAx software provider. The hitch to this Guangzhou company’s ambition, however, is the lowered-enthusiasm some international markets have for services developed in China.
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What often takes days using blindly incorrect methods takes minutes or an hour with Okino's well-defined optimization and compression methods using its DWF-3D conversion system.
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CCE updates its EnSuite-Cloud ReVue real-time 3D collaboration software with ReVue LiveLink integrations for Inventor, Solid Edge, Solidworks, and SketchUp. Creo and Revit links are to be added in the near future.
CAD Software Solutions’ SparePartsPlace Toolkit for Autodesk Inventor v2021.4 optimizes calculation times of surface and combined solid/surface models.
I read with interest the article on engineering math by Gustav Näslund. I guess he does not know about our software GrafiCalc that virtually eliminates tedious mathematical calculations from the product design process. GrafiCalc is trusted by thousands of users worldwide. - Shyamal Roy, owner GEOMATE Company, www.graficalc.com
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To me, engineering math software is very much associated with CAD and all the other engineering tools in my box, so I was delighted to see the review.
I did not know about Maple Flow and SMath Studio. Mathcad is great, but I’m still using a copy from 20 years ago. The complexity of my calculations has not changed over the past 20 years, so thousands of dollars of additional fees for unneeded features are not justified. Collaboration with others is not critical to me.
I’ll be experimenting with Maple and SMath. If they work, I’ll encourage others to go that route too. - Chuck Moore
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It’s nice to see SMath referenced in your publication. This is an excellent free program that I’ve been using for over a decade. I written hundreds of programs using it. Programs can be written to incorporate units of measurement. Arrays can be written with the column values containing units.
There are a few minor hiccups, but these can easily be worked around. The only other issue with it is that it is Russian and for political reasons, this may preclude the use of in for some businesses.
I’ve attached a bit of a clip of some of the code. It can get a lot more complicated and the units are taken care of directly.
The units in the answers are provided by SMath, based on the unit values of the variables automatically. I display the answers in both Imperial and metric. I'm a bit of a dinosaur; I work in Imperial and metric (SI), but think in Imperial; the metric values are for those that work in metric. - Dik Coates, P. Eng.
The editor responds: Me, too. Those of us of a certain age.
Most products sold in Canada are still Imperial, even though we have been officially metric since 1970. So, I asked my kids’ high school teachers to include Imperial instruction — no-can-do.
I’ve come to realize that imperial units are human units — inch, foot, yard relate to the human body, and are closer to the kind of e*-scaling that is common in nature. (Metric units and their power-of-10 scaling are inhuman, IMHO.) Even carpentry is easier: half of 3/8" is 3/16"; half of 37mm is who-knows-what.
*) e = Euler’s constant = 2.718281828459045235…
Notable Quotable
“Reducing our dependence on the Internet is a good goal. Kind of like aiming to smoke fewer cigarettes each day.” - Ralph Grabowski
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Marco Lucini of ProgeSoft (small company donation)
Christopher Cleary
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Issue #1,100 | Inside the Business of CAD | 14 June 2021
Written by Gustav Näslund
Mathematics software for engineers is not something I am especially familiar with. When I took calculus, we had no calculators, and in my field of study at the time, transportation engineering, we tended to work with simple trigonometry, rather than advanced equations.
So, reader Gustav Näslund suggested running an article about the software available in the engineering math editor space.
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Software for engineering math are not strictly CAD, but I think nonetheless that they are essential and powerful tools for design engineers to perform and document engineering calculations.
I think this class of software is not as well known, nor used, as much as it should be in our industry, which is why I would like raise awareness of them.
If you are not familiar with this kind of software, think of it as a free form digital notepad that does calculations interactively. It supports units of measurement and live links between all variables and equations. The figure below is typical:
Math software doing calculations and units conversion
In general, this kind of software lets you add equations, text, and images in a freeform manner, and you can rearrange them as you like. All equations are live-linked, so that they update their values when something changes.
Because you work in a paper-like format, the format is self-documenting. When you are done, just save it as a PDF file, and you have your calculations documented.
The equations support all units of measurements. This means, for example, that we can mix imperial and metric units in equations without fear. The mandatory reference here is to the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter debacle; see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter.
I find that the programs have a very low threshold for getting started, and run fast, so they are suitable for even the simplest calculations — never mind the most advanced.
