There is a way to determine people’s ability to structure designs. Ask them to arrange virtual furniture in a room:
When they draw rectangles and they annotate them with words like “wardrobe,” “bed,” and “table,” then place dimensions and distances, you are looking at a designer. The designer is a planner solving the “What can and should be done” problem.
When they create perspective views with details like armrests and cushions, it seems that they are “constructors” who would be better trying their hand at mechanical engineering. (See figure below.) Constructors solve the “How to make” problem using original, non-standard solutions. This is welcome in mechanical engineering, which has a pre-production testing stage, which does not exist in the design of buildings where non-standard solutions are risky.
Perspective drawing made by a constructor
“What is a model for, if you already have drawings?” This is the question I am asked during discussions on automatically generating 3D models from 2D drawings. People have no idea that it’s possible to make drawings without first constructing 3D models. For instance, this is the weighty opinion of a developer of one 3D modeling program: “The model is the only source of information for drawings. Drawings are nothing more than views of the model.”
And what do standards and textbooks say? When we consult them, we read terms like “projections,” “sections,” and “cross-sections,” such as illustrated by the figure below.
Orthogonal and other projections of a 3D model
When we read further, we learn that a floor plan is a horizontal section at the level of the window openings, or 1/3 of the story’s height. We might think that this confirms the priority of models over drawings. An example from a real project, however, casts doubt on this conclusion.
Depicted in the figure below is a shop. This is practical, clear, but how can it be called a “horizontal section” when it shows a variety of elevations? Some are at -2.500; there is a rail track at floor level; some platforms at +1.000 and +4.000; many columns and vertical bracings (above the floor, and below the crane rails); walls at level of windows; bridge cranes and a crane landing platform (just under the roof).
Production building plan at a variety of elevations
This exactly is a plan, a schematic representation of what should be built. It is an extremely simplified representation, with all plan objects refined and detailed elsewhere. By the way, sections are the same as plans, except that they describe builds from different aspects.
PROJECT NEWPLEX v2.0
Project Newplex 2.0 is the advanced SHX font designed for technical documents; compatible with every DWG-based CAD program that supports Unicode SHX files.
Features
Advanced character forms for readability & clarity
The synthesis of spatial objects from their projections is called “the inverse problem of descriptive geometry,” and is an unsolved technical problem. Nevertheless, for hundreds of years, designers and builders have been synthesizing mental versions of 3D building models from 2D drawings. Then, builders transform the mental objects into real ones — how do they do it?
It is impossible to build models using projections, but it is possible using conditional images that have parameters tied to them. When we draw a circle (even if it is not perfect), and then write just two words, such as “Sphere d1800,” we create the parametric description of a sphere as a spatial object.
A parametric description consists entirely of conventional signs, and as a result is a linguistic description. Parametric modeling is essentially linguistic modeling. As a rule, parametric descriptions include the following elements:
Object type designations, formatted as text (e.g., “sphere”)
Conditional graphical representations of objects (e.g., drawing of a circle)
Parametric designations as text (e.g., “d1800”)
Conditional auxiliary images (e.g., dimensions and extension lines)
There are cases where the object type designator is not explicitly presented. In such cases, it can be reconstructed from the drawing context. For instance, the context may be provided by the drawing’s name, such as “column layout scheme.”
Any parametric description assumes the existence of an associated execution procedure, such as a mathematical formula, a computer program, or a detailing algorithm linked to detail drawings. From a programming point of view, a parametric description is a function call with parameters passing to it. When executed, the function transforms conventional signs and images into mental or digital models.
We can come to the conclusion that the primary method for analyzing drawings is to establish parametric descriptions for each building element. In drawings, the same building elements are usually described in several different contexts, such as being present in different views, on different drawings, in different drawing sets, and so on.
As an example, let’s try to restore the parametric description of the column located at A-17 in the figure below. The type of object (column) is easily determined from the context: column sections in this drawing are rectangles. There is, however, no other information tied to the object.
Identifying parameters of column A-17 from the equivalent column A-4
So we apply this well-known rule:
If, in a group of objects that are identical in appearance and purpose, there is only one object provided with parameters (dimensions, marking, designations), then all other objects in the group inherit these parameters.
