Issue # 1,091 | The Business of CAD | 12 April 2021
by Ralph Grabowski
Onshape’s first annual user conference began with a keynote from the CEO of owner PTC, Jim Heppelmann. Here are some of the notes I took.
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Talks by PTC to acquire Onshape began in August 2019 and were completed in November 2019.
CEO Jim Heppelmann said he watched, at a distance, Onshape’s development right from the beginning. Each year, he checked with his staff to learn if Onshape was making progress in bringing CAD to SaaS [software as a service]. In 2019, his staff reported to him, “We think it’s going to work.” He decided he needed to convince Onshape to join PTC.
(SaaS is a computer term adopted by PTC to describe what we call CloudCAD: CAD software that runs on servers and is paid for repeatedly through subscriptions. Mr Heppelmann considers SaaS the future of CAD.)
Mr Heppelmann readily admits that his own company could not develop SaaS as cheaply or quickly as Onshape did (estimated at $100 million in three or more years). Even so, in paying $470 million net cash, it became PTC’s most expensive acquisition “of a rather small company.” Net means that PTC paid off Onshape’s debt (such as $169 million in funding by outsiders), which means the full price tag might be around $640 million.
“We were fortunate in the timing, too, because we didn’t know that a world-changing pandemic was about to hit. Cloud and SaaS have become more appreciated than ever.”
Update on Onshape
Onshape just crossed one million education users — teachers and students who use the software free, plus those who pay for additional support. Onshape commercial sales have grown “over 70%, recently.”
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Acquisitions made by PTC made on the request of Onshape: ECAD [electrical CAD] and rendering
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Other acquisitions by PTC that can be used by Onshape: Frustum generative design and Arena PLM [product lifecycle management]
It was Jon Hirschtick’s idea that Onshape become PTC’s platform for collaborative SaaS applications. The underlying platform is named “Atlas” (after the Greek god who carried the world on his shoulders, although no longer, I think). Programs running on Atlas will have the same UI as Onshape.
So far, only Frustum and the already-SaaS Vuforia AR program are being moved to Atlas. Arena PLM is to use it soon. Future versions of Creo and Windchill will work on Atlas. From these and other statements by PTC, I am surprised how long it is taking PTC to integrate cloud software with cloud software.
PTC hopes all its customers will eventually use SaaS in some form. As PTC now requires customers to pay annual subscription fees for desktop software, there wouldn’t be much of a change in how they pay for SaaS software.
PTC Visualizes a Gig Economy
Mr Heppelmann thinks the CAD industry is at the dawn of a new approach to product development. He sees Onshape as the “Uber of CAD,” which is attempting to eliminate the cost of owning cars. “You just use it when you want, where you want.” His analogy is broken; whereas Uber can be rented for 20 minutes, as he himself noted, you cannot rent OnShape for 20 minutes; the shortest duration is 525,600 minutes.
Mr Heppelmann went on to enthuse about the gig economy, the “new” economy that some governments are trying to shut down, including in his home country of USA. In his description, an entrepreneur at a kitchen table wants to bring his idea to life, but has no expertise in engineering or design or manufacturing. So he uses the Onshape’s new Gig Finder application, which Mr Heppelmann admits exists only as a fantasy. “I pursue the different gig worker options, as if I were looking for a vacation home... and schedule a week of [an industrial designer’s] time to nail the design.”
This kind of service already exists from independent firms; upFront.eZine reported on an architectural version a few years ago. As a result, we know that the results by gig designers can be uneven, to put it politely -- kind of like the broad range in quality of 3D models at online library sites. Mr Heppelmann did not explain how gig workers would be verified, a problem that poster child Uber also hasn’t solved.
PTC General Manager Jon Hirschtick Keynote
For many people, 2020 was a terrible year, but for Onshape 2020 was a great year:
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completed the acquisition by PTC
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staff at Onshape nearly doubled
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16 product releases, one every 3 weeks
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launched Atlas, which uses the core services from Onshape
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acquired Ecad:Mcad for electrical design; to be released in the future
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acquired Migenius for cloud-based near-realtime photorealistic rendering; to be launched in the future
PTC general manager Jon Hirschtick noted that there are functions Onshape does not yet do. First up to be added are ECAD and rendering, to be followed by integrating the simulation software PTC already has.
He called rendering in Onshape “unique,” because of its full-SaaS, full-cloud approach. Rendering jobs are not batched to the cloud (as some CAD vendors have implemented it); rather, Onshape performs interactive rendering. In the demo, we saw renderings updated in about a second or two. Unlike CAD, rendering is something that definitely benefits from hundreds of GPUs.