Math Software Packages
The figure below is of SMath Studio; MathCAD and Maple Flow look similar.
SMath Studio from Andrey Ivashov
MathCAD has long been a player in engineering math editor field, 35 years in the business. It was taken over by PTC in 2006, and then received a total makeover as MathCAD Prime in 2011.
The latest version of MathCAD is available now by subscription only, in the ballpark of $1,000/year for a commercial licence. Educational licenses are available. www.mathcad.com and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcad
Maple Flow is a very recently released (2021) direct competitor to MathCAD from Canadian company MapleSoft. It appears to me to be aimed directly as a competitor to MathCAD, as it has a very similar interface and works in the same way.
Maple Flow seems to be priced at $2,390 for a single perpetual commercial license. Educational licenses are available. maplesoft.com/products/mapleflow
SMath Studio is a free alternative created by Andrey Ivashov, first released in 2006. It has capabilities that are very similar to the original MathCAD, before its remake as MathCAD Prime.
Being free, it is not as advanced as MathCAD, but for 90% of engineers it will be just what they want (and need). It has a thriving community that creates plug-ins and so on, and is funded through donations. www.smath.com
[Gustav Näslund owns GN Tech of Sweden, and specializes in product development and mechanical design. www.gntech.se/en]
And in Other News
The next release of NX is shipping later this week on June 18, while Solid Edge 2022 is scheduled to become available later this year in October.
In other Siemens news, the company acquired Nextflow Software of France for its meshless simulation technology. Smooth-Particle Hydrodynamics does particle-based computational fluid dynamics for gas and liquid flows. www.nextflow-software.com
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Radica Software’s Electra Cloud schematic electrical design software now exports BOMs (bills of material) directly to OpenBOM for report creation, with further links to accounting systems. A future upgrade will export data from OpenBOM back to Electra and its Vecta.io SVG [scalable vector graphics] editor. radicasoftware.com
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3D Systems has divested itself of its on-demand additive manufacturing service, named On Demand Manufacturing, for $82 million to Trilantic, which promptly renamed it Quickparts. Details at schnitgercorp.com/?p=18523
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Jon Peddie Research reports that the GPU market last year grew by 39% to 199 million units. The market share between suppliers remains unchanged:
Though well outside of my profession, I find FEA [finite element analysis] interesting. Does Coreform run on GPUs [graphics processing units]? I searched their forum for the term, but there was only one unrelated result.
How does the speed of their software compare to competitors that do run on GPUs? Many FEA software packages are optimized to run on nVidia GPUs: nvidia.com/en-us/gpu-accelerated-applications.
It would seem that if their core calculations are more efficient on CPUs, writing the code to get their software to run on GPUs would be a further advantage. - Peter Lawton Affiliated Engineers, Inc.
Greg Vernon replies: Currently, we only execute on CPUs, but we’ve architected our algorithms and code to be maximally parallelize-able. GPU-compute is definitely on our roadmap.
A large bulk of our compute time is spent within the linear and nonlinear solvers provided by the open-source PETSc project, which is currently developing GPU support. See mcs.anl.gov/petsc/features/gpus.html.
We’re currently focusing on classes of problems that have [in the past] required incredible amounts of compute resources, but rather than throw more resources (more CPUs and GPUs) at the problem, we’re consistently finding that throwing better math at the problem is giving us orders of magnitude faster solves.
I like to think of it in terms of Exascale* ambitions. If the point of Exascale compute is to solve problems, then there are two ways to achieve this:
Build faster/larger parallel computers
Use better mathematics that make the problem smaller for existing computers
We’re taking the second approach! -Greg Vernon, director of product management Coreform
*) Exascale = computing systems capable of calculating 10¹⁸ floating point operations per second, or more.
Mr Lawton responds: The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, of course, so Corefrom may consider using both — the outcome will be even greater advantage over competitors.
It sounds, too, like the math they are improving requires a different coding team than would be required to get Coreform to run on CUDA, so the two improvements can happen in parallel, once you have the right personnel.
Notable Quotable
“He’s at home recovering for a few days. He saw an offensive tweet.” - Management Speak
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate to the operation of upFront.eZine:
Martin van der Roest: “One of those decisions that is a no-brainer. I really appreciate your perspectives and contribution to our industry. Thank you!”