In the group of columns along the A-axis, we see column A-7 is associated with detail #4. (See figure below.) If we were to refer to detail 4, we would see a refined column section with its dimensions, and snaps of the section to the co-ordination axes on the plan.
Detail 4 describing column A-7 and referencing Section 1-1
Using the details of section 1-1, we can determine the column’s top and bottom elevations. We apply the parametric description we obtained from A-7 to all columns (except for the corner ones) of row A, including the column at A-17.
Step-by-step Detailing of Objects
So. We managed to determine the definition of a simplified architectural column. A short parametric description cannot completely define complex structures, as real columns are. Nevermind: during the early stages of planning, our knowledge of objects is very approximate and vague.
During the planning process, structural drawings appear following the architectural ones, from which the columns obtain designations (that will be marked). A separate drawing of an abstract column representative of the columns of this type will appear. The structural elements of this abstract column — the formwork, rebars, embedded items — will, in turn, be detailed.
The essence of step-by-step detailing can be described this way:
Any project detail is itself a project
Any project is itself a project detail
During step-by-step detailing, a hierarchical structure is built by which the types and parameters of the upper-level objects are the context for lower-level objects.
Knowledge and Data
Parametric descriptions and their associated execution procedures are knowledge of what and how the work should be done. As a result of the execution of the parametric description, we get an object’s 3D model, which is the object’s database. Let’s take a closer look at the process.
In the figure below, there is a drawing fragment explaining the principle of reinforcing the floor slab.
Drawing of slab reinforcement as a representation of knowledge
The recipient of the drawing extracts a parametric description from it, applies the execution procedure, and, as a result, gets a mental model of the slab reinforcement. When the recipient is a builder, he will transform his mental model into real reinforcement in the field.
The process of creating a model in a 3D modeling program is, in principle, no different from a traditional drawing. By some means or other, the reinforcement contour is defined; the diameter, steel class, spacing, and possible overlap of rebars are specified.
The end result is, however, different. The execution procedure creates a computer model of a set of rebars with attributes attached to every bar. This model is saved. The figure below represents a top view of the reinforced slab as displayed by a computer model.
Top view of the reinforced slab model as a form of data representation
As mental models are built solely on the basis of visual perception, let's compare the two figures:
Drawing — shows a single abstract bar, with information attached. The bar defines the size, location, and attributes of all other bars in the planned reinforcement slab. We do not see individual bars, but we get a very good idea of the slab reinforcement.
Model — shows lots of bars. Annotations need to be added to all bars, and many dimensions need to be placed. When the slab is large and contains a lot of rebar, we get a messy, poorly readable picture. The result is a poor-quality mental model and, accordingly, a poor understanding.
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Collaboration begins with understanding. Like it or not, we have to do what BIM calls "automatic" extraction of drawings from models.
A comparison begs. We cook borscht according to a recipe, throw away the recipe, and then, using complex algorithms, try to extract the recipe (the drawings) from the finished borscht (the models). This is the wrong way around of doing things.
The parametric drawing style is based on the assumption that recipients of the drawings have a professional set of algorithms for drawing analyses and for building mental models based on the analyses’ results.
In practice, this means that drawings should be made so that for each structural element, its parametric description can be restored. The mental object is modeled by calling the appropriate execution procedure associated with the parametric description.
Parametrics Determine Drawing Precision
In many cases, deviations from the image’s scale and accuracy contribute to the readability of drawings and the ease with which they can be adjusted. Consistent adherence to accuracy prevents this, surprisingly enough. The use of parametrics makes the meticulous precision of graphic images meaningless, and so it makes no sense to measure things on drawings. Indeed, the Russian standard prohibits such measurements.
The geometric accuracy of parametric drawings is determined by the accuracy of the values of dimensional parameters. In most cases, editing is limited to adjusting parameters, without affecting the graphic images. (It should be noted that parametric drawings are difficult to read when the proportions of objects are grossly distorted.)
As we see, this contradicts the autocad-style of drawing with its associative dimensions. The autocad style is based on drawing graphic images with tools that ensure great accuracy; the primary method for adjusting drawings is by editing the graphic images as required.