Mr Hirschtick described in general terms some of the additional functions users can expect to come to Onshape: “More part and assembly modeling features, more drafting features, more performance (we’re never fast enough), more data management features.
“We are still the only ones in the industry with a true full-cloud architecture.” Well, there are other true full-cloud CAD systems, such as Graebert’s Kudo used by Onshape in its drawing tab.
How Onshape Works
Ilya Baran, vp of architecture at Onshape, explained why some CAD functions aren’t available yet: “Most of us have worked at Solidworks; we know how to build a CAD system. So, let’s make sure we [first] put in place the things no one has done before, and then we build out the CAD functionality.
“If our competitors want to provide the benefits of a full-cloud CAD system, they have to build it from scratch, like we did,” said Mr Baran. CAD systems can be classified today by where the code runs and how the data is stored:
Desktop CAD
Local install (code runs on desktop computers)
Data stored in files
Hosted CAD
Code runs on remote virtual machines
Data stored in files
Thick-client CAD
Local install
Data stored in a database
Cloud CAD (SaaS)
Code runs on cloud (remote servers)
Data stored in a database
Some of how OnShape works is dictated by the capabilities of the Web browsers through which Onshape interacts with users; the rest of its capabilities are possible because it runs on server farms. See the figure below for an overview of the topology.
The Onshape client is the portion that runs in a Web browser, and is written in TypeScript. It handles user interactions, and it draws the model as triangles using WebGL, so there is no latency in this particular operation. (Mobile apps for Android are written in Java; for iOS, in Objective C. Their functions lag behind the Web version.)
The Onshape client communicates over the Internet with Web servers rented from Amazon. They handle login, permissions, serving up client code, billing, and account settings. The code is written with Java, which enables memory management and makes multi-threading easier than with C++.
Modeling servers (also written with Java) handle interactions with open documents (models, drawing, and so on), like geometry, assembly lists, feature trees, and user events like parts editing and workspace merging. These servers save the changes users make (more below), but do not operate on the geometry.
Geometry servers use Siemens’ Parasolid for modeling and DCIM for constraints. They run code written in C++ for performance and efficiency, like desktop CAD systems. These servers generate display-geometry, sketch interactions, handle hidden lines, solve assemblies, and run FeatureScript.
Models are stored in a MongoDB database. Data is encrypted, and continuously backed-up. With geometry handled by a separate server, crashes do not affect stored data. In a worst case scenario, only the last edit is lost if it was not written to the database. Onshape assigns an internal unchangeable ID number to documents, versions, and tabs. As the ID never changes, there are no broken references.
“Hardware failures are a fact of life,” said Mr Baran. When the hardware fails, users may notice hiccoughs like page reloads.
Onshape naturally runs on the Amazon server farm closest to your location; but when demand increases during your daytime, server availability scores tell Amazon when to switch to servers in other regions of the world. In either case (high utilization on nearby servers or usage on distant servers) can lead to slower response times.
One of the drawbacks to Onshape being Web-based is that programmers have to keep constant track of changes made to Web browsers, so that Onshape does not break with a browser update. This is done by pre-testing code on beta versions of major browsers.
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Coming up in part ii: Onshape for Solidworks Users; The Future of Onshape
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And then in part iii: Q&A
To watch the archive of the online conference, register at events1.social27.com/onshapelive21/home.
And in Other News
What BIM could use is more practical advice and less marketing and fewer Yet-Another-Applet applets. Dave Edwards offers a newsletter with practical tips and opinions on the topic. You can read back issues of his PargArcDesignTech newsletter and sign up for it at pragarchdesigntech.substack.com.
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C3D Labs adds flanges swept along paths to its set of sheet metal methods, a part of their C3D Modeler geometric kernel. Paths can include circles, arcs, ellipses, elliptical arcs, conic sections, and splines. See figure below.
More about the new method at c3dlabs.com/en/blog/tech-tips/what-s-new-in-c3d-modeler-swept-flanges-in-sheet-metal.
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ARM is like the ODA of the mobile CPU world; what ARM designs today you can expect to see in smartphones later this year. In bits of good news for 3D CAD users, Armv9 boasts
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Ray tracing and variable rate shading added to Mali
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Matrix multiplication upped from 128 to 2,048 bits
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64-bit apps to become the norm for 64-bit Android phones and tablets
www.arm.com/company/news/2021/03/arms-answer-to-the-future-of-ai-armv9-architecture
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Siemens has said that CAD belongs firmly on the desktop, but the tug of infinite revenues from SaaS is strong, and so we see new software emerging from the cloud, such as PCBflow for electronics designers on the one side and manufacturers on the other based on Xcelerator, analyzing a range of DFMs [designs for manufacturing] of each manufacturer’s capabilities. www.pcbflow.com
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Here is one of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
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Book review: Understanding the Divide
Subscribe to the WorldCAD Access blog’s RSS feed through feeds.feedburner.com/WorldCadAccess.
