Readers Respond: Lots of Letters to the Editor

Issue #1,061   |    June 29, 2020

 

Moderated by Ralph Grabowski   From the Editor So many of you wrote thoughtful letters about recent upFront.eZine articles that this issue is monster-sized and is dedicated to you, the writers.     - Ralph Grabowski - - -   Re: The Future of IFC Tech is still grappling with crossing the divide between design and build. I would make two arguments: one, possibly the majority of benefits of BIM [building information modeling] derive more from IPD [integrated project delivery] than from the technology. At a very high confidence level I would say that without IPD, BIM is of very limited utility.  Two, in the early years of IFC, it focused on MEP [mechanical, electrical, plumbing], so that is where BIM has had the greatest success.  The historically normal approach of design-bid-build is a process that in real life involves a lot of redesign, a.k.a. "delegated design" in which the shop drawing process is essentially an iterative detailed re-design in most cases. IPD instead means that you bring a general contractor and the key subcontractors (historically the MEP guys, mainly) on board early during the design phase. They come onboard on a negotiated basis, rather than as bidders. Often this involves sharing in both the upside and downside of the final project cost, versus the traditional approach in which subs participate only on the downside.  You put all the players in a big room and work out many of the details in that room, so the BIM model ends up being much more reflective of reality, than a purely designer-designed BIM. (I think you already understand that architects have limited knowledge and responsibility for what they design, and their fees are commensurate and limited.) The low hanging fruit among all the MEP contractors is clash detection, who otherwise fight for room [to fit their ducts, wires, and pipes] in ceilings and other spaces. The fighting used to occur during shop drawings and sometimes even in the field when trades gave each other little surprises.  With IPD, all the clashes as detected in the big meeting room, resolved, and put into the model. That technology wants to take credit is an old story. It tries to take credit for the gains from discipline and cooperation that are outside the technology, but often accompany it. For instance, computerized inventory control systems require that each item get a unique identifier, and that every movement of items in and out be recorded, whether at a store or a warehouse. Without discipline, computerized systems are basically worthless, or worse, are where you pay the costs but cannot reap the benefits.  Conversely, with the technology but without the discipline, you get some benefits.  When both cooperate together, you get maximum benefits, but the technology evangelists/salespersons will always attribute far more benefits to the technology, ignoring the role of the changed process.      - Leo Schlosberg   Re: 2 Guys Talk CAD If SpaceClaim is the evidence for the success of direct modeling, no wonder the CAD industry is not investing there. Your reader believes that direct modeling is the next thing. The truth is that it is an old technology that has been around way before the history/feature-based CAD and lost to the history-based systems.      - Gal Raz (via WorldCAD Access) The editor replies: Direct editing was the next thing a decade ago. Today it appears that the next thing is direct simulation. SpaceClaim was not successful, except in marketing itself. SpaceClaim's marketing did, however, force the largest firms in the MCAD industry to move their software away from being based solely on PTC's pioneering history-based parametric design, and embrace direct modeling -- as witnessed by the direct modeling software launched nearly simultaneously by Autodesk, Dassault, PTC, and Siemens.  - - - You wrote, "Synchronous Technology, however, suffers from being very hard to understand and implement, because you have to figure out stuff before you start drawing -- the very opposite to what direct modeling is supposed to offer -- and so few Solid Edge and NX users use it."  ST does NOT suffer from being VERY hard to use. Ralph, it's your bitterness towards Solid Edge once again that taints your opinion. Granted in the first few releases there were many issues with using Synchronous, and I was one of it's biggest critics at the time. However the developers at Solid Edge made huge improvements to the GUI to help ease the understanding of just how it works.  The ONLY people who find it difficult to use are those like yourself who are too stuck in their "OLD" ways to see its brilliance. Synchronous has matured into one of the best improvements in 3D CAD in the past decade and has saved my company countless time and money, so I'm not sure why you still hang on to such "old" perceptions and biases.  How much time have you ever spent using Synchronous Technology, and how honest of an attempt did you make to actually understand it? I've been using MCAD since the mid 80s going all the way back to Personal Designer from Computervision.  