upFront.eZine News Archives

Parallel Computing in CAD

Issue 1,071 | 26 October 2020

 

Guest editorial by Roman Lygin, CAD Exchanger

In CAD, parallel computing is tough.

Parallelism is where the computer runs two or more pieces of computer code at the same time on CPUs and/or GPUs. Nearly all CPUs sport multiple cores (the equivalent of two or more CPUs in a single chip) and handle multiple threads (more than one software operation at a time). GPUs are the graphics boards in our computers, and they commonly boast thousands of tiny CPUs, huge amounts of on-board data storage, and high data speeds.

Parallel operations on CPUs in CAD are limited to loading files and regenerating drawings, for the most part. In GPUs, parallel operations are useful for speeding up predictable actions like renderings and finite element analyses. Most of what we do in CAD cannot, however, be predicted by software. When we, for instance, start drawing a 3D solid cylinder, the software has no idea what step we take next -- specify the radius, drag the height, switch to a mesh model, specify an angle... And so all CAD software for the most part is single-threaded, running on a single-core.

Should someone make headway in CAD, then this is an important advance for our industry, because then our favorite software will run much faster. Roman Lygin heads up CAD Exchanger, and he talked with me about how his team works with parallelism in their software.

     - Ralph Grabowski, editor

- - -

Indeed, parallelism in CAD is tough. There are two important issues here.

Firstly, parallelism is challenging for the ordinary software developer. And the truth is that not every developer on the team should be involved in parallelism implementation. The entry barrier is quite high and it is best to have skilled people to do it.

Secondly, bringing parallelism to CAD is especially difficult due to CAD-specific challenges.

Parallelism requires good understanding of lower-level architecture (CPU and memory, processes and threads) as well as parallelism-specific issues, such as data races, work imbalance, and associated overhead.

Truth to be told, I did not see decent GPU-parallelism coming to CAD, except in the limited case of triangulation of huge 3D models, where the overhead of data transfers between RAM and GPU memory is offset by speed-ups due to the massive parallelism made possible by the GPU. The problem is that GPU parallelism is vulnerable to branching (such as through if/else statements), which is very common in CAD. I believe that CPU parallelism has a greater potential for CAD, and so let's set aside the GPU to focus on the CPU.

CPU parallelism can be viewed as a three-level pie, a metaphor I first heard from Arch Robison, former Intel senior principal engineer and the first architect of Intel Thread Building Blocks, the C++ library for parallel computing.

The three levels are as follows:

1. Multi-process parallelism. Usually MPI-enabled [message passing interface], the program runs in independent processes, with instances communicating between one another. Communication can be via shared memory when running on the same computer, or through a network when running on a cluster.

2. Multi-threading. Each process works through multiple threads that share data in the same (i.e. shared) memory. This applies to multi-core CPUs and multi-CPU workstations.

3. SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data). Thanks to long CPU registers, one arithmetic command can be applied simultaneously to several data items, such as two or four doubles [8 bytes each].

Multi-process parallelism (approach #1) can probably be applied reasonably well to processing huge assemblies, when the entire assembly simply cannot fit into a single process memory. We have never experimented with that, but we have seen our clients trying to achieve it with our APIs, and it made sense. You still have to apply to a lot of intelligence to achieve efficient scalability and reduce overhead, as assemblies can be very imbalanced internally.

In CAD, the greatest potential lies in working with a multi-threaded approach (approach #2), in most cases and when working with medium to large models. This is where we apply parallelism the most.

Approach #3 can be applied quite efficiently to NURBS [non-uniform rational B- splines] evaluation. In 2013, I wrote a paper “Applying Vectorization Techniques for B-Spline Surface Evaluation” (see figure 1) that found the local speed-up was 15x or more, thanks to applying FMA [fused multiply-add] instructions in most recent CPUs of that time.

Figure 1: From the paper, the function for determining surface point coordinates

 

CAD-specific challenges manifest themselves through several cases, especially the following ones:

Data structures with strong interdependence. For instance, a b-rep [boundary representation] graph has one shell referring to multiple faces. Each face refers to an edge shared by two faces (in a closed-manifold solid body). Each vertex can be shared by multiple edges, and so on. To efficiently process such a structure, you have to take care of proper data access synchronization to prevent data races, which can cause invalid executions and make it hard to trace bugs.

But if you do this naively by just applying a typical mutex [mutually exclusive flag], then you can easily kill all scalability because each fine-grain access to a vertex, an edge, and so on will be mutex-protected, incurring significant overhead -- which you don't have in pure serial code. [A mutex is a gatekeeper that allows one thread in but blocks access to the others.]

Data imbalance. In a typical assembly, you likely have parts with distinct complexity, such as a bolt being different from an impeller. Inside each part, you can have very different geometries, such as planar and NURB surfaces. Computation complexities (e.g. a 3D point from UV parameters) can be distinct in several orders of magnitude. So, again you cannot simply divide the work between n threads and expect good parallelism. You end up with pathological imbalances, with one unlucky thread crunching a big chunk of data, while the others sit idle.

We address these challenges efficiently by restructuring the data to reduce/avoid interdependence, and by applying work-stealing vs. work-sharing paradigms. We also heavily exploit nested parallelism, such as across parts in an assembly, across bodies in a part, and across faces in a body. Imagine a thread working on a first part of a thousand NURBS surfaces in one sub-assembly, while three other threads are processing hundreds of parts of twenty other sub-assemblies, with nesting.

This allows us to scale up 8x or more threads easily on typical medium-to-large models. Of course, the larger the model, the farther the algorithms can scale. In CAD Exchanger, these techniques are implemented in the core architecture, and most our converters take advantage of that.

But the effect strongly depends on the capabilities of the file formats themselves. In STL, there is essentially no parallelism, as the format does not allow for anything except a flat list of triangles. In JT, by contrast, parallelism is leveraged very efficiently.

In addition to conversion procedures, we apply parallelism in triangulations and organizing visualization pipelines by asynchronously loading/converting the data and gradually displaying the complex models. This video demonstrates the effect. We also apply a lot of parallelism tricks in I/O [input/output], reaching a great speed-up and efficient scalability.

 

Q&A

Ralph Grabowski: When customers license your firm's SDK, what kinds of projects do they use it for?

Roman Lygin: The most typical use cases include:

• CAD/CAM/CAE, BIM/AEC, PCB, and the like, both general-purpose and domain-specific, such as in Altium Designer [PCB design software] and OMRON Sysmac Studio [virtual factor planning]

• Visualization, AR/VR including Unity-integration

• On-demand manufacturing and in particular cost estimations

• 3D Web apps

 

Grabowski: You mentioned that CAD Exchanger is more than a converter or viewer. What other functions does it perform?

Lygin: It imports/exports assembly hierarchies, b-rep and mesh geometries, meta-data, and PMI [product manufacturing information]. The SDK and our other developer tools also offer:

• Measurements/computations of bounding boxes, surface areas, volumes, and so on

• Visualization in multiple display modes, with interactive selection/hover, and so on

•  Direct Unity integration in run-time

• Manufacturing-related algorithms, such as for CNC [computer numerically controlled] machining feature recognition of milled surfaces, drilled holes, countersinks; sheet metal unfolding, and so on

• Advanced meshers for FEA [finite element analysis]

• Web toolkit for in-browser visualization

• Cloud-based conversion API [application programming interface]

• Model simplification through b-rep shrink-wrapping, internal body removal, and so on, along with mesh decimation by factor 100x and more; see figure 2

Figure 2: CAD Exchanger reducing meshes by 99%

 

Grabowski: You support five native file formats -- Solidworks, NX, Creo, Catia V5, and DWG. Why did you choose these ones?

Lygin: Based on the general market and particular customers' demands. We currently support 20+ formats, with three just released and more underway. All the converters are based on common-core architecture and design principles, so the converters can leverage scalable parallelism on multi-core architectures.

 

Grabowski: Do you write your own translators, or do you license them from other developers?

Lygin: All translators are our own, except for a proprietary Autodesk FBX SDK to parse/format FBX and related formats. Other than that, CAD Exchanger does not depend on any proprietary technologies as we own entire technology stack for CAD conversion. We certainly use several open source libraries, though.

 

Grabowski: Has the coronavirus benefited or hindered your company's operations?

Lygin: YTD [year to date] our product revenue has grown strongly, on par with previous years. In the early weeks of coronavirus, we did notice some cautiousness in customers' orders, as some orders were temporarily put on hold, but in the following weeks things got back to normal.

I believe we offer excellent value to price and our customers appreciate that. We added many Fortune 500 companies to our customer list.

In operations, the team moved to and continue working remotely most of the time. We are now revisiting our lease to reduce the occupancy given the ongoing remote working mode.

[Roman Lygin spent ten years at Intel working in the software division that develops Intel Parallel Studio and Intel Cluster Studio, both developer suites for parallel programming. For the last five years at Intel, he managed engineering teams developing Intel TBB, OpenMP, and MPI libraries. He is the founder of CAD Exchanger. Parallel computing has become his second professional passion, after CAD data exchange.]

https://cadexchanger.com/

 

---

Sponsor

== 3D Conversion of Ultra-Massive 3D Models
via DWF-3D & Okino's PolyTrans|CAD ==

One of the most refined aspects of Okino's PolyTrans|CAD software is in transforming ultra-massive MCAD models of oil and gas rigs, LNG processing plants, 3D factories, and other unwieldy datasets into Cinema-4D, 3ds Max, Maya, and Unity (among others).

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.

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

Bricsys announces the new release of BricsCAD v21 online tomorrow, 27 Oct. I'm expecting to see the company expand its offerings in direct modeling with BIM and MCAD.

To watch, register at https://summit.bricsys.com/

- - -

Heads up as Graebert breaks up their two-day in-person new-release event to two online events:

• neXt is a 30-minute what's-going-to-be-new Webinar on Dec 1 (or Dec 2 or 3, depending on your residential continent)

• ARES 2022 launch event is in April

You read correctly: Grabert is skipping a version number, going from ARES 2020 to 2022. Save the date, as the registration link is not yet live.

- - -

The CAD software business tends to be recession-proof, with sales going up in good times (people looking to spend money) and up in bad times (people looking to save money).

But this year the world's tiniest living object felled the world's largest CAD company, as Dassault Systemes’ Q3 license revenues fell 15% and the company lowered expectations for the year, as it expects license revenues to fall 19-20% -- reduced more from July's prediction of a 16-18% fall.

Now, Dassault gets revenues from more than just licenses, and so overall organic revenues [revenues excluding recent acquisitions] fell a more modest 3%, and stalwarts like Solidworks were even up 5% on the quarter.

Monica Schnitger does important work summarizing CAD earnings at https://schnitgercorp.com/2020/10/22/a-mixed-bag-schneider-electric-and-dassault-systemes-announce-very-different-q3s/ so be sure to follow her.

 

---

Thank You, Readers

Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:

• Holly Stratford: "I continue to enjoy your ezine!"

• 3DBrains PTE, Singapore 

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then the suggested amounts are these:

$25 for individuals > paypal.me/upfrontezine/25

$150 for small companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/150

$750 for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750

Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and use 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.

