upFront.eZine News Archives

Q&A with CAD Exchanger

Issue #991

 

by Ralph Grabowski CAD Exchanger is not a new company among CAD translators, but only recently have they begun to make themselves noticed. I interviewed founder and ceo Roman Lygin and technical marketing engineer Ramil Gasanov. - - - Q: Let's start with a little bit of your background: what's your experience in the CAD world? A: My degree is in computer science and applied mathematics. I worked at Matra Datavision in 1990s, and then at Intel where I learned about parallel computing with multi-core CPUs.  I started CAD Exchanger in 2009. Users began asking for more features, and so after a few years we reached a critical mass of paying customers. We now have 10 employees and are located in Nizhny Novgorod about 250 miles east of Moscow. Q: So you've been around seven years, but this is the first I've heard of you! A: Correct. We focused on creating a product that worked smoothly, and now we are working on increasing our visibility. Q: There are already many CAD translation services around. Why is your's needed? A: We understand we came into an entrenched market, but this began as my passion to focus on what we do best and how we do it -- focus on what customers want, such as quality of translation, a reasonable price, and fast performance. For performance, we focus on parallelism , which is a very tough job to accomplish in CAD, and with translation in particular. We now have two patents on parallel computation for CAD, beating our competition at this.   Q: How many cores can your software access? A: There is no theoretical maximum, but at the practical level workloads scale well to 4-8 cores. After this, there is often saturation due to limited parallel slack available in models (i.e. independent data that can be processed concurrently). We run on Linux, Windows, Mac, and Android. iOS is in the pipeline. Most customers are on Windows, so we leverage multi-core CPUs on desktops and laptops. You can't yet load models up to our Web site, but we are working in the direction of the cloud.  We surveyed our customers, and their #1 concern is data privacy and security. They do not want their data to leave their premises. It is a given that the cloud is the most discussed subject these days, but data security is the #1 concern. Q: You write the translators yourself, or do you license some? A: We focus on writing our own; we do not commercially license third-party converters at the moment. Q: I notice that all the formats you support are neutral ones, and no proprietary ones, like from PTC or Solidworks. How do you decide which formats to add? A: It's a matter of return on investment. Implementing PTC, Solidworks would take a significant time, but we find that there is little demand for them compared to the generic formats. DWG might be the first external license we pursue; we are in talks with the ODA. We currently support IGES, STEP, ACIS-SAT, Parasolid-XT, JT, STL, OBJ, Rhino, BRep, VRML, and X3D. Q: CAD translation is an inexact art. How do you get feedback over failed translations? A: In the world of translators, there are different approaches. We try to bother users as little as possible, so we do automatic healing and troubleshooting -- the most time-consuming part of the translation. Following each failed translation, we get log files that we analyze. We try to issue releases once to twice a quarter to bring out improvements on a regular basis. Q: Who are your customers? A: We have three types: End users inside corporations (like Alcatel-Lucent) or individual users ISVs [independent service providers] like Fujitsu and Altium who license CAD Exchanger SDK to integrate it into their software Service providers who need our batch converters for such jobs as 3D printing Q: Why should someone buy your software over a competitor? A: We understand we are in a tough market, we leverage what we do best with our excellent price-performance ratio. We pay a lot of attention to the user experience. http://cadexchanger.com   Sponsor: Okino Graphics == Professional 3D File Conversion/Viewing/Rendering Software ==   For over 2 decades Okino (Toronto) has provided mission-critical 3D conversion software used extensively by tens of thousands of professionals. We develop, support and convert between all major CAD, DCC & VisSim formats. Robert Lansdale (CTO, [email protected]) tailors each package to the specific conversion requirements of each customer. Popular formats include 3ds Max, Maya, C4D, LW, ProE, SolidWorks, Inventor, SketchUp, DWF/DWG, DGN, CATIA, IGES/STEP/Parasolid, 3D PDF/U3D, JT, FBX, Collada & more. We know data translation, and provide immaculate developer-to-customer relations. http://www.okino.com And One More Thing... IronCAD LLC announces that the 2017 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite works faster with large data sets with 30% faster save and load times for large assemblies, and 10X faster graphics performance of large assemblies. Other improvements are in the areas of 2D sketching, sweeping, and sheet metal. There are enhanced revision tables, BOM editing, and a hundred other improvements.   