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Issue #1,099 | Inside the Business of CAD | 7 June 2021
Nearly all analysis software works the same way: break up 3D models into many small pieces, and then do an analysis on each small element to find out when the model might fail. The concept goes back Boris Galerkin, who mused that just because something can be proven physically doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be proven mathematically.
And so in 1915 Mr Galerkin developed an approximation method using differential equations, following which Richard Courant developed the finite element method as a special case of Galerkin’s Method. That was 1943; today, FEA [finite element analysis] is overwhelmingly the most common form of model analysis.
IGA [iso-geometric analysis] is a different way of splitting 3D solids into those chunks before performing analyses on models. Mike Scott, Derek Thomas, and Kevin Tew pioneered R&D on IGA under the name of Isogeometrx LLC. IGA is based on U-splines (unstructured splines, patented by Mr Thomas). The company rebranded as Coreform when Matt Sederberg came on board in 2016 to commercialize IGA.
IGA and FEA applied to a part: 1,000 elements vs 1,000,000 elements
Then about a year ago, Coreform developed a new IGA formulation, generalizing the finite cell method. The idea is to adjust simulation speed and accuracy, coarser or finer, according to the needs of each stage of the product development process. By decreasing meshing time and eliminating steps, Coreform speeds up design and analysis. (See figure below.)
Coreform software speeding up design and analysis
Coreform IGA handles both material and geometric nonlinearities, as well as nonlinear constraints, including contacts. For a given degree p, the bandwidth is the same but the fill-in is greater for smooth functions. Most customers define their own subroutines and material models through Julia, an open-source programming language. See julialang.org.
The following figure shows how Coreform fits into the panoply of FEA programs:
The place of Coreform IGS among analysis software
Before U-Splines
Before co-founding Coreform, Mr Sederberg commercialized the T-splines technology developed by his father, Tom Sederberg. T-splines were an improvement over meshing, which usually limits meshes to rectangles; T-splines meant that meshes could come to a stop before covering the entire surface. (See figure below.)
A simple T-spline (image source SourceForge)
One catch is that it takes a lot more computing power, but today’s computer can handle it. Another, more serious catch is that unlike U-splines, T-splines were never invented to be used for analysis.
The stand-alone T-Splines software was bought by Autodesk in 2011, which integrated the technology into its Inventor and Fusion 360 programs – much to the disappointment of customers who had been using the CAD-agnostic version of T-Splines.
Cubit and IGA
Coreform offers two software products:
Coreform Cubit is the mesher using hexagonal and square meshes (see figure below). It cleans up poorly-made CAD models, and everything can be automated with Python scripting. With coarse bounding-box analysis, the result from Cubit is nearly instant.
Course bounding box and detailed adaptive quadrature
The free version Coreform Cubit Learn for non-commercial use limits exports to 50,000 elements.
Coreform IGA implements IGA with linear and nonlinear solvers to solve static and dynamic physics made of nonlinear materials and contacts. Input files are in human-readable JSON [JavaScript object notation] format. Subroutines are implemented in Julia.
Visualizing IGA results inside ParaView open-source visualization software at www.paraview.org
Coreform is especially useful for complex assemblies. The company is interested in working with early adopters to understand their needs.
Q&A
Q: Traditional FEA is many decades old and is very well known. How would one go about explaining IGA to management that is comfortable with FEA, but has no idea what a spline is?
A: Here’s what I tell them: Every traditional FEA mesh is a spline. However, it has historically been so intractably difficult to build “high-order, smooth splines on unstructured meshes” that it hasn’t been worth encoding traditional FEA meshes as a spline.
Any practical, commercially-viable simulation tool needs to have unstructured meshes; real world parts are unstructured and complex.
Academics have known for years the benefits that smooth splines provide in FEA. See the section titled “The piecewise polynomial spaces” at the bottom of page 8 of doi.org/10.1090/S0002-9904-1973-13351-8. The last sentence in the paper reads, “But the actual construction of the psi^i is genuinely an open problem,” and refers to the problem of creating smooth, high-order splines on unstructured meshes. U-splines are a solution to this problem.
Smoothness is often referred to as “continuity.” We would say that traditional finite elements are “continuous (C^0)” while IGA is “smooth (C^1, C^2, C^3...).”
In fact, for special cases, we already use smooth splines in FEA, we just give the elements different names like “Euler-Bernoulli beam element” or “Hermite shell element.” However, even these haven’t been recognized or implemented as splines.