 

*4794

Siemens in 2020: Solid Edge 2021 (part ii)

Issue #1,067   |  September 28, 2020

 

by Ralph Grabowski

Siemens last summer held an online launch event [replay: youtube.com/watch?v=2nZXi9YJ3o4] for Solid Edge 2021, at which it emphasized the do-it-all nature of this mid-range software. Presenter vp of R&D Dan Staples boasted that Solid Edge has "the best mechanical design in the marketplace." (Siemens had not yet held a launch event for NX.) In addition to MCAD, Mr Staples noted that Solid Edge 2021 is involved in a number of related fields (see figure 1), ones that aren't, however, quite as complete as marketing might suggest. It is Siemens as a whole that has the breadth in software offerings, with Capital electrical design for vehicles and aircraft as the most recent significant acquisition.   Figure 1: Breadth of activities performed by Solid Edge 2021   Electrical Design in Solid Edge consists primarily of designing cabinets and auto-routing wire harnesses; it doesn't actually do electrical design. Instead, it depends on importing electrical and PCB designs through TeamCenter, IDX, and DSI files. Simulation is conducted through a cutdown version of Siemens's own Simcenter. Manufacturing involves choosing tools for simulating models cut by multi-axis CAM [computer-aided manufacturing] machines, as well as AM [additive manufacturing] material selection and output checking. Technical Publications means generating interactive documents through the HTML5-enabled Share3D at https://www.share3d.com/, and PDF files; see Figure 2.   Figure 2 Exploding a 3D model for training   Data Management employs parts of TeamCenter inside Solid Edge to control drawings. Cloud-based Collaboration refers to a separate program, TeamCenter X (in beta), for sharing and viewing models on mobile devices, and using AR [augmented reality] to place them in the physical realm; see figure 3 or visit https://trials.sw.siemens.com/teamcenterx-cloud-plm/.   Figure 3: Teamcenter X placing a 3D model the real world Sub-division Modeling is the number-one feature touted by Siemens for Solid Edge 2021. It really is meant for industrial designers who make organic-looking things like the swoopy shell of a mouse or camera body. The emphasis in sub-d is not accuracy but looks. Me, I have difficulty with freeform sketching programs like Gravit, and so I find sub-d just as difficult to wrangle. Never mind. Here is how it works. You begin with a primitive, like a box or sphere, and then interactively push and pull mesh areas to get closer and closer to the shape you want. When you need greater detail, you sub-divide some meshes into smaller ones. Sharp corners are added by manipulating edges. Solid Edge includes a handy mirror function, so that anything you do on one half is replicated in the other half to create a perfectly symmetrical result. See figure 4.   Figure 4: Mirrored subdivision modeling in Solid Edge 2021 Arriving at a curvy mouse or camera body is faster with sub-d modeling than with solid modeling, but eventually the mesh needs to work with solids. Here, Siemens offers Convergent Modeling, its take on allowing disparate data to exist in a single model, including generative and reverse-engineered (3D scans) ones. Sub-d modeling is included with both the Classic and Premium versions of Solid Edge 2021, so you don't pay extra for it. Let me run down highlights for some of the other new features: Modeling. To make large assemblies faster, all parts are kept in a single assembly file. Internal relationships (like constraints) are now remembered when copying and pasting parts from one assembly to another. Frames can have gaps to allow for welds, and semi-automatically add inward or outward end-caps with optional offsets and chamfers. Nesting now optimizes parts placement on unusual shapes, like cow hides. Sheetmetal. Multiple edges receive flanges just by selecting them and then pulling, and partial flanges can be constructed. Decals lets you place images and logos, even across multiple faces.  Simulation. The 2021 release adds electronics air cooling analysis from Simcenter's FLOEFD fluid simulation module. Package Creator defines the packaging and solder points of chips. Modern chips generate a lot of heat, and so simulation in Solid Edge now handles the impacts from air flow and cooling of fans, shown as temperature curves and iso-surfaces that represent air flow direction, velocity, and temperature. See figure 5. Structural designs also can take temperature into account.   Figure 5: Iso-surface visualization of fan's cooling capacity User Interface. Adaptive UI tracks the commands with which you are working, and then guesses the next command you might need. CAD managers can take output from experienced users and give it to novice users as they learn to do specific tasks, with Solid Edge telling them the next command to employ. Parts Catalog. Siemens  licensed the Cadenas parts library to provide Solid Edge 2021 with 1,500 manufacturers' catalogs. There is a visual search function that returns results sorted by percentage likelihood of matching your request.    Q&A Q: Siemens had a sketching app on Android a few years ago, which I notice hasn't been updated in over a year. Is NX Sketch based on this technology? A: Good catch on that. We learned from CatchBook how people sketch, but NX Sketch is brand-new and is built into NX. It avoids over-constraints on sketches. Q: Is NX Share available standalone or only in NX? A: Right now, it is part of NX. It will be available standalone later this year. Q: Regarding the $100 million AAR [average recurring revenue] of Mendix: why did revenues skyrocket? A: The covid crisis is making companies wanting to build apps quickly, to work remotely. Even before, Mendix provided local capabilities, such as to Teamcenter. It grew 155% over last year. Q: What is the pricing for Teamcenter X? A: We have very competitive and attractive pricing with what's out there on the market.  Q: Is Teamcenter Share a re-badge of Solid Edge Portal? A: Absolutely not. It is built on the Mendix platform. It adds CAD knowledge to a Dropbox-like platform. Q: Will Teamcenter be replaced by Teamcenter X over time? Is this part of a roadmap to replace all desktop programs with cloud apps? A: We are not one of those vendors who go to their customers who say, "As of May 25, we will be completely SaaS [software as a service, a.k.a. cloud-only]." This is not our approach. We are modernizing products by bringing them to the cloud. Customers can make the transition, if they want to, when they are ready. We will never have to have that hard discussion with customers about them having to make a difficult transition of technologies.  Q: What market does Teamcenter X target? A: Immediately, in the mid-market. But there is interest from large customers as well. Q: How is Mendix affecting development at Siemens, and will it be an independent company? A: We learn a lot from each other. We don't forget that Mendix began with business applications, such as HR [human resources] and finance. So we can solve the complete solution across the board for customers. Q: How is your partnership with Bentley on CALM [capital asset lifecycle management] going? A: It is growing business for data management of plant design, offshore platforms, and so on. We will be doing more together, as you will hear in the coming 12-18 months. We are bringing Teamcenter product configuration to these large projects. [For an introduction to CALM, see blogs.sw.siemens.com/teamcenter/introducing-teamcenter-for-capital-asset-lifecycle-management-calm.] Q: When will authoring [design] software like NX be on the cloud? A: The cloud is a major trend, and we are looking at how to bring more of it to our customers. We are working on the authoring side, but the real strength of the cloud is on the collaboration side. So, for instance, we are bringing more collaboration to the authoring software. Q: Revenues of your division for the year? A: Siemens does not report divisional revenues [such as for Siemens Digital Industries Software], but maybe that will change in the future, like in two years. We are outgrowing our competition every quarter. Q: How is simulation, CD-Adapco doing? A: Overall it is doing well. Simulation is core to the digital twin of vehicles and plants. Our simulation revenues are equal to the revenues of the market leader [ANSYS]. That gets lost in our large portfolio of software.    What Ralph Grabowski Thinks This is an era where, it seems to me, some CAD vendors concentrate harder on collecting subscriptions from customers than improving their software. So it is good to see Siemens going all out by loading up this year's release of Solid Edge with lots of new functions.  During the launch event, the host introduced Solid Edge 2021 to us by saying, "We bring the technologies of tomorrow to our customers today." But some new features -- like sub-d modeling and electrical design -- were long needed to catch up with competitors AutoCAD and Solidworks, respectively. The improvements to fluid simulation were, I suspect, in reaction to Discovery Live fluid simulation added by PTC to Creo last year. Other new features, like the "AI"-enabled interface, are trickle-downs from earlier releases of NX. Solid Edge 2021 is expected to ship in late September. The 30-day free trial can be downloaded (after registration) from https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/store/en-us/trial/solid-edge.html. It is free for students (including self-learners) and startups (in business under three years, still under $1 million in revenues).  https://solidedge.siemens.com [This article first appeared in Design Engineering magazine and is reprinted with permission.]

Sponsor: Okino Graphics == 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 [email protected]  http://www.okino.com

And in Other News

Here are some of the articles posted on the WorldCAD Access blog recently: Addressing the problems of digital twins   Google, Stalker   ZwSoft Cuts Prices and Raises Prices   My First Software Manual -- 1981   VM on Linux in ChomeOS -- too slow for me

Letters to the Editor

Congrats on covering CAD for 35 years. I was working at Colorado State University at the time and remember it well. I hope you continue your work for many more years.      – Terry Wohlers, president     Wohlers Associates, Inc.   Re: Open Design Alliance DevCon 2020 I tried using IFC when using the educational version of Tekla. I wanted to go between Inventor and Tekla, one way or the other. Could not be done. I tried it with other CAD software and found it could not be done. The reason is because of the extensive amount of time and energy that goes into telling the IFC converter all the data for each and every structural part, if at all available in the software itself, and if it is the same in the other software. I quickly discovered that there is no IFC standard per IFC standard! And if you let the software do the metadata exchange for you, it'll screw you every time. If you can manage to work your way through the process, you’ll be so exhausted by the time you’re done, that it makes the process untenable. My limited experience says that “details in BIM are too low for CAM” is a low estimate. I’ve found that “details in BIM are too low for most of the fabrication and construction involved”. The reason is because the fab shops can’t get sufficient dimensions off BIM drawings to “cut and fit.” That is, if the drawings done right, which is nearly never, due to the cost-cutting which hires novices to make the drawings. That lack of sufficient BIM dimensional info is why they farm out the structural to structural detailers, the reinforced concrete to concrete detailers, the miscellaneous steel to steel detailers, the plumbing and piping to specialists, the machining... Thanx for your ‘invigorating’ reporting!     – Chris Cadman The editor replies: The problem is that IFC was never meant to handle architectural data exchange. It was invented in 1994 by Autodesk with Release 13 to deal with data stored in custom (user-defined) objects, made possible by the then-new objectARX API. BuildingSmart is working at making it work. Martyn Day, editor of the British AEC Magazine, has been pounding on the lack of the BIM-construction link. Autodesk spent a billion dollars to join the already-crowded construction monitoring software market, instead of on the BIM-CAM link that would have given them a leg up over competitors.   Mr Cadman responds: At least ODA hasn’t sat on their thumbs with AutoCAD. Maybe if Autodesk worked up a translation app that exchanges data between their various 3D software, we’d have our solution already. One has to wonder where all the subscription $ goes, considering the little they do to substantially improve their software year after year. The editor replies: Autodesk has a 3D translator meant primarily for MCAD but does not work with AEC.   *4806