IronCAD DCS 2017 is available immediately from http://www.ironcad.com/download  Even More News There is more at our WorldCAD Access blog about the CAD industry, tips on using hardware and software, and our popular travelogues. You can keep up with the blog through its RSS feed and email alert service. These are some of the articles that appeared on WorldCAD Access during the last week: foto of the sunday: Winter on the Trans Canada Highway Autodesk ceo Carl Bass talks a bit about Quantum - - - We're on Twitter at @upfrontezine with late-breaking CAD news and wry commentary throughout the day, such as.... upFront.eZine (@upFronteZine) Dec 7: "Intriguing story out this morning that Intel will be putting AMD GPUs inside its CPUs ->  http://www.pcworld.com/article/3147846/computers/intel-may-use-amd-gpus-to-challenge-nvidias-rising-power.html Letters to the Editor Re: The Future of Solid Edge If being able to translate drawings is the big draw for Solid Edge, doesn’t that make them a little vulnerable to Solidworks if Solidworks (or another competitor) provides great translation tools? Just thinking about it.     - R. P. The editor replies: The CAD market is no longer growing much, so CAD vendors try to grow by poaching users from competitors. So, they have no choice but to write great translators. - - - Thanks very much for your interesting eZine, and this article especially. But I couldn't see the image of the assembly relationships coming through from Solidworks to Solid Edge.     - Greg Morehouse, Senior Engineering Analyst     Motovated Design & Analysis, New Zealand The editor replies: Sorry about that! Here is the missing image: - - - FYI we are one of the many Solid Edge users who never went to Synchronous Technology. Due to the economic downturn we went off maintenance just as ST came in. Several times since we’ve spent significant time trying different versions of ST, but never felt comfortable with it. Since we were stuck at V20 [from 2006] due to the maintenance issue, we’ve chosen to just use that as a sufficient tool that works well, and still prefer it to our Solidworks and Inventor seats, which are up to date. We use several CAD packages which use "ordered logic" [a.k.a. history tree"], and it makes switching between all of our CADs easier. I think making their main product ST was a mistake. It would have been fine to offer it as an option or another environment, like sheetmetal. But Solid Edge as a package is not intuitive to ordered CAD users now, and since it has both [modeling systems] has become too complicated.  I’m good friends with the local Solid Edge reseller, so this puts a bit of pressure on our relationship unfortunately. Just thought you might want to hear another take on Solid Edge!     - Name withheld by request - - - I have read with much interest your notes on Solid Edge University and in particular round table discussion on Cloud & Collaboration. It has been great to read opinions from users which much resonate with our own thinking. We are currently working on enabling cloud. We plan an early alpha version within a few weeks and partner with Microsoft on that front. On our roadmap we target viewing, conversion, measurements and other scenarios all of which have been stressed as priority for Solid Edge users.     - Roman Lygin, ceo     cadexchanger.com   Re: For its future, Autodesk copies from Dassault Interesting to watch if all moving towards in-memory computing, especially BIM or simulation tools. For field guys / construction that will be handy, and off-line will be key selling point!      -Pranab via WorldCAD Access - - - Wrote a post today you might find interesting: https://solidedging.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/further-thoughts-on-fusion360-nothing-online-is-safe. Some pretty eye opening stuff against the use of the cloud for CAD CAM and some sites I intend to follow I did not know about before.     - Dave Ault The editor replies: The site https://health.autodesk.com shows how Autodesk's servers are offline. As I write this, some cloud services had been offline for over 16 hours.   Thank You, Readers! Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine.  Darren Young Should you wish to support upFront.eZine through PayPal, then the suggested amounts are like these: $25 for individuals > paypal.me/upfrontezine/25 $125 for small companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/125 $500 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/500 Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of [email protected]. Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.   Notable Quotable "There has to be some sort of app to cover all of this human relationship stuff."     - Management Speak (@managerspeak) on Twitter