Machine Interpretation of Drawings
When professional algorithms are transferred to a computer, we get the ability to carry out automatic drawing analyses and building a computer model based on the results of the analyses.
A set of drawings can be considered a program written in a professional language — the equivalent of a high-level programming language. The program is compiled as a whole; a machine interpreter of drawings is in fact a compiler. As a result of the compilation, an overall execution procedure is formed, such as an IFC text file. In the end, a computer model is created. Note that the primary method of programming drawings is the step-by-step detailing of objects, better known as top-down design.
How is this different from the traditional way of creating models with 3D modeling software? All of them use a command interpreter as the input interface for 3D modeling. Complex objects are created by assembling pre-prepared components, whether primitives or parts. This technique implements the bottom-up principle; it simulates the construction process and so has nothing to do with planning.
It is clear that for many, assembling a building from cubes is easier and clearer than creating a linguistic description of a building with help of drawings. Unfortunately, except for the model in the computer’s memory, what’s actually needed are models in our heads. A set of drawings is an algorithm of understanding. It is impossible to replace the reading of this algorithm with something else, such as wandering across a computer model.
Crucially, the delineation of legal responsibility within the framework of this algorithm is also not a problem.
Machine Interpretation of Sketches
The parametric style of drawing allowed engineers with blunt pencils on broken-down Kuhlmann drafting machines to create absolutely accurate (not in the autocad sense) drawings. The independence instrumental to parametrics creates the principled opportunity of interpreting freehand sketches and drawings.
The figure below illustrates an example of such an interpretation. The problem is to turn a freehand line (possibly the sketch of a beam) into an accurate two-dimensional model.
Steps in interpreting the freehand line as a beam
Here are the steps involved:
Step 1. Bridge the gap, created by careless sketching. The extent of the gap is insignificant and is not numerically specified.
Step 2. Straighten the curve. The bend radii and the curve deviations from the straight line passing through the curve endpoints are insignificant and not numerically indicated. From this, we deduce that the curve is a straight line segment.
Step 3. Refine the x coordinates of the line’s endpoints. Horizontal deviations of the line’s endpoints from the A-axis and the 6000-dimension extension line are insignificant and so are not numerically specified. The x-coordinate at the line’s left endpoint is equal to xA (xA is the x-coordinate of axis "A"); the x-coordinate of the right endpoint is xA + 6000.
Step 4. Refine the z coordinates of the line’s endpoints. Vertical deviations of the line’s endpoints from the 3.000 elevation’s extension line are insignificant and not numerically specified, as is the inclination angle of the line. The z coordinates of the line’s endpoints are the same, and both are equal to 3000.
We completely restored the parametric description of the object.
Standards for Preparing Drawings
Current rulemaking in the area of preparing drawings stopped trying to combine the Gaspard Monge legacy with the drafting practice of the 1980s. [Mr Monge invented descriptive geometry, which became the basis for technical drawings.] In my opinion, construction drawings in Russia reached their peak in the eighties. From this, progress regressed, as drawings were made with 3D models and autocad styles of drawing.
Arrested development results in degradation, as shown by the figure below comparing Russian state standards from 1980 (top) and 2018 (below).
Drawing styles from 1980 (top) and 2018 (above)
The Grammar of Drawings
Due to the appearance of 3D modeling programs, a question has arisen about teaching descriptive geometry in technical colleges: Is it still relevant? The crisis in descriptive geometry is a consequence of the same misconceptions about drawings as in engineering practice.
Back in the 19th century, drawings were called “the language of technique,” and descriptive geometry was the grammar of this language. In my opinion, the reasons for misunderstanding were these:
Incomplete awareness that drawings have all the properties of the language in a direct, literal sense
The consequences of not fully thinking this through. For instance, if we speak of drawings as text, then it is not clear what accurate projections have to do with the text
Descriptive geometry can and should develop in the direction of machine analysis of drawings: from classical descriptive geometry to parametric (linguistic) descriptive geometry, a kind of analytic geometry.