Letters to the Editor
Re: A Contractor’s View of BIM (part ii)
Interesting read. Paints an idealised workflow that has its benefits as well as problems. See this video on how GC-led modeling worked for a new firehall:
I agree with the laundry list of problems, but I don't think just going GC [general contractor] is going to solve that much. In the Mid East and Japan, big construction companies have always done the bulk of the detailed design work in-house. In France, the contractors also use Bureau d'Etudes as in-house design and coordination resource. In would be good to get their views, as they have done this a lot longer [than in North America].
At the end of the day, Pentels [mechanical pencils] and sketch paper for everyone is unrealistic, except for very simple buildings. Looking at a lot of the complaints, what is needed is better collaboration and information transparency. This means better digital tools.
Designers may lack technical nous, but contractors are not much better, bro. They have specialised, have been at it longer, and are commercially incentivised.
Starting with paper CDs [construction documents] contradicts the real benefits made thru BIM, as problematic as BIM is. Analytical models (structural and energy etc) are here to stay.
Drawing duplication inefficiency is a red herring. How is “creating a new series of models from scratch” better? The key is to filter and harness whatever info is available.
The key problem for contractors is that they have always struggled to identify problems in time in the bid documents. IPD was meant to give them the time to price the job so you don't have to rely on your “rainmaker” estimator weighing drawings in his hand. What a mad idea!
Instead of going voodoo, contractors have been using 3D estimating tools like Destini and RiB to cost-model the bid design using the 3D model as a basis. This is not the same as cleanroom semi-reverse engineering the design, as suggested.
I also think that the savings with respect to foreign standards and modeling oddities is overblown. Sounds to me like they just haven’t figured how to work with Ideate to remap info.
Hiring experienced modelers and engineers in-house is not as easy as portrayed. The main reason IPD fails is that your specialist subbies’ [subcontractors’] biggest asset is their design staff and knowhow; they make their money from the install, not the design service. Good luck with getting the expertise in-house at low rates. What you will end up with is BIM jockeys who don’t have the tech knowhow, importing risk to the GC.
Lots of complaints listed in the article are the result of making the best of the existing BIM tools blind spots:
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Bad 2D/3D CAD in BIM interop (Revit)
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The clash detection fiasco, mainly because Revit can’t xref [place] live .dwg files very well and relies on asynch declashing using Navisworks
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Ditto on lack of modeling in-context
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Low or no LOD [levels of detail] mainly because Revit etc bogs down when things are overmodeled
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Etc, etc
It would be better to focus on these issues instead of grand gestures. I am not against GC-led modeling, but that will only go so far.
- Dwy Seah (via WorldCAD Access)
The editor replies: In the video, I loved seeing the many paper prints in the background.
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One of the things which has confused me about most BIM applications is that they have a separate command (and code base) for each object category. This may make sense at first, limiting the commands to most common 3D forms.
But one of the major issues with all BIM applications is they try to create ease-of-use by confining each object category to a set form. A Wall is a long extruded rectangle; a Slab is a flat extruded surface.
These kinds of assumptions causes the most failures when a designer wants to create an object whose shape is out of the norm. For example, a slanted Wall or a doubly-curved Wall or an undulating Bezier-based Slab. What, geometrically, is the difference between a Wall, a Rail or a Fence? What about a Slab, a Roof, a Pad or a Ceiling? What about a Roof Hatch or a Door? BIM applications developers get into trouble because they develop commands for the most common object forms.
I think a better approach would be have a set of 3D object creation commands which could be used for all object categories. This way users wouldn’t have to wait for developers to add new creation commands to individual category commands to create exceptions. If a new creation command is added, it should be available for all objects. This would prevent application development Whack-a-Mole and allow users more freedom for object creation which seems to be always on their Wish Lists.
- Dave Edwards
The editor replies: I am no expert in BIM, I just know about it theoretically.
I think commands are object-specific so that the software can tag the object automatically. You select the Wall command, the software goes, “I’ll tag this as a wall and look really smart.”
BricsCAD has a Bimify command that reads 3D objects and then categorizes them in to BIM elements. This is done by looking at their relative sizes and positions: a broad but thin solid is most likely a slab; a tall one a wall; an opening starting at floor level probably a door; and so on.
ArchiCAD is one BIM program does the special kinds of walls you are asking for.
Notable Quotable
“Nobody knows who or what is in charge right now: is it humanity’s deep technological prowess, or is it Mother Nature herself?”
- Chris Martenson
Thank You, Readers
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