Q&A With the CEO: The Future of Vectorworks

Issue #1,062   |  July 6, 2020

 

by Ralph Grabowski Over a Zoom meeting facilitated by Vectorworks Senior Media Relations Manager Lauren Burke Meyer, CEO Dr. Biplab Sarkar and VP of Product Development Steve Johnson discussed with me their plans for Vectorworks, near and far. - - - Ralph Grabowski: What are you planning for the next release of Vectorworks? Steve Johnson: We are making improvements in a number of areas: Improvements to the user interface, including Tear off palettes A quick search for tools that are then executed at the cursor Smart Options Display that brings recent tools and controls from the perimeter of the screen to the cursor (it works across multiple monitors) Providing users with suggestions for the workflow We continue to expand upon our conceptual modeling solutions from the last several releases that made Vectorworks an alternative to SketchUp and Rhino, and so the next release has the last piece: draw a line to split the face of a solid to manipulate the geometry using push/pull.   It will have history modeling that provides direct modeling interaction with history-based modeling features. For interoperability, we are adding Excel import and export, and publishing worksheets to PDFs. Smart Markers are annotations that work across all our software, with reference links to view details in viewports. They create hyperlinks automatically when exported/published as a PDF. When you click on a marker, it links to the page in the PDF document that it is referencing. These live hyperlinks can also be viewed in the Vectorworks Nomad app, as well as any desktop PDF viewer. For structural grids, the layout is more automated and can be customized so that users can determine how the grids show up in viewports. Vectorworks needs to handle larger and larger models with more data, so we have more support for multiple cores to take advantage of the hardware that our users are running. Navigation between scenes in large models is improved. We are integrating and taking advantage of new technologies, and on the road to employing Apple's new Metal graphics system. For our Vectorworks Architect  product, we added a materials resource with graphical and physical attributes that can be attached to any object for better quantity take-offs, like volumes of materials in walls. As an architectural tool, we are best suited for data that falls under the architect’s purview. This includes STC [sound transmission class] ratings, fire ratings, U-values, daylighting information, run-off coefficients, and so on.  Data Visualization shows all data in the model, in multiple ways and now supports Materials, too. We re-engineered the lighting device to better support focusing, and to handle multiple lights at one time. We were part of a group that defined a new specification for exchanging lighting fixture data between different software programs -- GDTF [General Device Type Format] -- and so the lighting device provides better support of GDTF. (See figure 1.) Figure 1: Data flow using DGTF For Landscape, we added support for components in the Landscape Area tool. Components define information such as a layer of topsoil on top of a base material. This lets us get proper sections.  Biplab Sarkar: Landscape is catching up with BIM! Grabowski: When do you plan to release Vectorworks 2021? Lauren Burke Meyer: We plan to release it mid-September. Grabowski: How deeply do you plan to use the APIs developed by the Open Design Alliance for Revit, Navisworks, and IFC files? Sarkar: We added the first level of Revit compatibility three releases ago. This release has a second version of Revit export: first, we exported models as mesh geometry, now as solids.  We use Solibri for mixed format project files, so we don't need Navisworks. As for IFC, we use our own IFC export/import routines, and we were the first to receive IFC4 Reference View 1.2 Export Certification. (See figure 2.) Figure 2: IFC data in a Vectorworks model (image source Vectorworks) We will implement the Civil3D API from ODA in our landscape software, Vectorworks Landmark .  Grabowski: What are some of the long-term goals you have in mind for Vectorworks?  Sarkar: Our vision for Vectorworks is for it to become the all-in-one software for designers around the world.  Currently, Architect supports the needs of our interiors market. However, we’ll be building upon this and soon adding an interior design module, driven by a new rendering engine. (See figure 3.) Real-time rendering is important, and we already have live scenes. Future releases will add TwinMotion architectural rendering [from Unreal Engine] and Maxon's new real-time GPU-powered rendering system, Redshift.  Figure 3: Interior design renderings (image source Eastlake Studio) Last year, we began modernizing the UI and UX [user experience], and we will continue on that. We are working on a high-performance engine so that Vectorworks can use as many cores as are available.  Interoperability is important, as our customers bring data into Vectorworks from all kinds of other products. We plan more partnerships, such as last year's link to Esri [for mapping], links to more real-time rendering engines, and to other companies under the Nemetschek umbrella. (See figure 4.) Figure 4: Placing GIS data from Esri into Vectorworks (image source Vectorworks) Grabowski: I recall some talk about moving data more easily between Nemetschek products; how is this progressing? Sarkar: We have always been a proponent of Open BIM [for compatibility with other BIM software]. We have been working on tighter integration with Nemetschek products, and are targeting direct interoperability by March 2021. Grabowski: You use the Parasolid kernel from Siemens. At its user event last month, Siemens spoke about the advances it has made in convergent modeling [mixed solid and mesh modeling]. Does it have a role in Vectorworks? Sarkar: Certainly! Convergent modeling is useful for any architectural modeler, being able to mix a solid design with a meshed chair from an online library. We are prototyping it [working on implementing it]. Grabowski: Apple is switching the CPUs in its computers from Intel to ARM. As Vectorworks runs on Windows and MacOS, how will the switch affect you? Johnson: We have already been looking at what is involved. We will not be using Apple's Rosetta [Intel emulator], as we don't want to sacrifice any speed, no matter how little it might be. It will likely take us only a week or two to compile the Vectorworks core code for the new Apple silicon using Apple's development toolkit. We will be working hard to prepare Vectorworks for the new Apple hardware, which is reported to be hitting the streets at the turn of the year. www.vectorworks.net   And in Other News The following posts appeared in recent weeks on my WorldCAD Access blog: Nobody owns 3dconnexion Siemens Media Conference, Day 1 Siemens Media Conference: Q&A Thank You, Readers Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine: Kathleen Maher (corporate donation) Trent Barrow 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 $750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750 Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of [email protected]. Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

*4854

2 Guys Talk CAD

Issue #1,059   |  June 15, 2020

 

A reader and I corresponded over the status of the CAD industry. He asked to be kept anonymous. - - - PL: It seems like Solidworks and Inventor have gotten good enough to reduce people needing to move to higher-end packages like Catia or NX. Are there things from those systems that could benefit Solidworks users? RG: Catia and NX do things Solidworks and Solid Edge cannot, and deliberately so -- such as advanced surfacing.  For the most common kinds of MCAD, however, Solidworks and Solid Edge are good enough. The primary problem with older CAD (Pro/Engineer, Inventor, Solidworks, Solid Edge) is that they lacked direct editing and modeling, which became vogue with the successful marketing of SpaceClaim. CAD vendors took different approaches to solve the problem:  PTC integrated ME/30 (from HP) into Pro/E and called it Creo. The transition took several years. The company has its own kernel, Granite.  Siemens wrote the Synchronous Technology add-on to their Parasolids kernel, which brings direct modeling to Solid Edge and NX. (When Siemens licenses Parasolids to other CAD vendors, however, it leaves out ST part.)  ST, 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 SE and NX users use it.  Autodesk wrote a new CAD program to handle direct modeling, Fusion. (The company has its own kernel, the ACIS-derived ShapeManager.) Inventor carries on as a traditional MCAD history-based modeler.  Dassault Systemes tried to port Solidworks to V6 (3dExperience) but failed, so they wrote bridging software -- modeling programs that use Dassault's CGM kernel and are meant for Solidworks users. These also failed, as each one required expensive annual subscriptions, were immature (lacked functions), and were data-incompatible (Solidworks uses Parasolids). I am unsure where Solidworks stands with direct modeling; my understanding is that it has only a kludge that imitates the effect of direct modeling, but I could be wrong.  Among smaller CAD vendors, several are starting to add direct modeling, with Bricsys having made the most progress, I think. Bricsys was fortunate in having only a rudimentary ACIS-based 3D modeler when they had the foresight to buy outright the direct modeling tech (and staff) from Ledas of Russia.  PL: Not being a CAD guy, what are the things that Dassault should be including in Solidworks that they are not? I know they have redesigned the UX [user experience] a few times. RG: In retrospective, it is easy to see what Dassault should have done. They should have copied Apple, who successfully switched CPUs and OSes under the hood without users noticing much. Dassault should have done the following: Swapped out Parasolids for CGM, while leaving everything else in place Written a transparent Parasolid-CGM translator Added in direct modeling and editing Called it a day Admittedly, geometric kernel swaps are easier today than a decade ago. But head office in Paris was pressing forward with their V6 generation (known today as "3dExperience"), which uses Enovia as the central repository for Catia data and runs much of the ancillary software as Web-based modules. So no surprise that they thought Solidworks should be converted into that as well. Never mind that its own Catia customers are disinterested in 3dExperience; after a decade, about 25% have transitioned from V4 and V5. Or that Solidworks is so much more successful at not being cloud-ized. The final death knell for cloud-based mid-sized MCAD came when Onshape admitted they had only 5,000 paying customers. BOOM! Nobody is going to want to go that way now. PL: But if they swapped out Parasolid for CGM (they certainly do not enjoy paying license fees to Siemens) they would have incompatible geometry yet again. Perhaps if they implemented direct modeling they would have had an improved ability to deal with it. I am not sure why they did not do that. RG: That certainly is the position of Bricsys when they say that BricsCAD can import 3D models from any source, have some automated routines fix it up as necessary, and then work on it with direct modeling, like it was native.  My guess is that there is something about the structure of the code in Solidworks that prevents direct modeling from being implemented. Or maybe Dassault was thinking along these lines: if we have to implement direct modeling, we might as well write an all-new MCAD program that fits these modern times. PL: But surfacing would be easier to add, I assume, since NX can support it with the Parasolid kernel.  At one point, Dassault told me that CGM was better at it because it was second derivative continuous, a phrase that makes sense to this lapsed mathematician. RG: In terms of marketing, surfacing is made to be the differentiator. Siemens told me Solid Edge uses the same version of Parasolid as NX, so it is a matter of switching features on or off -- kind of like mainframes of old! Letter to the Editor Re: MX Performance 2S is Logitech's expensive mouse mistake Excellent article! I've just returned an MX Master 3 mouse as defective (after 2 weeks of testing) that suffered the same problems reported here on the 2s. Ultimately for me, these were the top problems I had with it: Options replaced Setpoint and lost important features, such as acceleration (which makes it nearly impossible to move quickly across two large monitors and still be able to accurately select fine details) Non-replaceable battery (as opposed to the AA battery in my Performance MX) The incredibly poor quality of Logitech's customer support (email only, days for each reply, inability to communicate clearly or accurately respond to each individual problem or question) Their unwillingness to offer any sort of help to repair or replace my far superior Performance MX mouse with a failing left-click button. You are correct when you say "Devolution has attacked the MX," and it seems to have also permeated Logitech completely. Ultimately, however, I am grateful for Logitech's failure because it forced me to look deeper into my other options and allowed me to give my money to another company that I would not have otherwise considered -- and one which seems to listen to its customers. I have just spent twice as much money with 3Dconnexion for two of their products (3D SpaceMouse and 2D CadMouse), which seem to have consistently received good customer reviews.       - Daren (via WorldCAD Access)   Thank You, Readers Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine: Direct Dimensions Inc: "Congratulations on your anniversary. We turned 25 this year as well. " Chris Huminski: "Ralph: Thanx for another great year of CAD news and reviews!" 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 $750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750 Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of [email protected]. Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

*4880

Potential Impacts of Coronavirus on PLM

Issue #1,053   |    May 4, 2020

(PS: Celebrating upFront.eZine's 25th Anniversary! )