[Alexander Yampolsky has designed residential, public and industrial buildings, mainly as a structural analyst. He was an early participant (1982) in BIM at the Minuralsibstroy construction ministry of the Russian government, and developed technology for machine interpretation of drawings. Mr Yampolsky is a graduate of Tula State University.]
Notable Quotable
“The CDC said we can leave the Christmas lights up til January.” - Aubrey Strobel
I keep mourning the passing of CAD as a topic interesting enough to keep producing interesting articles about it. It used to be that you didn’t have to look far to find a great technical topic, or a new way to apply CAD tools. On the Solidworks (desktop — do I really have to specify what the name implies?) side of things, for instance, development has been largely uninteresting.
Developments in design technology seem currently focused on 3D printing: improvements in materials, methods, support structures, finer structures, finishes, and machines to go bigger and smaller. The surge in robotics is related to the hardware side of 3D printing, and also is going gangbusters.
Let’s take a look at what general 3D CAD development has achieved in the last decade or so, and then look forward to what we can hope for in the next decade. The big topics CAD developers have tackled include these ones:
Universal file management
Some CAD systems added file management, but others made it less accessible
Is it possible that Solidworks killed off PDM [product data management] as certain individuals were going out the door to create a new venture with built-in data management?
Alternatives to History-based Modeling
T-splines and related technology
Direct/synchronous modeling
Convergent CAD that combines sub-division meshes + NURBS in the same model
i. Sub-d push-pull ii. 3D scan data iii. FEA meshing iv. 3D print meshes v. Generative techniques for shape optimization vi. Medical, dental meshes
Application Delivery and Data Storage Options
First, decentralizing CAD from mainframes to personal computers
Then, centralizing CAD back to cloud servers
4. CAD in a database
Much data these days is kept in a database format; it makes sense, as it provides built-in data management and turns the idea of file management on its head
5. Various 3D Print Integrations (although most 3D printing advances have been in materials and robotics)
Support structures
Moving specialized functions from specialized software into CAD
Not all of these have been ubiquitous, and not all have impacted all CAD users, but most CAD users have access to these solutions when they need them.
Mechanical CAD with 3D scan-and-print has been a great success in specialty areas like medical and dental. If recent wars have an upside, it in the development of next-generation prosthetics, some strictly mechanical, some with newly developed neural interfaces. Scanning and printing have allowed us to customize attachments to individual injuries, quickly replacing and repairing limbs, and even joints.
Big Ticket Disappointments
When it comes strictly to mechanical CAD, I think we’re in a lull period right now. With all these other interesting things to do, the base technology has been forgotten for a while.
At the same time, some of the big ticket items that CAD developers put on the table haven’t really caught on.
Cloud. I think there was an assumption that cloud computing was going to be embraced in the same way that PC CAD was embraced in the 1990s. But it hasn’t. Clearly, it works for some people, but not for everyone.
This tech will catch on eventually, but too many intransigent engineers have too much invested in overly-complex history-based systems, and so haven’t taken the time to understand the real advantages of synchronous modeling.
Where Do We Go Next?
I’ve made predictions about the future of CAD before. I thought engineer-to-order was the next big thing, as would be synchronous modeling. They weren’t. I predicted CAD-in-the-cloud was not going to be the next big thing; so far, this is my closest to a good guess.
And when is A.I. going to show up, or do we not have the piles of unsorted data required to make A.I. successful?
I really hope the idea of converging different types of data keeps developing, as well as mesh manipulation tools for mechanical CAD. There are so many sub-d tools out there that every big CAD developer should buy one just to understand the data type, the tools involved, their usage, and applications of this kind of modeling. We don’t have to re-develop all of this knowledge.
Another thing I hope gets some play are more specialized tools. We already have tools specific to designing sheet metal parts, frames, piping, and in medical fields. I think more needs to be done with plastic, assemblies, resilience, and local design.
Plastics Design. Plastic parts are so hard to design. The outsides are all minute, custom-made details; the insides, that you don’t even see, can be even more difficult to design. We need a series of functional features that can be applied to models. Maybe this requires a special file format just for plastic parts, as with the other specialized techniques.