Or maybe you just can't say what you truly feel as to not upset the folks at AutoCAD or Dassualt, eh.      - Bob Mileiti (via WorldCAD Access) The editor responds: I base my opinion on the few hands I observed going up when the question was asked at the four annual Solid Edge user conferences I attended. From this, I estimate about 10% use ST. So, I am very pleased to hear that you find ST useful. Of the nearly 300 CAD reporters and analysts at Siemens' online press event earlier this month, I was the only one to ask Siemens staff why during the two-day event they hadn't told us anything about Solid Edge. Mr Mileiti responds: I don't think Spaceclaim's problems have anything to do with direct modeling a whole. Their failure to attract enough customers had more to do with their single-minded approach.  Solid Edge has always been able to deal with both Parametric and Direct Modeling. As [engineering.com wrote about Siemens vp of mainstream engineering R&D Dan Staples] back in 2018:  "One might also wonder why, if Synchronous Technology is as beneficial as its proponents claim, it’s not a more widespread paradigm. Staples believes the reason is that Siemens is just that far ahead of the technological curve in large part because of its ownership of the Parasolid kernel and D-Cubed constraint solving SDK [software development kit].  "But perhaps there’s a simpler reason, which he summarized nicely: 'Engineers are not people who like to change a lot.' History-based parametric modeling is still the dominant paradigm in the CAD world and, despite its drawbacks, it works just fine." https://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArticles/ArticleID/16587/Whats-the-Difference-Between-Parametric-and-Direct-Modeling.aspx The editor replies: I feel Mr Staples makes my case. The 'single-minded approach' referred to by Mr Mileiti is that Spaceclaim had positioned itself as a model fixer-upper adjacent to CAD seats, rather than as an MCAD system in its own right. It thought it could land a share of what it saw as a 10x-100x bigger market (of adjacent seats) than trying to compete directly with ensconced MCAD systems. (In 2014, it was purchased by ANSYS as a model fixer-upper.) - - - Synchronous Technology seems cool in a lot of ways, but I don't see it as superior to history-based design, just a different way to model and edit with its own pros and cons. It appears to fall down on complex geometry, which is where a long rebuild in the history model is at its worse.  I have some parts that I don't know how ST in Solid Edge could edit them, because there is curve to them and/or extremely complex intersections of geometry. I imagine once you learn it, it's not bad and flows well, but I must admit the user interface looks daunting -- a lot of button selections.      - Jason Capriotti (via WorldCAD Access) - - - You wrote, “Head office in Paris was pressing forward with their V6 generation (known today as "3dExperience"), which uses Delmia as the central repository for Catia data.” Enovia, ya plum. Much love,     - Al Dean - - - An interesting summary of kernels and consequences re the big boys. I have been a VX/ZWCAD user [and dealer] for 15 years doing a lot of advanced surfacing as part of everyday modeling. ZW3D has a history-based direct editing approach, which provides the benefits of geometry adjustment and the power to edit the direct edit. I find users of other software are a bit shocked when they see how intuitive and effective it is. Maybe ZW3D is not flavor of the month being Chinese, but the deep development still takes place in Florida, driven in a unique US/Sino collaboration that has been going on for years now.     - Paul Smith     Graceland Technology, New Zealand - - - Istvan Csanady responded with a marked up Word document. I summarize his and my comments with the original sentences. Mr Csanady is founder and CEO of Shapr3D. My article in upFront.eZine said: Catia and NX do things Solidworks and Solid Edge cannot -- and deliberately so -- do functions such as advanced surfacing. Istvan Csanady: I would say that systems engineering is also a key differentiator. upFront: Direct editing and modeling became vogue with the successful marketing of SpaceClaim. Csanady: I wouldn’t say Spaceclaim was very successful to be honest, and unfortunately still most CAD users don’t understand what is direct modeling. Ralph Grabowski: The company was not successful, but their marketing was brilliant. upFront: Siemens' Parasolid kernel brings direct modeling to Solid Edge and NX. Csanady: Synchronous Technology is much more than direct modeling. You can think of ST as “feature based direct modeling”. ST automates and batches direct modeling operations by recognizing features in the geometry, like shells. Direct modeling is actually part of Parasolid, and it is licensed to third parties. My Shapr3D is a direct modeling tool, for example, and it runs on Parasolid. Grabowski: My