What IGA does is implement the finite element method upon the recognition that all meshes are splines. This means that certain critical parts of the finite element method are generalized, such as integration and assembly. Critically, IGA is FEA, but with a whole new set of rich mathematical theory and tools that are more effective at solving FEA problems.
Q: How much of Coreform is based on T-splines?
A: T-splines are not part of the Coreform IGA solution. Our U-splines are a general form of spline designed to support simulation.
T-splines technology was a stepping stone to U-splines. Coreform’s technical founders learned from the shortcomings and positives of T-splines when they began developing our U-spline technology.
Q: Can we use user-defined materials (UMAT) in Coreform?
A: Yes, we have a fully defined user interface that leverages Julia. It can handle user-defined materials and other subroutines for assembly, element definition, and so on.
Q: Is there a discontinuous Galerkin function in Coreform?
A: We do leverage some techniques that are closely related to the discontinuous Galerkin method [which converts continuous functions to discrete ones].
Q: Solving time?
A: We use the open source PETSc [portable, extensible toolkit for scientific computation] parallel solver library. We have 15x fewer elements and 20x fewer degrees of freedom for a typical part, so it will solve much faster. However, with the same number of elements, we are slower because of the setup time.
Q: Why is accuracy per degree-of-freedom [DOF] an important quantity to measure/report? As the stiffness matrix gets denser for spline basis, wouldn’t the solve time also increase, despite the smaller number of DOFs?
A: This is highly problem dependent, but as the complexity increases (such as due to nonlinear materials, geometry, contacts, and dynamics) the disparity between Coreform IGA solve times and traditional FEA increases, in that Coreform IGA is much, much faster.
Q: Do you have the ability to report the uncertainty in the calculation of the results?
A: We do not yet support uncertainties in computed quantities.
Q: Does Coreform IGA model [analyze] contacts between parts?
A: We are actively developing contact capabilities. New capabilities will be rolled out with every release. We have a fully-defined (self-) contact algorithm that can be deployed over both body-fitted and immersed contact surfaces.
Q: Can Coreform simulate any kind of partial differential equations set by the user? Not only stress mechanics or Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics, but also flow fields of electrolyzer systems, for example?
A: You can add additional physics through our user-defined interface. Our code is designed to be highly customizable, as this has been a requirement by all our customers.
Q: Is MPI [message passing interface] solver (for parallel computing) supported in Coreform?
A: Yes, it is fully parallelized.
Q: Geometry is obviously very important, but I am sure you are aware that materials’ parameters have been calibrated based upon element technology for traditional solvers, so that certainly applies to IGA. Users will have to look carefully at their material properties. Any comment about this?
A: We have quite a bit of experience porting advanced (often proprietary) material models from commercial FEA codes to Coreform IGA. We have never encountered a situation where special techniques were used in addition to what is commonly used in FEA.
Q: Is there Bezier extraction in IGA?
A: We use Bezier extraction extensively in Coreform IGA. In fact, the U-spline technology is defined in terms of Bezier extraction.
Q: BEM [boundary element method] can have even smaller DOFs for isotropic homogeneous models. However, the resulting stiffness matrix isn’t sparse anymore. How about IGA and sparsity patterns?
A: The sparsity patterns for IGA are exactly the same as p-FEM except there may be more fill-in due to smoothness. This means that the matrices are still sparse, just less sparse than traditional FEA. The matrix is the same size as the number of degrees of freedom in the model. For an IGA solution that has 1000x fewer DOFs it’s okay that this smaller matrix has a higher relative density.
Q: Can we directly use CAD files (such as Solidworks) in Coreform?
A: Coreform Cubit includes data importers that support most CAD inputs. Some of these importers are free with a standard Cubit license, while others are licensed separately. See coreform.com/products/translators for details.
Q: Is there a way to improve the quality of the display of the results, such as smoothing out the results?
A: Yes. The ability to see the results directly on the underlying CAD model is literally days away.
Q: Is the process during decomposition using multiple adjacent subdomains, and using same or different material— Is it a single mesh or multiple meshes?
A: Both scenarios are fully supported.
Q: Can we solve fluid-structure interaction problems (FSI) in Coreform?
A: We don’t currently have fluids/FSI capabilities, but it is on our roadmap.
Q: Heat transfer?
A: That is the next simulation we plan to implement. We never implement a feature without a customer request.
Q: Any plans to support a “Coreform IGA Learn” version?