Plastic designing and manufacturing need to come closer together. The design of the outside shape and mechanical details, and the manufacturing expertise to make individual plastic parts need to be centralized so that a single person can make the decisions about design and manufacturing. Throwing designs over the Great Wall is not going to be a viable solution going forward.
Assembly Design. And we have to do something about assembly design. Right now, it’s a custom approach every time. We need a tool that follows a process for assemblies, and can reuse information on how assemblies go together. Is it rules based? A.I.? Can it somehow learn about different types of joints, closures, and mechanisms?
We need tools that know how to work with horizontal modeling, resilience, top down, layouts, master models — all these are methods that design software should be able to replicate, and even guide you through. We’re at a point where forcing dumb tools to do smart things is just inadequate. Best Practice rules already exist to help people use tools in poorly structured workflows.
Sustainable Design. Beyond software, I’d like to see product development aim to be more durable and reusable, to get away from single-use products, especially in plastics and packaging. As engineers and designers (and, yes, even marketers), we need to have a conscience. Reject bad ideas.
Throw-away products have always been a bad idea, but someone other than the people for whom this is a religious cause needs to stand up and say so. We need to design stuff that endures, and when it doesn’t endure, it needs to be fixable, and when it can’t be fixed, it need to be recyclable. Not that long ago and certainly in my lifetime, we used to have less stuff, but the stuff we had was more valuable. It lasted longer, because it was built and designed with use in mind, rather than crass consumption.
Local Design. Maybe all of this heads back to more employee-owned companies. I don’t think driving the economy with a bunch of disinterested investors is good for anyone, and obviously centrally-managed economies have shown they don’t work. Globalism is a failure.
Certainly we need to learn to do things locally again. The bigger an organization gets (including government), the more corrupt it becomes, the more disconnected it is from the people who make it work, and should be benefiting from it. Stop sending product development and manufacturing to China. Manufacture molds locally again, make microelectronic chips locally again.
These are things I’d like to see in the next decade.
[Matt Lombard has been working with CAD and as an independent product development professional for 30 years. He is the author of eight books on Solidworks and Synchronous Technology. He blogs at dezignstuff.com/about.]
XVL from Lattice Technologies (part owned by Toyota) is an inbetween format that reads files from most 3D CAD programs, then displays them in an XVL viewer, and used for training and parts lists.
XVL can be exported to 3D PDF, Excel, iPads, and so on. As of 2021, it is native on 3Dexperience; back in 2005, Dassault based its 3DXML on Lattice’s XVL. lattice3d.com/company/xvl-technology
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ARES Commander 2022 from Graebert is now in beta, with an emphasis on the 2D processing of Revit and other BIM models, as well as new features for the Touch tablet and Kudo Web versions of the CAD software.
Desktop beta is downloadable initially for Windows and then later in January for MacOS. graebert.com
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Here is one of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
A.I. projects that attempt to replace humans will fail. A.I. projects that attempt to augment humans have a much more likely path to success. - Randall S. Newton (@RSN_Global on Twitter)
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I recently spent a week working with my colleagues at RIB Software improving the UX and UI in our iTWO software, trying to get a commitment between functionality and usability.
I recall Xerox Parc’s Larry Tesler with his “NO MODES” license plate. I prefer one that reads “NO OPTIONS”, as every option in software is a question to which we programmers have no answer. So we transfer the problem to the user.
I have a new car, the most modern German car, chosen on purpose for being the most digitalized model in its size. It is much more similar to my PC than to my previous car.
You must learn how to use it, as it has lots of options for adapting the car to your convenience. Otherwise, don’t buy this car! Do you really need an acoustic signal when you close the doors? Will you remember that there is a setting for entering car washes? What happens when you forget?
And, of course, it has many “MODES,” which affect my driving. After a day of driving it, I asked the salesman how to stop the car from obeying speed limits, as many of them are nonsense. His solution was completely wrong: he unchecked the “Adapt to road conditions” option; he should have turned on “Ignore speed limits,” which is found in a different menu.
The “Adapt to road conditions” option adapts the car’s speed not only to road conditions, but also to your speed setting and to the car in front. (The car knows the road conditions because it has a GPS; when I tell the car my destination, it reduces speeds in curves, and so on.) Should you think this option is turned on, but it is not, you could easily drive off the road.