description of ST being a direct modeler was a simplified one. I understand that it is much more complex, and that users find it too complex. upFront: Autodesk wrote a new CAD program to handle direct modeling, Fusion. Csanady: Fusion actually supports both traditional history based modeling and direct modeling. You can switch between the two modes. Grabowski: Fusion is Autodesk's answer to direct modeling, rather than bolting it onto Inventor. upFront: My understanding is that Solidworks it has only a kludge that imitates the effect of direct modeling. Csanady: Solidworks supports all the direct modeling operations, but you can’t turn off design history. So every direct modeling operation is another step in the design history, but basically you get many of the benefits of direct modeling. Obviously, there is a lot of room for improvement in their direct modeling implementation, but it has the basics. Grabowski: That is the reason behind me using the word 'kludge'. I knew that there was a problem with Solidworks direct modeling. Thanks for spelling it out for me! upFront: Dassault should have swapped out Parasolids for CGM, while leaving everything else in place. Csanady: This is easier to say than do. They tried, but it’s basically impossible. If you want to replace a b-rep kernel under a history-based modeler, you need bug-to-bug level compatibility between the two kernels, otherwise you will have significant data loss. Grabowski: Oh, I understand that it would be very difficult! Hence my use of the word 'should'. Mimicking all bugs is an angle I had not thought of before. upFront: If they swapped out Parasolid for CGM (they certainly do not enjoy paying license fees to Siemens) they would have incompatible geometry yet again. Csanady: I think this requires a little bit more of a pragmatic approach: how much they are paying for Siemens versus how much would it cost to replace Parasolids with CGM, and how much would customers benefit from that?  Considering these factors, it’s actually not that obvious that [the kernel swap] would be worth it, unless they believe that Solidworks will start competing at the higher end of the market, becomes a direct NX competitor, and replaces CATIA in their portfolio, which I find highly unlikely. Grabowski: Agreed. Nevertheless, Paris keeps hitting its head against a wall -- a Solidworks wall. upFront: At one point, Dassault told me that CGM was better at it because it was second derivative continuous. Csanady: This does not make too much sense. You can create G2 or Gn continuous surfaces with Parasolid as well, and you can implement any surfacing algorithm on the top of Parasolid. Actually I would say that Parasolid is in every possible way superior to CGM. In robustness, performance, speed etc., CGM is not even close. Grabowski: This statement was made by an ex-Dassault employee, who was not on the CAD side of things. upFront: The final death knell for cloud-based mid-sized MCAD came when Onshape admitted they had only 5,000 paying customers. Csanady: Not because it’s cloud-based, but because there isn’t a single customer problem that their implementation solves. It’s technology done for the sake of doing technology. Obviously cloud-based solutions will be and should be implemented, especially for collaboration and data exchange, but running the modeling with a browser front-end and cloud back-end makes literally zero sense, is insanely hard to implement, gives no value to the user, and has lots of drawbacks. Grabowski: I always found the approach used by Belmont Technology interesting, them using the 'we wrote the new gen of MCAD (Solidworks) that became a huge success' argument to land $169 million. A does not infer B.  I think that PTC sees value primarily in the database aspect of Onshape, and a way to sell PTC-branded CAD to smaller customers. In a press event earlier this month, the head of Siemens CAD again emphasized that there will be no cloud version of NX and Solid Edge. - - - Let Daren know that Logitech owns 3Dconnexion. His money still went to Logitech. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Dconnexion     - Christopher Fugitt The editor replies: I was under the impression 3Dconnexion went independent of Logitech. Mr Fugitt responds: I've been able to find only one reference to 3Dconnexion being sold: spacemice.org/index.php?title=3DConnexion. It looks like from SEC filings that 3Dconnexion was removed from the list of Logitech subsidiaries. It isn't listed as a subsidiary in the 2020 10-K filing, so you might be correct in it being sold. ir.logitech.com/financial-info/sec-filings/sec-filings-details/default.aspx?FilingId=14178866 - - - Daren is right about everything, except 3Dconnexion being a different company than Logitech. I missed my Performance MX enough I bought a replacement spring for the left click switch.     - Henry Sommer The editor replies: The confusion comes about as both Google and Bing, as their top search result, incorrectly say 3Dconnexion is owned by Logitech, while the Wikipedia entry has not been updated in a decade. I did not know it was possible to get replacement parts! Mr Sommer responds: You were right. Logitech sold them in 2012. The Spacemouse I was using is older than I realized. logitech.com/assets/45907/logitech-2012-annual-report.ENG.pdf There are instructions online about how to take it apart and replace the spring at electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/29955/how-do-i-fix-an-omron-d2fc-f-7n-microswitch-from-unwanted-clicks and gonnalearn.com/inside-omron-d2fc-f-7n-microswitch/. I bought entire switches, and then transplanted the springs. It is a delicate process but the mouse is as good as new. smile.amazon.com/dp/B00HPL57JQ/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_7c55EbW16XNAC The editor replies: Logitech says it sold the company at a loss as "it is more likely than not that the Company would not generate adequate capital gains in the next five years before the capital loss expires under the U.S. tax law." I turned our research into a blog entry, which you can read here: worldcadaccess.com/blog/2020/06/nobody-owns-3dconnexion.html. It concerns me that Bing, Google, and Wikipedia all have the same wrong answer, and have been wrong for nine years!   Sponsor: Okino Graphics == Okino's PolyTrans|CAD Software for Professional 'Load & Go' 3D Conversions ==    For over three decades, mission-critical 3D conversion software from Okino of Toronto has been used effectively by tens of thousands of professionals. We develop, support, and convert between all major CAD, DCC, and VisSim formats. CTO Robert Lansdale and his team tailors each package to the specific conversion requirements or problems of each customer. Popular CAD data sources we support 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. 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 [email protected]  http://www.okino.com And in Other News A domain registrar has 3D.com for sale and hopes to land $25 million. I don't see anyone in the CAD industry ponying up that much, but someone in gaming or an nVidia might. - - - Nanosoft last week launched nanoCAD Plus 20 with drawing comparison, 3D clipping, new built-in script editor, and a monitor for changes to system variables and externally-referenced drawings. Dynamic input adds command options, and undoes/redoes can now be visualized before committing to them. The program imports IFC and point cloud files. Download the 32- or 64-bit 30-day trials from nanocad.com/products/plus/download/. - - - Decent IFC viewers can be tough to find, as either they have not been updated lately or are too expensive. The Open Design Alliance has released a free one that handles IFC v2x3 - v4x2 formats. In addition to all the usual viewing functions, it has cutting planes and clash detection, and will support v4x3 in September. https://openifcviewer.com/ - - - Graebert is adding to its coronavirus-related CAD offer. Anyone who took up their previous offer to use Kudo browser-based CAD free to the end of June, can now join a focus group and get six more months free -- open at least one drawing in http://kudo.graebert.com (following registration) by the end of day June 30. - - - MachineWorks will be releasing Polygonica v2.4 soon that offers:    Curvature aware remeshing Offsetting curves across mesh surfaces Reconnect islands based on surrounding mesh curvature http://www.polygonica.com/ - - - AMETEK-owned Creaform to begin shipping later this summer a wicked-looking 3D scanner, the MetraScan Black with 15 blue lasers, 4x greater resolution than earlier models, and no warm-up time. Targets optional.   It takes 1.8 million measurements each second at a resolution of 0.0009" (0.025mm) and performs meshing in real-time. But you'll need an optimal hardware setup to handle that amount of data. https://www.creaform3d.com/en/optical-3d-scanner-metrascan - - - Ideate Software offers several Revit helper programs: StyleManager fixes style problems when importing content into Revit. BIMLink imports data into Excel and then sends it as BIM data to Revit. Explorer fixes Revit problems through a model browser. Sticky connects non-BIM data from Excel into Revit. IdeateApps does spell checking, sheet managing, quick selecting, and more. Free trial versions available for all from ideatesoftware.com/download Thank You, Readers Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine: Mary Fugier: "Congratulations on 25 years! Thanks for all the insight." Todd Majeski: "Ralph, thanks for all support of the CAD industry. Not many other places you can get this unfiltered reporting." To support upFront.eZine through PayPal, then the suggested amounts are these: $25 for individuals > paypal.me/upfrontezine/25 $150 for small companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/150 $750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750 Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of [email protected]. Or mail your cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

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