The Future of Solid Edge

Issue #920

 

by Ralph Grabowski Siemens has changed its Solid Edge development process so that it can accept input from end-users. Each year they have round tables at Solid Edge University at which users can tell executives what functions they want added to Solid Edge. But they have to explain how the proposed function would benefit users. Not allowed: complaints about bugs. There were several round tables, and I was able to attend three of them – sheet metal, cloud and collaboration, and drafting and translation. The format of each round table is like this: Users in the room speak out their ideas, describing how it would benefit users Executives record the idea, and others in the room chime in At the end, a vote is taken on each idea and then the ones with the most votes are recorded as the most popular  Sheet Metal Design I recorded 20+ ideas for improving sheet metal design. Here are three of them: Being able to enter relative (offset) x,y points along keypoint curves for sketches. In synchronous, I would like to see the Loft command turned into a procedural, so the guide path and cross sections can be edited. As a workaround, we use hybrid modeling.  What about flattening bends (unbend) in synchronous? This gets asks for every year. Cloud and Collaboration Whereas the sheet metal round table was packed (with some even standing at the back), the cloud and collaboration round table had half the attendance. 'Cloud and collaboration' is not, strictly speaking, a CAD feature. It is new to Solid Edge, even if it is not new to most users -- using email to collaborate and Dropbox to share drawings is by now, old news. To get discussion going, the facilitator asked these questions: Where do you see your company going in terms of the cloud? How do you use the cloud if you are an independent contractor? Do you use Dropbox, etc, and how? Does corporate policy prevent you from using the cloud? Is the Internet blocked at your company? What improvements would you like to see to cloud-enabled Solid Edge? This session had more discussion than the rapid-fire of feature requests in the other sessions. Here is some of that discussion: Attendee: We are looking for Solid Edge and TeamCenter on the cloud.  Solid Edge Exec: What does that mean to you?  Attendee: I have no idea; I am just here listening. We have 155 licenses of Solid Edge and have maybe 5-6 working on the cloud; the 5-6 are at another company with whom we work. We want them to do their own thing, we just want to get their information. We want to view the parts, mark them up, have them make changes, and then use their parts in our assemblies.  Attendee: We would like to see a corporate one-drive area for a group of people. We would like to see selective sync'ing, as well as watermarking on files. Our database is 600GB, you can't sync that! We already pay for an unlimited storage corporate subscription, but we don't want to have to pay more just to get a few more features.  Solid Edge Exec: You can specify the folder(s) to sync, but not the individual files in the folder (ie, all files are sync'ed).  Attendee: A cloud-based viewer (for Solid Edge) would be useful, so people don't need to install anything. At larger corporations, employees have no authority to install new software on their own. Just send a link and the viewer loads automatically. Solid Edge Exec: Is there a security problem with employees opening links send to them? Attendee: No. Our NetNanny would catch bad links. Solid Edge Exec : What kinds of files would you want to view?  Attendee: We want to view 3D models, and measure them; that's the main thing.    Drafting and Translators Here are three ideas presented by users at the Drafting and Translation round table: Be able to add technical requirements, such as embedding surface texture symbols and flags in the text.  Need callouts when we place chamfers on holes.  I want to find the length of a path, and then lock it. When it moves, I don't want the length changing. I want a PMI annotation of the locked length. Migrating Solidworks Files to Solid Edge Steve Weatherwax is product manger for 2D-3D data translation for Solid Edge. Here is my transcript of his comments on translating Solidworks files to Solid Edge – or, as he calls it "migrating." He noted that "being able to translate drawings has been the big draw for people" towards Solid Edge. – – - Solidworks has the largest user base in the MCAD industry, with numbers ranging from a half-million (commercial users) to 2.5 million (commercial + education). This makes it a target of competitors like Autodesk, Siemens, and even other divisions within Dassault Systems itself. They want to attract Solidworks users. To attract them, the CAD vendors need to be able to move over their design files.   In the case of Solidworks and Solid Edge, users are in luck, because both CAD systems use the Parasolid modeling kernel.  Solid Edge has a Solidworks Migration Tool that uses the Solidworks automation layer to extract data. This means that you need to have at least Solidworks 2012 installed on the same computer as Solid Edge ST9. The newer the release of Solidworks, the better the translation (I,e,, more types of data are translated). Solidworks must be able to resolve all the links that Solid Edge is requesting as it opens the model file.  You can open the model files in ordered (history-based) or synchronous (direct modeling) environment, but synchronous is recommended as it can manipulate the body, such as finding holes in bodies. The migration tool can import drawings, parts, and assemblies from Solidworks. Attributes are extracted and stored in PLMXML files – an XML format created by Siemens that references geometry and stores in a Parasolid x_t file. The translator supports the following features in Solidworks files: Material definitions are converted from the Solidworks .sldmat file to Solid Edge .mtl file using the SWmat2SEmat.exe program. Holes are converted with attributes such as thread data by converting the Solidworks .mbd hole database file to the Solid Edge hole table using the SEhholePipeTxtFromSW.exe program. Assembly relationships Families of assemblies: suppressed parts are migrated as FOA [family of assemblies] members. Flexible assemblies: alternative position assemblies are migrated as FOA members. Associated drawing files (new to ST9): geometry and text is translated using DXF format; drawings are kept associative to the 3D model Migration is not instant, but can take 3-4 minutes even for a small model. Mr Weatherwax recommends starting with converting parts to get used to the process. "This is a data translator. You can't take apples and change them into oranges" because there are differences in the data structures in the two CAD program. If 99% of the data is translated, that's doing good, he figures. Q&A Q: Is there a record of constraints in the log files? A: Yes, there is. The log file also reports number of threads found. A different log file records the assembly details found. Both Solidworks and Solid Edge generate log files. The key thing to search for are errors. Q: Are custom file properties translated? A: Yes. But we don't get properties in features, such as descriptions in configurations. Q: Does it place title block info into a background sheet? A: No, it places them on the foreground sheet. Q: Does it handle display states in Solidworks [where parts are hidden by turning them off]? A: No. We bring the part files over; if it is on in Solidworks, it is on in Solid Edge. But we bring over ones that are off, too. Five different display states are not going to be reproduced. A workaround is to convert display states to configuration data.  Q: If a client does a Pack-and-Go to send us everything in Solidworks folders, how does migration work? A: It does the assemblies first, then checks the parts needed. Clicking the top-level assembly is the best place to start. Do drafts last; they will hook up automatically. Q: Iso views in Solidworks seem to embed a title; when translated, the text was embedded in the part, right-justified. A:  Look at the AutoCAD (DXF) file and see if the problem is there. https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/solid-edge/ Even More News We're on Twitter at @upfrontezine with late-breaking CAD news and wry commentary throughout the day, such as.... upFront.eZine (@upFronteZine) Nov 24: Siemens PLM Software is reporting that they have 15 million licensed seats with 140,000 customers.   Notable Quotable "The danger for Microsoft is that if everybody standardises on an operating system that's three versions old [Windows 7], it will have lost its raison d’être as a tech firm."     - Gavin Clarke     http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/29/inside_windows_9/

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