Thank you for your insight, your knowledge, and your information. - Fernando Valderrama RIB Spain
The editor replies: I buy old used cars to avoid the electronics shoveled into new ones, which I experienced when renting cars.
The worst was a Ford Edge, where even the heating and cooling required adjustment through a touch tablet, several menu levels deep -- followed by precise 0.5-degree temperature changes that required repeated taps while keeping an eye on the road.
Subsequently, Ford admitted they had gone too far in the digitalization of the car’s UI.
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Thanks for your excellent updates, professional dialogues, and information. Even for us non-mechanical guys, it’s valuable. - Michael David Rubin
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Regarding knowledge: I am a huge fan of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, from which we got the term “paradigm shift.”
Regarding interfaces: visiting one of my sons I encountered a fancy toaster with a novel (to me) interface. Push the Toast button and the bread is transported down. As I have aged, I have encountered many puzzling interfaces that were once familiar. Ten-15 years ago I could not open the car window to pay the toll. -Leo Schlosberg
The editor replies: I bought a T-fal toaster, because its designers were featured speakers at a CAD conference. They had slanted the top by 45 degrees, so that we could look into it and see how the toast was coming along. (Turns out I never do that.)
Well, you know the special property of 45 degrees: when the toast is released at 45-degrees, it is launched into the air in an arc to land, most times, on the kitchen floor. Not all design improvements are improvements.
Mr Schlosberg responds: Speaking, as we were, of toasters, a cartoon showed up.
Notable Quotable
“Thankfully, there are still hardware Morlocks* to clean up after the mess the Eloi have made.” - Andrew Orlowski
*) The Time Machine, HG Wells
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine. To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:
With this issue,upFront.eZine takes its annual break to celebrate Christmas, and then returns in the new year. For January, I have the following topics planned:
2 CAD Guys Talk
Solid Edge 2022
Plug-ins or Apps?
See you again on January 10, 2022!
In the meantime, enjoy the best-ever! version of Little Drummer Boy, by For King and Country:
The Complexity of Simplicity
Another in the upFront.eZine series examining complexity
There are a half-dozen or so books that have greatly impacted my thinking. One of the very first was Alan Bloom’s classic The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which launched my decades’-long longing for a better understanding of understanding, and a clearer knowing how we know (epistemology). In brief, Mr Bloom allows us to see that is not necessary to view life through the prism of our culture; it is possible to step outside of it.
Also, he predicted today’s woke bullies by some thirty years.
The book that a year ago really began this upFront.eZine series on complexity in is “Evolution of Scientific Knowledge: From Certainty to Uncertainty” (Edward Dougherty). I didn’t dare review it at the time, as I found it overwhelming. Not to read, but in its breadth. And so a year later, I take a stab at telling you what it’s about.
For a few thousand years now we’ve been trying to understand how we understand. The movie The Matrix popularized the problem: How do we know what we experience (and what we think we know) is truly what is. Or, as Rene Descartes wondered, suppose there is there an evil being fooling us into thinking we exist, when we don’t.
(In Mr Descartes’ case, he figured that if an evil being were fooling us, then we must exist, otherwise why would the evil being bother fooling us? From this, he came up with his famous cogito, ergo sum conclusion that he must exist, if only because he is thinking about these matters.)
While Mr Descartes’ conclusion has since been countered by other thinkers, he nevertheless launched a many centuries effort to explain everything through the portal of rationality. This approach, however, takes us Westerners only so far, and then we hit barriers: not everything can be understood through rational thinking; not all that there is can be known by humans.
And that’s what Mr Dougherty’s book is trying to teach us: we can’t know everything through logic alone. His book as a pretty good introduction to epistemology. He starts with Aristotle with his theories on certainty, and then arrives four chapters later at Bohr, who ruined certainty.
Mr Dougherty’s conclusion is this: although we desire the certainty of deterministic solutions, we’ll have to be satisfied with the vagueness of stochastic models. There is just too much we can’t ever know for sure.
Publisher SPIE considers this book important enough to distribute as a PDF for free, and I recommend it as a start in understanding epistemology.