Q&A led by Stan Przybylinski   The Q1 financial results we are seeing from CAD vendors show flat or slight increases in sales, the result of the pandemic's effect on only the last month of the quarter. With parts of the economy further shutting down the giant customers on whom large CAD vendors depend, Q2 results for CAD vendors will be more dramatic. Even Airbus is questioning its viability.   Early responses by corporations to coronavirus (source for all images CIMdata) When the virus began erupting in China, consulting firm CIMdata in March lowered their 2020 prediction for PLM [product lifecycle management] sales to a much smaller 2.4% increase. As the local virus turned into a pandemic, CIMdata tore up their 2020 prediction, scrunched it into a tiny ball, and threw it in the trash bin. (When CIMdata speaks of PLM, they include all forms of related software, including CAD, CAM, and CAE, as well as PLM.) It can nevertheless be helpful to look at past disruptions. With the 2008 economic recession, PLM revenues in 2009 fell by 9.6% but then bounced back in 2010 and 2011 by growing 10.8% and 14.9%, respectively. Stan Przybylinski, vice president of CIMdata, hosted a Webinar last month discussing the possible effects of the coronavirus pandemic on PLM. Not all questions were answered live during the Webinar, and so here is the complete Q&A transcript.  You can watch the original Webinar here (after registration) at register.gotowebinar.com/register/6445876329140066316  and download a PDF of the slides from cimdata.com/images/Webinars/CIMdata_April_COVID-19_Webinar.pdf - - - Q: Will cloud-based PLM solutions, especially solutions on public clouds (e.g., Onshape), be a winner in the crisis? A: People will undoubtedly look more closely at cloud-based offerings. Whether that will extend to a new CAD system is a bigger question. That is as much a function of a comparison of the needed functionality as the way it is delivered. What is true is that companies have their employees working remotely. Some companies have always embraced it, but many have had it forced upon them. The point in this Webinar is that if companies see that their employees can be productive working remotely, it might change their opinion on remote work in general. That could open the floodgate to cloud trials and, eventually, adoption. In a recent CIMdata survey on cloud-based PLM, we asked about major concerns that respondents had about adopting cloud-based solutions: Not surprisingly, security was high on the list Second was cloud-to-onpremise integration Further down the list was an item that is not often discussed: continued solution availability Say you have an on-premise CAD system and data management on the cloud. You work on your design but you might not be able to save it to the system if your cloud access is down. That is a problem, sure, but you can always save it locally. But when your authoring tool is cloud-based and your cloud access is down, you cannot work.  Yes, you say, but my service level agreement states that it will be available 99.9% of the time. Yes, that is true, but that is the application [running 99.9% of the time on the remote server]. Does every link between your desk and that application in the cloud have the same degree of availability?  If your company network goes down, you cannot work If your ISP goes down, you cannot work You can only be as good as the weakest link in the chain This is why that question was included in our multiple-choice question. Its lower ranking shows that people are not necessarily thinking about that eventuality.   Q: Would a potential new normal of personal distancing slow down the adoption of ride-sharing and more importantly automotive investments in mobility solutions for the long run? Or would it be more of a blip? A: Personal ownership of a vehicle has been trending downwards for some years. Some of that decrease in demand has been balanced by vehicles used for ride-sharing services. Based on personal experience, many vehicles used for ride-sharing are not new, particularly for the lower tiers of the ride-sharing experience. The ride-sharing services themselves are looking to eliminate drivers, which would reduce the chance of being exposed to the driver or the recent passengers. They could include systems to sanitize the passenger compartment between rides and negative airflow to suck out the pathogens.  Will that increase the design complexity and require more tools? It is too early to tell. Here I think the chart the I included on vehicle sales is more relevant. [See figure below.] A lot of purchasing power is being taken out of the economy. That will kill sales in the short to medium term, depending on how long it takes people to get back to work. A blip. What you are asking about is more the long term trend.   Automobile sales in the USA since 1978 show where recessions have occurred Q: What industry will potentially experience growth [during the pandemic]? For example, auto flat, aero down, but medical, pharma perhaps up? A: This was not explicitly covered in the Webinar and will be more strongly considered as we flesh out our complete forecasts for the PLM market. But what you ask makes sense.  Medical devices and pharma will thrive in this environment. Auto and aero are tough to figure. There will likely not be people hired to “sit” in new seats. But you need to design a safe, stylish, efficient car if you sell 10,000 units or 500,000. The same for airplanes. You might not need as many design seats, but you may need more simulation. Q: Did you take into account the joint effects of coronavirus and other crises, such as climate change? A: No, that is beyond the scope of our forecasting process. But you could argue that climate change has already driven PLM investment in many segments. Higher mileage requirements mean more design and simulation. Energy requirements in appliances could be seen as having a similar effect. It will take some time for climate change to eliminate entire segments where PLM investment has been high. Mobility is transforming, but it is still focused on personal vehicles (or vehicles sized that way). Will personal vehicles be replaced by smaller autonomous trams that take us the last mile from newly imagined transportation hubs? We are still building airplanes. Will hyperloops replace them? It is those types of changes that will change the PLM economy.   CIMdata's predictions for the new normal Q: Is anyone really using cloud PLM? A: Adoption to date has been slow. In some respects, it has been a chicken-and-egg problem. Overall, the leading on-premise data and process management solution providers have been slow to market with cloud offerings. Many mostly sell managed services, hosting their on-premise versions on public cloud infrastructure.  There are some cloud-native providers like Arena PLM and Propel PLM, and recent entrants like OpenBOM, that are enabling some of the use-cases that the on-premise solutions have long supported. As I said during the session, the coronavirus crisis might encourage industrial firms to take a more serious look. Q: You said on-premise to cloud transformation will pick up the pace now. How do you see the role of PLM system integrators changing? A: CIMdata has spoken about this for several years. There will be at least two kinds of changes: The first has to do with integration. It used to be point-to-point integration between on-premise solutions. Today the underlying technologies and standards are more supportive of other types of integration or linking in the case of the evolving OSLC standards. Also, there are more types of systems that need to be connected. On-premise to cloud. Cloud to cloud. These require different skills than were needed ten years ago.   The second change is in the customization of solutions. There was a co-dependent relationship between the solution providers, system integrators, and the industrial clients. Industrial firms wanted their solution their way. The solution providers were more than happy to offer solutions that could be customized, and the system integrators were delighted to be paid time and materials rates to do it. Today most cloud solutions can only be tailored in ways conceived by those who created them. This changes the type of work that systems integrators will be called upon to do. Setting up an instance of a data and process management solution will be easier with cloud provisioning.  But there is still a lot of work in getting that system ready to work for the company that some people ignore in a world where consumerization of IT is commonplace. Many think that you buy some licenses and are ready to go. That is not the case: Security models still have to be defined and populated with users.  Business processes must be captured and “taught” to the system.  Organizational change management and communications are still essential to support adoption.  The bottom line is that services will always be needed, but their composition will change. Q: What are the major restraints in the market to adopt cloud-based PLM? A: As I stated in a previous answer, some of it is the availability of attractive cloud offerings from the traditional market leaders. But, in CIMdata’s opinion, most of the restraints are psychological. Every time there is a publicly-known security breach, cloud PLM takes a small step backward, even though credit card numbers have little to do with PLM use-cases.  Most large companies are pushing their IT to the cloud.  Small companies like the cloud because of its flexibility.  The shift is likely inevitable. What we are lacking are the case studies of large companies successfully making a move. And it is those types of stories that CIMdata has long told. Q: Which industries do you think will look to adopt PLM solutions more than others? A: One of the constraints on cloud-based PLM is the transmission of large files to and from the cloud. Industries that don’t have large files or are just doing business process collaboration are more likely to move. One good example is retail, footwear and apparel. Document-centric industries work well, like pharma or CPG [consumer product goods]. It is more about business process collaboration and speed. We see more adoption in the traditional high-investment PLM industries like automotive and aerospace, but for them, it is as much inertia holding them back. Q: Do you think coronavirus will provide opportunities for CPG manufacturers? Specifically, will the number 3, 4, 5 brands be able to move up in their category as number 1 and 2 are not available on the retail shelves? A: People who understand the retail business know that most 3, 4, and 5 brands are the same product under the covers. Consumers will undoubtedly be exposed to lower-ranked products because of supply chain constraints presented by the current crisis. Will they change their buying behavior? Perhaps, if those products maintain their cost competitiveness in a curbside pickup or delivery future. Q: Will the focus on robotics increase manufacturing, in addition to the need for increased transportation, resulting from more online retail businesses than people movement? A: There has been some work on picking-and-placing robots in a retail environment that could be used in existing retail configurations. If this becomes a long-term trend, then I would expect grocery supply warehouses designed for robotics to emerge as they did for Amazon. Q: Is CAD or CAM in the cloud going to be widely adopted? Or is it ever going to be adopted given security concerns? A: CAD and CAM adoption is another chicken-and-egg proposition. To paraphrase 'Field of Dreams', if you build it, will they come? Onshape built it, and people came, in big enough numbers to get a huge valuation from PTC who bought them for $470 million. Some estimated that it was about 47 times revenues. In some respects, the virtualization of on-premise CAD addresses some of the concerns that are raised about CAD in the cloud. The data is created and remains in the cloud. There is no movement up and down to worry about bandwidth.  CAM could be done the same way. There needs to be a compelling reason to move, one that includes no reduction in functionality. Onshape was moving in that direction when they were acquired. There has been no such innovation in the CAM segment to date. Q: Is there a technology limitation for visualization and interaction with solid models? A: A big problem in visualization has been visualizing very complex models, an issue that solution providers have been attacking over the last twenty years. The compute power available in the cloud has helped some recent entrants address this problem more elegantly and efficiently. Visualization emerged, in part, to allow for collaboration on geometry outside of the native CAD system. But any collaboration you do has to be captured and changes made to the native geometry. Q: Can we say that PLM data will be secure on the cloud, both public and private cloud? A: It should be, if done using the same types of security measures as done on-premise, i.e., strong passwords, encryption, etc. It is much easier to physically breach an on-premise system because its physical security may be lax.  Conversely, you do not know where your cloud-based software is actually hosted. If it is multi-tenant, it may be a set of tables in a much larger database.   CIMdata's predictions of coronavirus effect on PLM Q: I don’t know if there will be greater or fewer regulations in the future, but there probably will be more and diverse ones. How does the PLM industry consider this? A: The PLM economy has always had to deal with regulations. Historically, PLM investments have been the largest in mobility, aerospace, and defense, both heavily regulated industries, often with competing regulations in different segments or geographies/countries. If you have a set of regulations, you can define a set of processes and verification and validation procedures to ensure you meet those requirements. It is thinking like this that led, in part, to the system engineering “vee” approach to development. The important thing is whether regulations can adapt to the changes in technology or not. It took many years for the automotive industry, and their regulators, to accept that virtual crash testing could replace physical testing to a great extent. The same in aerospace.  On the other hand, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was slow to adapt to the applications of digital technology to product development in the industries they regulate. This will be the big issue. With crises like coronavirus making speed critical, can things be done fast enough while still satisfying the regulators? As we have seen early in this crisis, the answer today is no. https://www.cimdata.com/en/ [Reprinted with permission of CIMdata. Portions edited for clarity.] Letters to the Editor "The web [is] so huge that you don't even see it. It's not so much an elephant in the room as the room has become an elephant and you don't see the elephant that you're inside of." https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/04/24/1654230/times-new-arial-mutates-familiar-fonts-into-something-wholly-new     - Anonymous Coward on Slashdot, submitted by Don Beaton The editor replies: I was just now thinking how in the late 1990s Netscape announced their plans to turn the Web browser into an operating system, making it independent of hardware. Microsoft freaked out, bought Mosaic, renamed it Internet Explorer, integrated it deeply into Windows, and then got sued for doing that. Today the Web browser has become an OS, except it is Google's browser engine that powers Opera, Vivaldi, and even Microsoft's Edge, and we can do almost anything in it, even CAD!   Re: When the cursor gets erratic, it's the mouse's nano-receiver at fault I was suddenly having trouble with my 12-year-old vX Nano mouse. Intermittently, it began acting as if it had no connection at all. Moving did nothing, clicking did nothing, then suddenly it would work again for several second,s and then go off again. Very frustrating.  I just built a new PC. My previous PC was 12 years old, containing several hacks to it to make it work like I wanted. I actually had to Dremmel a 2"x1/3" hole in the heat sink enclosure of my 9800GTx video card to make room for a USB 3 card. WORKED 100%. Years later I decided it was time to do the new build, as Windows 10 had lots of problems on the 12-year-old Frankenstein. So I built a new rig, and swapped over the hard drives, SSDs, keyboard and mouse. Built it about two months ago.  But today, the erratic mouse behavior began. I have done electrical troubleshooting as a profession for about 40 years now. I figured I would just figure this out. So, I thought about it. First thing I thought was what kind of signal does this thing use? Discovery: 2.4GHz, as does one of my WiFi routers about three feet away from the PC. Also, microwave ovens operate at 2.4GHz. What about EMF [electro-magnetic frequency] coming from the inside of the PC? This machine has a heck of a lot more power than the last one, maybe it has more EMF leakage?  As I sit and stare of the machine, I realize it has a Plexiglas panel, on the same side of the machine as the USB port that the dongle is on. So my first guess was correct. EMF coming from case is causing issues with mouse connectivity.  So, I grabbed my old USB extension cord that I bought back in 2004. It fixed the issue. I've used it now for several hours straight with no issues at all. By the way, it wasn't a line-of-sight issue. Same distance away, but the receiver is about three feet from the PC now.      - Bob (via WorldCAD Access) - - - How crazy is it that you buy a $100 mouse and have to google "logitech mx master 3 jumpy" to find out how to fix it. In my case I removed the Unifying receiver from the USB port it was in, and put it into a USB 7-port expander that I had and this fixed my issue immediately.      - Richard Lau (via WorldCAD Access) - - - I have had the same jumping wireless mouse problem. This forum has provided useful solutions. I have experimented a little over some weeks to find the cause of radio interference. Found that a USB extender cable is essential here, as the mouse and keyboard are unusable without it Found that a thin USB cable does not work as well as a thicker (branded) one that probably has better shielding Having the USB cable and receiver near a newer monitor and monitor cable gives more problems -- the newer monitor has HDMI ports and cables Using the USB cable and receiver near older monitors that have DVI ports and cable does not give problems.      - Ri Beneke (via WorldCAD Access) Thank You, Readers Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine. 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 $750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750 Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of [email protected]. Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