A: Yes! It will be very similar to Coreform Cubit Learn. Stay tuned.
Q: May I know the immersed technology behind Coreform IGA? Is that adaptive quadrature or reparameterization?
A: We accommodate both workflows. One can be preferred over the other depending on the application. The immersed technology is a generalization of the finite cell method.
Q: What advantages do you see using Coreform IGA over known open-source IGA solvers considering an academic environment? Sadly, we have to take care of possible fees, etc. at academia.
A: Contact us and we can discuss fees.
We’re committed to supporting the open-source community:
We added Bezier extraction to the open-source Exodus mesh format so that Cubit can communicate IGA’s spline meshes between open-source solvers, such as MOOSE. See github.com/gsjaardema/seacas/issues/189.
We believe there will always be a space for open-source IGA solvers, and that it is mutually beneficial for Coreform to support open-source solvers.
Q: How do you suggest forming an IGA structural model based on point clouds of geometry (based on measurements of parts from something like LIDAR)? What would be the workflow in the context of Cubit?
A: That is of great interest to us. It is not a clean way to build a model. For a point cloud, is a point inside or outside? You still need to build triangulations but it does not need to be clean.
A solution for CAD vendors stuck on Amazon’s cloud-rental hamster wheel: “Analysis of 50 public software companies finds that repatriating workloads from public cloud infrastructure could help them reduce their cloud spend by 50%.” (Sarah Wang and Martin Casado)
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After burning through $2+ billion in funding from SoftBank and other venture capital firms, construction startup Katerra last week told its 8,000 employees that after six years in operation it is shutting down. The company wanted to revolutionize building construction through off-site modular-panel factories and lots of technology. katerra.com/vision
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NCG CAM Solutions releases NCG CAM v18.0 with new features like
Create a patch from two 3D curves
3D tool guide
Horizontal area passes from outside to inside
Waterline offset passes (see figure below)
Another new function, Trim Surfaces to a Boundary, will be added later. As the company says, “Perpetual Licensing (This will NOT change).” Download the demo version from www.ncgcam.com/demo-download (after registration).
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Precast Software Engineering is now a subsidiary of Allplan, operating under the name Allplan Software Engineering. www.allplan.com/us_en
Letters to the Editor
Re: A 2021 View of the PLM Market
Here are 171 programs that claim to be PLM at capterra.com/product-lifecycle-management-software: “Find the best Product Lifecycle Management Software for your business. Compare product reviews and features to build your list.”
Can you imagine giving an employee this task from this list?
PLM was never to be this. Those that created it, American Motors, started with a drawing archive. Today, they are trying to manage engineering documentation. The major programs are associative and create a nightmare for document control. The Info-techs have devised many unworkable processes to solve this problem.
Boeing’s engineering was taken over by Dassault’s Catia 5 PLM, the result was the failed MBE [model-based engineering]. They eliminated the drafting group and document control without preparing the staff or doing a test run, all cold turkey.
In the past, all documentation was controlled by drawings (part and assembly drawings) The drawing package defined the complete project and stood alone. PLM’s efforts to take over document control has made a mess of engineering. But it was just part of a perfect storm! - Joe Brouwer
The editor replies: As PLM is meant to do all things, then all things belong to PLM:
P = product = everything that ever was made, is made, and will be made
L = lifecyle = the duration of every product, from before it was designed until after it is torn apart by the recycling biz
M = Management = managing it all with software and, more recently, using IoT for feedback.
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Part of the problem with the PLM market seems to be that it is compelled to make up new names for the same thing. I’m sure that PLM, PDM, MRP, ERP, and MES have some differences, but all appear to do the same thing.
Or maybe they don’t all do the same thing, but they all — no matter what they started as — now claim to be the total solution to running businesses.
My direct experience of all of them is limited to the ways they impact the engineering world, but it’s always interesting to listen to a CAD company explain that their engineering software is now ready to take care of your accounting system, and vice-versa. - Jess Davis
The editor replies: That is the ulterior motive behind CAD and other software vendors pushing their PLM: one software to rule your whole business, reaping subscription fees until the day your business ends.
Notable Quotable
“Apple is second to none in this field, perpetuating an obscene throwaway culture, candy-coated with neat videos and communication extolling their green posture. (A note in passing: a lack of further investigation into this is a major journalistic failure.)” - Frederic Filloux
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Jim Wright: “Thanks for your efforts!”
Anthony Mirante
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