upFront.eZine News Archives

The Steep Challenges Facing MBE Adoption

Issue #977 by Ralph Grabowski with John MacKrell A few blocks away from the worldwide offices of upFront.eZine Publishing, new water pipes were last week put under the road. I wish I'd taken a photo of the stack of D-size... Read more →

What Nemetschek Is Doing

Issue #976 by Ralph Grabowski with Sean Flaherty After being at Vectorworks for a long time, Sean Flaherty is now chief strategy officer at Germany's Nemetschek Group. Nemetschek originally was a software company that developed Allplan, a CAD system for... Read more →

Autodesk Wants to Be Your Dassault

Issue #975 by Ralph Grabowski With its ultimate aim being subscription-only access to applets getting their data from a single centralized database, Autodesk follows in the footsteps laid down first by Dassault Systemes. More of more of this is revealed... Read more →

CAD Exchanger on the Cloud

Issue #974 by Ralph Grabowski with Roman Lygin and Ramil Gasanov CADEX is a file translation company, one that I previously interviewed in www.upfrontezine.com/2016/12/cad-exchanger.html. The company now has a Web version of their translation-viewing software. To learn more, I interviewed... Read more →

Unique Features in IronCAD 2018

Issue #973 by Ralph Grabowski It's a rare for today's MCAD programs to not have every single one of the user interface innovations introduced two decades ago by brilliant TriSpectives programmers. Yet IronCAD continues its streak in being unique. It... Read more →

How Tech Soft 3D Undergirds the CAD Industry

Issue #972 by Ralph Grabowski There are CAD vendors, and then there are the vendors that undergird the CAD vendors. These somewhat invisible software developers are the reason CAD exists today in abundance. Or to put it another way, CAD... Read more →

Unreal Engine Comes to CAD

Issue #971 by Ralph Grabowski with Marc Petit Marc Petit, general manager of Unreal Engine Enterprise at Epic Games, talked to upFront.eZine as his company prepared to launch Unreal Studio. This software is a new pipeline for importing 3ds Max... Read more →

Why Three MCAD Programs Failed (and How Two Recovered)

Issue #970 by Ralph Grabowski There have been, over the course of years, MCAD systems that shook up the way we think design ought to be done. They made an impact, changed our way of working -- and then failed.... Read more →

Solid Edge ST10 Converges Modeling

Issue #969 by Ralph Grabowski It seems to me that big advances in MCAD arrive every ten years or so. 1986 saw PTC introducing history-based parametric MCAD, and just about everyone made that the standard way to model in 3D.... Read more →

How Extending the C3D File Format Speeds Up Reading Large 3D Models

Issue #968 by Tatiana Mitina CAD users who work with complex 3D models all face the same problem: it can take a long time to load large geometric models into their systems. As a result, users may wait for some... Read more →