*4932

Cesium + Smart Construction

Issue #1,050   |  April 13, 2020

 

by Ralph Grabowski   Though an interview last month with Cesium, I learned that there is an open competitor to Google Earth that works with CAD.    Cesium Geoimaging Even though Cesium -- the company -- has been around only for nine months, the underlying technology has been worked on for eight years. It began as an R&D [research and development] project inside an aerospace company that wanted to track satellites accurately. They released their software, CesiumJS, as an open source project for displaying massive amounts of 3D geospatial data in Web browsers. Cesium says it has the ability to achieve sub-millimeter-level accuracy in tracking things like satellites.  The company is located in Philadelphia with 23 people, and recently received Series A venture funding. It's named after the element cesium that's used in atomic clocks for the accuracy. Cesium ion processes and hosts massive 3D data sets, while CesiumJS visualizes the scenes using the 3D Tiles format.  You can see samples at sandcastle.cesium.com/. See figure 1. While most of the demos place buildings and vehicles on topographical maps, it can work with indoor scenes too. A slider lets you move through time to see changes that may have been recorded. And you can host your own data on Cesium Ion.    Figure 1: Point-cloud scanned church with a variety of geospatial imagery (all images sourced from Cesium) Ralph Grabowski: What is the difference between free and paid accounts?  Cesium: You pay for commercial use, otherwise Cesium JS is open source and always free to use . Grabowski: Who do you consider as competitors?  Cesium: We don't have exact competitors that are at the intersection of computer graphics and geospatial. Grabowski: What else do you plan to do with Cesium? Cesium: For construction specifically, we plan to simulate the job site to show what it is going to look like, show the resources that are needed, the routes for machinery,and so on. Grabowski: Do you support CAD formats?  Cesium: We are working on importing, DXF, DWG, [files from] Topcon and Trimble, and LandXML. We plan to not just import the design data, but also edit the design data. Grabowski: Whose CAD editor will you use? Cesium: We will write our own CAD editor. We want to add a way to make adjustments to the content being displayed by the Web browser, such as making the target design better optimized for the existing terrain.   3D Tiles Format 3D Tiles is a package file format developed by Cesium that is also supported by other graphics applications, such as Unity. The name "tiles" comes from how it does streaming: when you are far away from a scene, just a few parent tiles like skyscrapers are seen; as you move closer, sub-tiles (linked to the top-most ones) display daughter skyscrapers around the original ones. See figure 2.   Figure 2: Tile-linked skyscrapers in New York City The b3dm format is documented at github.com/CesiumGS/3d-tiles. It supports four kinds of data: B3DM - batched 3D models rendered by meshes, videos, animations, billboards, and so on I3DM - instanced 3D models for repeating similar 3D mesh objects, such as skyscrapers and trees PNTS - point clouds, just like the ones we all know CMPT - composite stacks tiles together to reduce queries and speed things up The display of tiles is controlled by JSON [JavaScript object notation] and tiles are delivered through glTF [graphics language transmission format]. Johann Sorel provides the clearest explanation (and description of limitations) that I was able to find at geomatys.com/en/2018/07/18/3d-tiles-in-action-for-enc/ The CAD-like entities supported today are points, polylines, and polygons. Extensions allow 3D Tiles to handle more properties and functions.   Construction with Komatsu Komatsu is the second largest manufacturer of construction equipment in the world, and the largest in Japan. Cesium struck a deal with Komatsu to fuse data coming from construction sites, which the heavy duty manufacturer says is part of their Smart Construction solutions.  Cesium's role is to provide a dashboard to Komatsu's customers to monitor construction sites from anywhere in the world, seeing it change over time, and to compare design plans with real-world data being used to calculate cut-and-fills, slopes, and so on. See figure 3.   Figure 3: Dashboard developed by Cesium for Komatsu   Sources of data include GPS trackers and sensors on earth moving equipment, overhead drones taking pictures, and from CAD models. The incoming data are combined into 3D meshes of the job site on top of CAD data of the site, and then displayed in their Web app.  Grabowski: Where is the data stored? Cesium: Data is initially stored on edge servers on the site, and then hosted on Cesium's cloud platform for sharing. Grabowski: How is data transmitted from the collectors to the servers? Cesium: The steaming is done over 3G connections [the data transmission used by cell phones]. WiFi is not needed and might not even be available on the work site. Grabowski: How is your enhancement to Komatsu equipment paid for? Cesium: Komatsu customers buy an add-on package that includes the software, drones, servers, and so on. Grabowski: Is Komatsu your first big customer?  Cesium: They are the first one in construction. We already have government customers, like Track Santa from NORAD. http://www.cesium.com   Letters to the Editor Someone on Reddit suggested you might be interested in this story. I'm an Autodesk customer concerned about climate change, so I contacted the CEO about their support of coal mining in the largest coal mine of Europe, near where I live. It emits 270,000 tons of CO2 every single day. Autodesk brochure about RWE from 2009 I still can't believe how Autodesk responded: Deleted evidence of coal support from Autodesk website twitter.com/JoanieLemercier/status/1112774849712283648 Admitted that policies are not enforced twitter.com/JoanieLemercier/status/1145762207759814658 Canceled our follow-up meeting, and then I experienced a total blackout since July, 2019 Censored discussions on Autodesk forums twitter.com/JoanieLemercier/status/1161354793446793217 I went to their office, hoping to politely arrange a meeting, someone called the police. I am just asking Autodesk to respect their own policies. I thought it was a fairly reasonable request, but I'm amazed with their response. This is not what I was expecting from a leading company in software and tech.   Coal mining photos posted outside an Autodesk office You can read the full story at paper.dropbox.com/doc/Autodesk-coal-mining-correspondences.     - Joanie Lemercier     France The editor replies: I think that it is normal for corporations to say one thing and do another, just as people do. I am not singling out Autodesk here. In my opinion, all corporate social responsibility efforts are marketing exercises to keep environmentalists off their backs. If companies were actually worried about their impact on the environment, they would shut down their operations entirely.  On the other hand, the need for RWE to dig up lignite coal (the dirtiest kind) in Germany is the responsibility of the German chancellor, who unilaterally ordered the shutdown of clean nuclear power plants. So, it's politics all around, instead of science. (Coal use in Germany is to be phased out by 2030.) Mr Lemercier responds: I agree with you, and I'm slowly discovering the PR versus reality. I'm quite amazed to see such dissonance between the words and the actions. I doubt Autodesk employees, investors and CAD users are aware of this, what do you think? Would you have any advice to shed more light on this story? The editor replies: The dissonance occurs because CAD software is meant to design things that can consume resources and so produce waste. It really doesn't matter if employees, investors, and users are aware. When it comes to a Maslow's-Hierarchy-of-Needs situation like this one, having a job to feed and house yourself and your family trumps quitting a firm that writes software that helps maintain a coal digger on another continent. And it's not just CAD. Western manufacturers deliberately build products in China to increase profits and export pollution. They design meant-for-obsolescence products that do not allow users to replace parts that wear out, even for something as necessary as replacing a phone's battery.    Re: Coronavirus Concerning GIS & COVID-19, there is an example of nice use and public sharing of stats on this ArcGIS web service from our Ministry of Health: hexperience.arcgis.com/experience/e4e58e39a0ec410eb054f42012a27b4b     - Robin Capper     New Zealand Thank You, Readers Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine: Machineworks (small company donation) Michael Rubin: "Thanks for your vital updates & info." 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 $750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750 Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of [email protected]. Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

*4960

From Things to Life: 3 Reasons Dassault Is Changing Focus

Issue #1,049   |   April 6, 2020

 

Updates on Coronavirus Support A number of CAD vendors added and clarified their support for customers working from home. See the Letters to the Editor section, below.   by David Levin with Francis Bernard The LEDAS team has partnered closely with Dassault Systèmes for many years in software development. From 1996 to 1999, we worked together in the area of academic research, and then from 2000 to 2011 we developed several key modules for Catia and Solidworks for Dassault. I was fortunate during this time to maintain personal relationships with several Dassault founders and managers, including Francis Bernard, a co-founder of the company. He was the inventor of Catia, and held the position of CEO with the launch of Dassault Systèmes in 1981, until 1995. Mr Bernard retired from Dassault in 2006. Now, he is the board president at CapHorn Invest, executive adviser with Knowmore and several other companies. I will always be a fan of Dassault Systèmes and cannot be indifferent to its impressive development history. (The February cover of isicad.ru shows a centaur that combines a thing with a human as an illustration of the recent extension of the Dassault's business.) - - - Dassault Systèmes recently announced that its 3Dexperience platform will be applied not only to things but also to life. However, the updated version of the company's well-known roadmap shows a running man (the virtual twin experience of humans) seemingly leaving behind not just PLM [product lifecycle management] but also 3Dexperience. (See figure 1.) This seems to me to be the most significant corporate news in CAD for the first half of 2020. Figure 1: Dassault's illustration of its history and future I want to outline for you some of the motivations for this change in direction by Dassault Systèmes. (Mr Bernard kindly provided comments on each of my points.)    Market Demand I feel we cannot expect to see further expansion to the classical applications of CAD and its direct neighbors (CAM, CAE, and so), and so we should instead expect new breadth to come with developments in modern, non-classical software. One possible direction for non-classical development is its enhancement by AI [artificial intelligence] or something that behaves like AI. As yet, it is still far from being applied to real industrial use-cases, but I feel the direction towards AI is inevitable and so should be supported by businesses, beginning with experimental projects. Another direction for the fruitful (and profitable) evolution of engineering software could be an extension to non-traditional markets, such as construction, medicine/healthcare, and more generally to things that are directly connected to us humans. Francis Bernard: "Yes, it appears as if solutions for industry have reached a level at which it no longer needs significant improvement. Speaking frankly, however, I doubt it. It reminds me of an executive I met in 1983 to whom I gave a Catia demonstration. At the time, it had only black and white wireframe visualization, yet he told me: “This is quite impressive. Do you think that there will be future evolutions of your system?” "We will see the implementation of AI (as you note), massive collaboration improvements with the cloud, and many other things that we cannot imagine today. In the world of technology, the future cannot be defined beyond more than ten years. For example, in 1992, the top technology specialists did not mention Internet in their analyses of the future [even though it already existed at the time]. And, as you say, there are still several domains that are not yet properly addressed, like the construction industry. "Regarding the medical market, I believe that we cannot address it the same way as we did in industry. For me, it is a completely new domain, with a limited synergy with industry. Yes, perhaps the 3Dexperience platform can be a base, just as any IT [information technology] hardware and the cloud can be, but the applications to be developed are totally new, and they address a domain with a very specific culture, organization, and methods."   Differentiation from Competitors When it comes to the huge potential market in construction, the MCAD billionaire-leaders are acting sluggishly. The exception is Autodesk, which would probably be not as impressive a leader without its AEC/BIM [architectural] offerings. PTC tries to differentiate itself by promoting IoT [Internet of things] and becoming the owner of Onshape. Siemens Digital Industries Software takes its own path, because it is part of the huge Siemens corporation. Many CAD companies, including LEDAS, today deal with the healthcare sector but in a fragmented and nonsystematic way. Dassault, by contrast, has been involved in the healthcare domain for years already, and is doing so more or less systematically. (See figure 2.) This strategic direction of Dassault was confirmed by its recent acquisition of Medidata for $5.8 billion, the biggest acquisition in the history of the company, amounting to approximately one-sixth of its capitalization. So why not combine a human-oriented sector with the company’s current 3Dexperience system to reach the next strategic step? Figure 2: Bernard Charlès at 3DEXPERIENCE World talking about the step Dassault Systèmes is making from things to life Francis Bernard: "I agree with your comments, except that with the medical domain, it is not a differentiation, it is a new business. Competition will come from players other than those in the PLM business."   Optimizing the Company’s History and Course Market demand and market-driven differentiation are sufficient for Dassault to make its mark on the next stage of its growth by adding the virtual human to its roadmap. It is, nevertheless, interesting for me to add another dimension, the personal motivations of Dassault's leaders. Everyone can agree that the role of a successful CEO in a multi-billion corporation cannot be underestimated. Bernard Charlès, who has led Dassault since 1995 and through whom the company multiplied its revenue, is definitely an outstanding manager. But Dassault is lucky to have a leader who is not satisfied at being merely outstanding. Mr Charlès is a very ambitious person who, along with his remarkable career, would love to live in an alternative timeline in which he would also be known as the founder of Dassault, the inventor of Catia (which today brings Dassault about 25% of its revenue) and Solidworks (more than 20%), the man who made Dassault a leading provider of 3D for global automotive and aircraft industries, the leader who from scratch developed his enterprise to the level of world-famous CAD company to its first billion. Sometimes ambition can better explain controversial actions, such as the attempted transformation of Solidworks through what some even call “the death of this CAD program.” At the same time, ambition can become a great source of personal energy and a key driver of success.  Despite the market not being very accepting of 3Dexperience, Mr Charlès is now extending the future of Dassault with the next great leap into biology. As the legendary milestones of the founding and initial take-off of Dassault are slowly hidden in a remote fog of the past, the whole history of the company, step-by-step, begins to look like the current CEO’s biography. Francis Bernard: "First of all, it is important to know that the history of Dassault Systèmes began in the early 1970s at Dassault Aviation, some ten years before the establishment of Dassault Systèmes. In a paper I wrote two years ago, I described the history of Dassault Aviation and Systèmes through my own eyes. (See figure 3.) Figure 3: Francis Bernard and a member of his Catia team demonstrate CAD to Dassault Aviation founder Marcel Dassault in 1980. "Of course, Bernard Charlès played a major role, especially after 1995, in continuing to grow the business. I agree that if Bernard Charlès succeeds in the new medical domain, then he will have written a truly significant and personal step in the company history." - - - I appreciate the deliberate and systematic development made by Dassault towards the humanitarian field. Such a direction could possibly become a primary focus in the future for almost all industries and so strategically become very pragmatic from the business point of view. https://www.3ds.com [Reprinted from isicad with permission by LEDAS. isicad.net/articles.php?article_num=21123] Sponsor: Okino Graphics == 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 [email protected]  http://www.okino.com Letters to the Editor Updates from CAD Vendors Bricsys published their response to coronavirus here: bricsys.com/common/news.jsp?site=1&item=2250. As well, they offer free, renewable, one-year licenses to students. - - - Ansys creates "relaxed licenses" so customers can temporarily access Ansys software form home, as well as test their product designs remotely on the cloud. globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/04/02/2011041/0/en/ANSYS-ISSUES-LETTER-TO-INVESTORS.html - - - PROSTEP offers their data exchange software "for free, forever with no strings attached." Register first to find out more at prostep.us/cpmn/2020ftcvd/your-submission-is-confirmed-b/ - - - Here's a link to Link to 3D Systems' download for 3D printing face shields: https://3dsystems.com/covid-19-response#faceShield. The files are in STL, DXF, and .3dprint formats. - - - Re: Work From Home All Tekla licenses can already be accessed remotely. For information and to read our articles that support accessing licenses from home click here: tekla.com/how-trimble-can-support-you?Tekla_Licences. General information on support from Trimble during coronavirus: tekla.com/how-trimble-can-support-you. For example, we have widened our Tekla Model Sharing free trial to be available globally and amount of trial licenses from 5 to10 so that our Tekla users can use it for free 90 days for their business (the earlier trial was available only for selected countries and normally trial license can't be used for business purposes) We didn't send out a press release about this topic but we communicated this directly with our Tekla users and customers through our customer channels.      - Anne Niemeijer, manager global pr       Tekla - - - One note of clarification. One should never borrow a Solidworks license using VPN. This can cause problems later trying to return it. As quoted from the blog post, “Borrowing should be performed in the office connected to your network and NEVER over a VPN connection.” Thank you as always for your timely reporting.     Mike DeKoning The editor replies: Thank you for the clarification. Mr DeKonig has more tips at his blog blog.tpm.com/working-from-home-tpm-can-help-you-use-solidworks-pdm-remotely - - - For a complete view of all Siemens Digital Industries areas of support and action for our customers and partners - feel free to reference this dedicated blog site: blogs.sw.siemens.com/covid-19-response-resources/.     - Jeff Zobrist, vp of global solution partner sales     Siemens - - - It is probably because Siemens has so many “home pages” that our software-specific response to the pandemic might have been missed in your web searching, but this page went up last week, and is posted to the front page of sw.siemens.com, which is our new homepage. This outlines some of the steps we’re taking to make our products available for those at home, as well as other steps we’re taking to try and help respond to COVID-19.     - Noah Cole, director of global communications     Siemens Digital Industries Software The editor replies: Thank you for providing the updated link. - - - Just went through today's upFront, and what a pile of information for times like theses for your readers. You really saddled at the right time at the right job, how did you foresee it?     - Herb Grabowski The editor replies: A reader had asked if I was going to write about it: "Can we look forward to an issue about CAD remote access from home?" I in turn asked him if he had any examples, which he provided, and so that became the start of the article in last week's upFront.eZine. - - - Things that will become clearer with time: Will new strains of Covid-19 develop? Will an infection with Covid-19 provide temporary or permanent protection against a re-infection? Are there any long-term side effects of Covid-19 among infected people? Will the pandemic explode in third-world countries? Will constant close contact with Covid-19 patients decimate the medical profession? Will politicians heed the advice of epidemiologists, or will they make impulsive decisions based of what their gut tells them? Will politicians prepare for the next epidemic? After this will come Covid-20, Covid-21, Covid-22, and so on -- or else select one or more from the list of uncurable diseases: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_disease_case_fatality_rates If you really want to dig deeper into data analysis, then take a series of statistics and GIS courses at your local college. After you've mastered the basics, you can take advanced GIS courses on data modeling and hypothesis testing, as described by wiki.gis.com/wiki/index.php/Statistics and wiki.gis.com/wiki/index.php/Geographic_information_science.     - Don Beaton The editor replies: GIS is a crucial tool in tracking virus outbursts that I am not hearing being spoken of.    Re: Running Generic CADD in 2013 Another GCADD disciple here. I've been successfully in using it under DOSBOX in 64-bit Linux for years (Fedora and Debian). Nothing in the icon-clicking world comes close to being able to do everything with two- or three-character commands that can be scripted!  I grew up in a drafting family with my dad playing with going from a T-square to Generic CADD on his original IBM XT but he never quite got the knack for it. I did though. Unfortunately, I don't use it frequently enough to immediately remember how to regain my host mouse. D'oh!     - Rob P (via WorldCAD Access) The editor replies: For those interested in what CAD under DOS was like, I still have available my 1992 book "Learn Generic CADD 6 in a Day" as an ebook at worldcadaccess.com/ebooksonline/2015/07/gcp.html ($14.60).   Re: When the cursor gets erratic Thanks for this solution, which worked for me. For over two years now I had my Logitech M510 mouse parked after it start suddenly drifting to the corner and could only move up and down on two different laptops and a desktop. I could not figure out what the problem was, spent a few hours cleaning it, removing parts, changing drivers without any improvement, I was on the verge of scraping it.      -  Mead (via WorldCAD Access) The editor replies: As my tip on the blog explains, Logitech's nano-size receiver is so close to the computer's body that it picks up interfering radio signals. Moving it away from the computer with a USB extender fixes the problem in most cases. Thank You, Readers Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine. 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 $750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750 Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of [email protected]. Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

*4972

 

Q&A with ODA's Neil Peterson

Issue #1,047   |  March 23, 2020

 

As the Open Design Alliance gets busier and busier, I thought I'd get an update from CEO Neil Peterson. We talk about LOT Network, proxy objects, the latest APIs, and open cloud.   LOT Network The Open Design Alliance announced last month that it had become a member of LOT Network, which holds 2.3 million patents. It protects firms when patents are sold, which is why LOT is short for “license on transfer.”  Sometimes, patents are acquired by patent assertion entities, also known as patent trolls, who use the patents to sue companies who might (or might not -- it doesn't matter) be using the technology described by the patents. Defense is expensive, costing as much as several million dollars, and so companies sometimes fold, paying the trolls what they want. An alternative is to join LOT Network. https://lotnet.com/ - - - Ralph Grabowski: I've read the material on LOT, but it is not clear to me how LOT protects members when patents are sold to a troll. Neil Peterson: When a company joins LOT, it agrees that if -- and only if -- a member’s patent falls into the hands of a troll, a signed agreement goes into effect that grants all members of the community a license to the patent. With the license, member companies cannot be sued by trolls. All traditional uses of patents are not affected by LOT membership. This includes a company’s ability to enforce patents by suing other companies (including network members), asking for royalties, and selling them. Grabowski: Was there an incident that caused the ODA to consider membership in LOT Network? Peterson: We were doing our annual insurance renewals last year, and LOT membership came up as a checkbox on one of the renewal forms. We reviewed the organization and its mission, and found it was all upside: low membership fees, clear mission, and obvious benefits to member companies. The terms of the LOT agreement only take effect when a patent falls into the hands of a troll. There are no restrictions placed on a company’s efforts to legitimately protect its IP [intellectual property] rights. Grabowski: I looked through the list of LOT members and noticed no CAD vendors. How does LOT help ODA's member companies, all of whom are involved with CAD? Peterson: To benefit from the protection offered by LOT, ODA members need to join on their own. Actually, the member list on the LOT Web site is out of date; I know of one ODA member who joined already based on our referral.  LOT has successfully penetrated a number of industries, including automotive, financial, many retail sectors, entertainment, and a number of IT-related areas. With of the convergence of technology, software infiltrates nearly all industries nowadays, and so the fact that the membership is cross-industry means that it provides some significant protections. I believe CAD vendors will join once they understand the benefits of LOT. The more members there are in the network, the greater the protection. Some of the world’s largest patent holders, like IBM and Canon, are members, which means that any company that joins gets a lot of protection. It’s important that the CAD community be aware of LOT Network as a resource.    Proxy Objects One of the benefits of the ODA is to document the DWG file format so that drawings are interchangeable between competitors. Some vendors, however, extend their CAD programs in a proprietary manner. Specific examples that I'm thinking of include solid modeling, constraints, and BIM.  When Autodesk rewrote AutoCAD with Release 13, it added the ability to create custom objects. To display custom objects in incompatible systems, it defined proxy objects (uneditable visual replacements). To edit them, Autodesk provided plug-ins called "object enablers." When I open a drawing of a "N"-CAD solid model in "O"-CAD, I see the model as a proxy representation, and so I cannot edit it. (See figure 1.)  Figure 1: Proxy image in O-CAD of a complex 3D model made by N-CAD - - -   Grabowski: Will ODA member companies be able to handle proxy objects with object enablers? Peterson: Our Drawings SDK allows members to create object enablers to handle custom DWG objects. This functionality has been available for years. The problem here is not with the technology, but rather with the demand for this technology. AutoCAD is still the leading application in this space, so people are primarily interested in accessing custom objects from AutoCAD-based verticals. There isn’t much incentive for a vendor to create enablers that would allow third parties to access their custom objects, and there isn’t enough demand currently for ODA to take on this work either. We are working with members to develop a set of best practices for when they create custom objects in DWG files. It will help members understand how to create such objects in a way that enables as much functionality as possible, without the use of enablers.    Updates on APIs and SDKs The Open Design Alliance releases updates to its software roughly twice a year. In the last month, we've seen updated APIs and SDKs for reading RVT/IFC files, constructing 3D meshes, working with ReCap point clouds, and so on. - - - Grabowski: The ODA is working towards a definite goal in expanding access to DWG-related file formats. With the updates released since the start of the year, how far along is the ODA towards that goal? Peterson: We’re making good progress with this: We have a complete solution for architecture, which a number of ODA members are using for visualization, data access, and even full editing of architectural DWG files.  Our Civil SDK is a mature solution that supports full data access, and visualization for civil custom objects, with creation support under development.  Our Mechanical SDK supports data access, visualization, and limited creation of mechanical custom objects. Last year we started work on Map3D at the request of members, and work in that area is ongoing.  We haven’t received many requests for MEP, Plant, or Electrical, but certainly if there is interest from our members, we are ready to implement solutions for these. Grabowski: I spoke last week with a woodworking subcontractor, who expressed his frustration at working with Revit models he receives from architects. He uses Revit, but finds it too ungainly. He would like to extract the parts of the model he needs, and then design cabinets, trims, and paneled ceilings in an AutoCAD-like program. Lastly, he needs to send the files to a CNC machine to cut the wood. Do you foresee this workflow possible in the near future using ODA SDK/APIs? Peterson: Our BimRv SDK provides full access to the data in Revit family and project files. A number of ODA members, for example Bricsys and Graebert GmbH, are using this technology to import Revit models into DWG-based editing applications. From there they can be edited and sent on to CNC. There may be other solutions coming on the market, as we have fifty member companies currently licensing our BimRv SDK. New applications of this technology are appearing all the time.   Open Cloud The ODA is making a platform available to handle CAD work on the cloud, first on Amazon AWS and now Microsoft Azure.  - - - Grabowski: You are expanding access to your Open Cloud initiative by making it available on another service provider. Tell me about that. Peterson: Open Cloud is a Web technology platform that allows users to host their own cloud services for CAD and BIM. This includes visualization, markup editing, data access, and automation services for a range of CAD and BIM file formats. It is self-hosted technology, and so Open Cloud allows users to maintain control of their own cloud services and their own IP, something that is lacking in SaaS-based systems. Last year at our Milan conference, we previewed our new Open Cloud product for Microsoft Azure, because it is a popular platform for corporate users. Open Cloud for Azure allows Web-based CAD and BIM services to be tightly integrated into a company’s existing Azure infrastructure. In addition, Azure provides options for local hosting of sensitive IP, which is a requirement of many government and corporate users. You can find more details by going to Azure Marketplace and searching for "open cloud." - - - Neil Peterson is the president of the Open Design Alliance. www.opendesign.com/ - - - The 7th annual ODA  DevCon 2020 conference is being held this year September 8 - 9 at BMW Welt, Munich, Germany. More info from conference.opendesign.com. - - - isicad interviewed Neil Peterson in Novosibirsk and posted the English version at isicad.net/articles.php?article_num=21101.   In Other News Dynamic Infrastructure's learning system creates "medical files" of bridges, tunnels, and elevated highways from existing photos, annual inspections, and day-to-day operations. The software compares existing images to new ones to detect maintenance issues. diglobal.tech - - - After Palo Alto Networks tested 1.2 million IoT devices, they found 98% sent data unencrypted, exposing networks from both ends:  Vulnerable IoT devices infect PCs Unpatched PCs give attackers access to IoT devices and their data theregister.co.uk/2020/03/11/the_internet_of_things - - - Datakit Software released its new glTF writer (GL Transmission Format from Kronos). Developers can convert their CAD files to the self-style "JPEG of 3D".gltf and .glb files. http://datakit.com - - - Graebert ships ARES Commander 2020 for the desktop, and previews its plans for BIM at last month's Japan conference. graebert.com/cad-software/download/ares-commander/ - - - "Augmented reality headset maker Magic Leap has struggled with the laws of physics and failed to get to market. 'Magic Leap could fetch more than $10 billion'... is the number a prideful company strategically leaks in hopes of drumming up acquisition interest, even at a lower price. The whole economy is hurting due to coronavirus. AR seems less interesting than virtual reality with people avoiding public places. Getting people to strap used AR hardware to their face for demos seems like a tough sell for the foreseeable future." techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/magic-steep/ - - - Epic Games released Twinmotion 2020 architectural visualization software with... Enhanced vegetation Rhino link plug-in  Import videos as materials See more in this video: youtube.com/watch?v=2qtVcZgbrl4 - - - Dropping a (lightened) car on a tough (Kevlar) trampoline. CAD is mentioned. The super slo-mo sequences are especially interesting, particularly the distortions of the water-filled yoga ball undergoes.  youtu.be/tMKXbLBgkEc - - - ABIresearch says, "By 2035, 83 million 5G connected cars will be on the road, making them safer and greener." This is unknowable. - - - Startup Monograph, whose cloud-based software handles project and cost management for architects, raises $1.9 million in seed funding. monograph.io/ - - - How to install the Linux version of Blender on ChromeOS devices: chromeunboxed.com/three-ways-to-install-blender-3d-software-on-your-chromebook/ - - - "Cutting Rates Is Now About As Relevant As Painting A Sinking Ship." That's because people are putting their health ahead of their wealth. As Seth Fiegerman put it, "Purell is the new bitcoin." - - - BetaCAE Systems released v19.1.6 and v20.1.1 updates to its KOMVOS/ANSA/EPILYSIS/META software. http://beta-cae.com - - - The Khronos Group formed a new working group to create a free, open standard analytic rendering interface API for data visualization called "ANARI." www.khronos.org/ - - -   Letters to the Editor Re: The Test that Failed Thank you so much for the story about your father in the newsletter. The photo (below) shows my father. He was involved in the microelectronics industry. The photo was taken in the early 1960s, when he was studying in Lviv Politechnik University, now Ukraine.     - Olga Kalyagina - - - My thoughts on BIM vs 2D drawings, etc, etc. Back in the last millennium, when I was going through university, I worked one summer for the local electric company. At one point I was working on a project that involved updating an existing facility. The project engineer sent me down to the vault to dig out the old drawings. I was more than a little puzzled by how they looked to me, so when I returned I asked him for the story and here it is: In the days of paper and pencil, copies of drawings were made using blueprint machines. The original would be placed on top of a light-sensitive sheet of paper and the pair would be exposed to a strong ultraviolet light. Finally, the copy would be exposed to ammonia fumes which would develop the image. So far so good, but the blueprint paper was opaque so that a copy could not be made from a copy. Solution: Sepia or brownline paper. The process was exactly the same as making a blueprint but sepia paper was transparent enough that a normal blueprint could be made from it. The only issue was that as the sepia was made from the pencil-and-paper drawing, and then as a blueprint was made from it, the light would have to pass through and be diffused by an additional layer of paper and so that copies from the sepia would get a little fuzzy.  Solution: the sepia would be made by turning the original upside-down so that the penciled side was adjacent to the emulsion side of the sepia. Similarly, in the field, the sepia would be turned upside down so that its image side was adjacent to the blueprint paper’s emulsion side. Now to the case in point. It turns out that someone in the field forgot to invert the sepia, and so the “as-built” drawings and the actual construction were mirror images of the original design.      - Bill Fane   Thank You, Readers Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine. 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 $750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750 Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of [email protected]. Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

*4996

Electrical on the Cloud

Issue #1,041 | February 10, 2020

 

by Ralph Grabowski with Thomas Yip   Radica Software has grown since I first interviewed CEO Thomas Yip and his electrical schematic software that runs on top of Visio -- Electra. For this kind of design task, Visio is brilliant. (I still use it for annotating figures for my books, because of its smart connectors.) The company launched 15 years ago, is growing 25-30% annually, and now has 20 employees. It is headquartered in Malaysia.  Now Radica has ported their schematic designer to the cloud. "Three to five years ago, we saw the industry was moving to the cloud, and so we made the difficult decision to embark on this," Mr Yip told me over Skype. "Engineering CAD software in a browser is extremely challenging." The base program no longer is Visio. Instead, Radica first wrote an extensible SVG [scaled vector graphics] editor, Vecta at https://vecta.io/ (see figure 1), on which they built Electra Cloud. Figure 1: Vecta SVG editor running in a Web browser Electra Cloud launched just a few weeks ago at cloud.radicasoftware.com, with Mr Yip calling it "the world's first fully browser-based electrical CAD software." Being browser-based, it runs on all current operating systems and hardware that handle modern Web browsers. (See figure 2.) Vecta and Electra are hosted on Google Cloud in the USA.   Figure 2: Electra Cloud running in Opera for Android on a Chromebook Both the desktop Visio-based program and the browser-based SVG app handle 2D diagramming of electrical, pneumatic, and hydraulic systems. Electra Cloud automates tagging, circuit reuse, real-time cross references, NFPA/JIC [National Fluid Power Association and Joint Industry Council] and IEC [International Electrotechnical Commission] symbols, PLC [programmable logic controller] modules, bills of materials, terminals, and panel layout. Another reason for the cloud version was to make licenses more affordable. When a company has two engineers and a manager, the manager might need only read-only access, so the firm needs only two licenses. The partial license is free, and provides some editing and full viewing functions. The full license adds automation, report generation, and so on.   Revision Control A third reason for a cloud version was to get around emailing files to people, and being able to collaborate on a design. Electra Cloud uses a dashboard to handle file organization, collaboration, and revision control. The dashboard shows all drawings produced by the team, including new ones that are shown immediately. (See figure 3.) The dashboard controls the workflow in which users mark up drawings and pass them to others. Notifications are sent to users on both the cloud and the desktop. Figure 3: Dashboard collating all diagrams being worked on by a team Revision control is called "Version History" in Electra Cloud. It is automatic, meaning everything is synchronized at the server. Versions are saved with "events" (changes made to the document) and so are not based on timing. Electra Cloud groups the modifications so that you are not flooded with a long list of minor changes.   Programming Mr Yip believes that having a modern JavaScript based API will let users customize Electra according to their needs. The built-in editor lets you write as little as one line of code to control the look of objects. Intelligence is added to objects through scripts, which can be named, to enable them to be referred to.  Data and programs (written in JavaScript and JSON [JavaScript Object Notation] can be attached to drawing elements, even elementary ones like radius=10. Having an object controlling the position, size, and properties of other objects operates like parametrics and constraints in CAD. Even fills can have formulae that change the color of an object based on what is happening to other objects. "Our vision is to open up the platform for others to create their own solutions," he said, and the team has since collaborated with a music equipment maker in Germany for their design work. Another collaboration is in the works with a French software firm  Radica also supports plug-ins, such as one that calculates the number of symbols in the drawing. Electra Cloud supports public plug-ins and private ones seen only by the team. "We provide some plug-ins, but prefer that users write their own," said Mr Yip. The API is documented online at https://vecta.io/api/.   The Role of SVG SVG is a lightweight vector format supported by all Web browsers, even if you never use it. If you have never heard of it, then we probably have PDF to thank for that: think of SVG as the JPEG for vector images. Embedding SVG files in Web pages can be problematic, as they can be large. And so Mr Yip wrote Nano, what he calls "the world's best SVG compressor," which on average removes 80% of the file size. https://vecta.io/nano is free to use online, and a desktop version is coming soon. (See figure 4.) Figure 4. SVG compressor showing before and after results Compressing SVG saves bandwidth by taking out unnecessary information, such as fonts and structural elements required by the editor. The compressor follows the SVG spec closely, so it uses inheritance to remove unnecessary references to properties. Diagrams are not stored as files with Electra Cloud, because when small changes are recorded, there could be a huge amount of writes on the server side. Instead, diagrams are saved as a database using Google services: only changes are recorded to use as little bandwidth as possible. Mr Yip and his staff are, however, reinventing the system so that they can provide on-premise saving, which is not possible with public Google Cloud. The ideal he is aiming for is to provide security, privacy, and speed. "Because we live in a country [Malaysia] that is not well known for high speed Internet, this has benefited us in forcing us to make sure the software is responsive and speedy," explained Mr Yip. For instance, once a symbol is used, it is cached locally. Electra exports diagrams as vector formats (DWG, DXF, SVG, and PDF), raster formats (JPG and PNG), and in as a TSV (tab-separated values) data file. The company has been making progress improving DWG and DXF, and so the program can now handle DXF files as large as 50MB.   Future Plans Radica makes public its road map, as illustrated below:   Figure 5: Road map showing development plans for Electra Cloud   In the next month, Electra Cloud will receive an enhanced dashboard for attaching PDF files, DWG drawings, spreadsheets, and so on. The idea is to have all resources in a single place to document the project.  The online demo is available through https://cloud.radicasoftware.com/app/edit/demo   And In Other News ASCON Group releases KOMPAS-3D V18 in English, Turkish, and Korean with a new user interface in ribbon-like sets, and light or dark themes. Other improvements to the MCAD software include faster 3D models and associative views, new functions for sheet metal, new versioning function, better BOM [bills of materials], and the Add-Ons Configurator.  You can download the 30-day free trial from ascon.net/download/kompas/items/?dl_id=532 - - - Open Design Alliance last week released BimRv SDK 2020 Update 2 for creating Revit families from any application. albeit limited at this time. The goal is support for creating the entire Revit object model. ODA SDKs are available to members only. More information on this release at opendesign.com/blog/2020/february/oda-adds-limited-family-creation-bimrv-2020u2    Letters to the Editor Re: Mr. Davis’ experience with cracked vehicle parts Currently I’m reworking the frame of a 2000 Silverado 4x4 because the 6” lift kit caused the frame brackets to crack where the steering components bolt-on to it. The ‘gingerbread’ market has been sorely negligent in the area of frame reinforcement for their lift kits. Seems like nothing’s changed. Appeal to ego or aesthetics, but FDOT requirements are an afterthought!       - Chris Cadman Thank You, Readers Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine. 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 $750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750 Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of [email protected]. Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

*5104

 

Interactive Site Design: TestFit from Building Forge

Issue #1,040   |  February 3, 2020

 

Ralph Grabowski interviews Clifton Harness TestFit is unique among software programs in that urban planners can interactively design and change site plans, taking into account building densities, offsets, parking lots, road alignments, and more. (See figure 1.) The work is done parametrically, with a touch of generative design thrown in. "Let's get rid of placing tracing paper over satellite photos," ceo Clifton Harness told me that was his impetus.   Figure 1: Dynamically adjusting interior roadways to optimize land use TestFit came about when Clifton Harness met Ryan Griege at the University of Texas, and found common ground in building Flash games; none were ever completed. Never mind. That formed the basis of a good working relationship that lasted to this day. Mr Harness became an architectural intern working for a real estate firm, but didn't want a 9-5 job. His day job, however, gave him an idea for software that would make it easier to design sites for new home or office construction. To him, it looked like a math-based problem. Mr Griege wrote an initial program that accepted criteria for placing buildings optimally on sites, but one that only Mr Harness could use. Then Mr Griege got serious, and spent two years writing the core for TestFit, shipping a multifamily generator in 2017, and then a parking generator in 2018. (As a former transportation planning engineer, this part of the interview was exciting for me.) It was a story of moving goalposts as the two fine-tuned a product when they weren't exactly sure what it would become. Mr Harness called real estate developers in Dallas to get feedback, and they named their company BuildingForge. The first release of the software was named "Residential Engine," shipping in the fall of 2017. They had two customers, and so Mr Harness cold-emailed 3,000 professionals across the country to grow sales. After eight months, they were finally able to pay themselves a salary, and then hire another programmer. They renamed the software TestFit. The two decided they needed an injection of funding, and by coincidence VCs [venture capitalists] were wanting to meet them. The two were picky about who they would accept. Jesse Coors-Blankenship of Parkway Venture Capital seemed like a good fit, and so they accepted $2 million for hiring sales people, creating an international retail channel, finding a public relations firm (which resulted in this interview), and adding more programmers. They now have customers in six countries. (Mr Coors-Blankenship is better know for selling his Frustum generative design software to PTC for $70 million, where he is now senior vp of technology, as well as part of Parkway Venture. worldcadaccess.com/blog/2018/11/exclusive-qa-with-frustum-ceo-jesse-coors-blankenship.html) Here is an example of the thinking Mr Harness and his team put into the TestFit software. Its database health check looks for these attributes (see the dashboard lower portion of figure 2): •    Inline unit score: do units work well together by width? •    Angular score: do units work well when turning corners, especially irregular corners? •    Target area score: do units achieve a wide variety of unit averages?   Figure 2: Dashboard reporting results in realtime As you adjust units, the dashboard reflects the changes, whether positive or negative. After three years of development, TestFit offers these functions: Unit editor for defining building units Shadow casting Land planning Varied retail space Parking garages Zoning It supports up to 16 categories of building use, along with configurable hallways, balconies and bays, stairwells, and so on. See figure 3.   Figure 3: Optimizing varied uses of a building Generative design is used by recent marketing descriptions for TestFit, but to me it looks like the software primarily uses parametrics. Mr Harness said he likes to call his version "practical generative design" in that the software places things like staircases as efficiently as possible when generating building masses. (It's about 10% of the code base.) You specify a minimum number of staircases, constraints with parameters, and TestFit works within it.  He doesn't like the voluminous output from typical generative design solutions for BIM. His goal is for his software to generate, say, two really good buildings, instead of 15,000. "Building design is tough for generative design, as people have to live inside of them," he said. Generative design is meant to optimize a design, but there is a lot of core technology like the staircases before the building can be optimized.  A building is a compromise between many parameters, with which TestFit works with faster than does tracing paper. You cannot optimize buildings for just one parameter, such as cost (no one would want to live there) or courtyard space (too expensive to build). And it needs to keep the initial design cost down, because only one out of ten building designs eventually get built. The data is stored in its own format with some meta data attached to each entity. The results can be output in PDF, DXF, SKP (SketchUp), glTF (graphics language transmission format for 3D scenes and models using JSON), RSD (TestFit's native format), or CSV (comma-separated value) formats.  "Are architectural CAD vendors interested in TestFit," I wondered. From the response, I gather they are, but it is too soon to talk about it.  "Who is your typical customer?" I asked. Mid-size real estate development firms, architecture firms of any size that want to jump into new technology, and more recently general contractors who see it useful for quantity take-offs.  You can download a 30-day demo from https://www.buildingforge.com/ after registering. https://blog.testfit.io/   Sponsor: Okino Graphics == 3D Conversion of Ultra-Massive 3D Models via DWF-3D & Okino's PolyTrans|CAD == One of the most refined aspects of Okino's PolyTrans|CAD software is in transforming ultra-massive MCAD models of oil and gas rigs, LNG processing plants, 3D factories, and other unwieldy datasets into Cinema-4D, 3ds Max, Maya, and Unity (among others).  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.  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 Letters to the Editor Re: Readers Respond to When Generative Design Backfires In response to the person that said "comparing a spoked bicycle with a car wheel makes no sense." Perhaps a more apples-to-apples comparison then would be with an older car with wire wheels.     -Joe Tilman The editor replies: You know, I was thinking about spoked wheels on cars, but then I forgot to mentioned them. I am glad you reminded me. I found that spoke wheels are still available today. - - - It always amazes me what kind of real-world issues crop up that a designer can't foresee. A friend of mine was griping about aluminum wheels and said that his company now swapped out the aluminum wheels that come on new pickups for steel one, because the aluminum ones wear out.  He finally clarified that, in constant operation on dirt roads, the abrasive dust and sand gets between the tire sidewall and the rim for just that tiny little band where the rubber flexes away from the rim, and gradually wears the rim of the wheel away until either the tire comes off, or, more likely, the rim breaks when they try to install new tires.  I've been around farm machinery, construction machinery, dirt bikes, and pickups most of my life and never heard of that, but it's only very recently that pickups in that kind of service (oilfield maintenance) have ever had aluminum wheels.     - Jess Davis The editor replies: All that aluminum is a desperate attempt to bring fuel consumption levels down to what politicians fanaticize should be feasible. Mr Davis responds: Ever since I got a couple of nice digital scales for a project, I've been weighing every wheel that I get in my hands. It's astonishing to me how terrible aftermarket aluminum wheels are, the few I've had. My notes are scattered all over a couple of different devices, but I remember switching some rims around on my daughter's Nissan, and the aftermarket alloy rims I had laying around pretty much weighed almost exactly what the factory Nissan steel ones did -- 20 pounds, I think. By comparison, the stock 14" rims from my old Miata were 11.5 pounds, way lighter than most aftermarket "racing" wheels.  3/4 ton Dodge stock alloys were extremely light compared to stock Dodge steels.  Racing makes a person obsess about weight, and growing up with actual, real race motorcycle bikes apparently made me kind of snobbish. Now that I'm too old for the real fun, and have to content myself with street-legal toys, I'm often appalled at the weight of components. I remember the first bike I had that got heavier while I owned it. There was a kind of tipping point back in the late 80s when Honda designed past the fatigue limit for a lot of stuff, and when you installed aftermarket parts, they were always heavier than OEM. That was weird. Finding fatigue cracks on things like rims was kind of expected, but the cracks on stuff like fork clamps and handlebars was alarming.    Thank You, Readers Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine: Jose De Jesus 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 $750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750 Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of [email protected]. Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

*5110