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The Essence of Software
There’s a reason all cars, toasters, and televisions interface with humans the way that they do. They have, over time, proven to have pretty good interfaces, ones that through practice have made sense to us humans. All toasters have the same interface; as do cars, and so do tvs. To put it more accurately, these interfaces are what humans have come to expect.
Not to belabor the obvious, but when we push down a toaster’s ejector lever, we do so in expectation that the bread will descend into the toaster. Before doing so, we form a mental image of what will happen.
The good thing about cars, toasters, and televisions is that their configuration is relatively inflexible. There isn’t much designers can do to make their operation puzzling to consumers. Not so for software programs and the computers on which they run. They suffer from being just about infinitely flexible.
For computers with large screens, we are blessed to have a standard based on the original prototype developed by Xerox’s famous PARC research facility. For ones with small screens or even no screens, standards also have been developed. For vague concepts like the cloud, standards are still being worked on.
Here’s the problem: a complex standard cannot stand up to customer expectations. A standard makes things uniform, whereas people are not uniform. We each have our own ways of interacting with hardware and software that suits us, but not our neighbor.
One person I know, who has worked with computers for two decades, still has difficulty grasping the Clipboard concept: once he selects an item and press Ctrl+C, it is not obvious to him that pressing Ctrl-V returns the copied item, for the copied item is invisible to him. Interestingly enough, Windows 3.x offered a Clipboard viewer in 1990, while Windows 3 for Networking had a version that allowed copying and pasting between computers. Later, they were removed; not everything advances. It took nearly three decades for Windows 10 to bring back a visual Clipboard history (press Windows+V).
The Great Disconnect
Between the near-infinite variety in the ways by which software programmers can develop their software, and the near-infinite variety in which humans form a mind-image of how software ought to work, there is a great disconnect.
In areas as simple and as frustrating as UX [user experience], should there be more options, or fewer; longer explanations, or shorter ones? Software being unlimited in scope, programmers include more options, and then hide a bunch of them to make it look like there are fewer; provide both longer and shorter explanations.
In “The Essence of Software,” Daniel Jackson explains that the problem isn’t the number of functions; it’s the mental model users adopt, and so users...
Cannot effectively use functions that exist
Assume the functions they need don’t exist, and so do not actively seek them out
Be nervous of making serious mistakes, and so use a tiny subset of functions
And, in the most severe case, suffer loss of data
In short, the users’ mental model is incompatible with the programmer’s mental model.
The cloud makes the disconnect worse. Files that at one time were securely located on one’s computer might or might not still be there. Mr Jackson describes how design flaws in Google Docs and Dropbox cause people to lose files.
The immediate solution that springs to mind — education — is a partial solution for the same reason: Everyone learns differently. “If only there was a book I could buy,” my mother-in-law sighs.
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Evolution of Scientific Knowledge: From Certainty to Uncertainty by Edward Dougherty 155 pages PDF; free ISBN 9781510607354 spie.org/samples/9781510607361.pdf
The Essence of Software: Why Concepts Matter for Great Design by Daniel Jackson 336 pages, of which nearly half are notes Hardcover; US$29.95 ISBN 9780691225388 essenceofsoftware.com
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A problem in 3D printing is distortion. Parts sag as gravity pulls down on not-yet hardened material; as heated material cools down, it can warp. The solution is to print the part, measure the distortion, and then edit the model. In this regard, Riven has a new Warp-Adapted-Model function that uses full-part 3D data to identify errors in printing, and then produces a new corrected model in minutes that eliminates warp. riven.ai
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IntelliCAD Technology Consortium releases IntelliCAD 10.1a to its member companies, featuring the following improvements:
Siemens lands a replacement contract with Hyundai-Kia, as the car makers switch to NX and Teamcenter for engineering design and product data management. The press release does not name the incumbent; in 2011, Hyundai-Kia implemented Windchill PLM from PTC.
Currently, and so far, Tangerine has no funding for developing TGN as I’ve specified and proposed it as an API, to be made openly available and encouraged for implementation in all 3D digital modeling environments/apps/platforms.
But hope springs eternal. Perhaps willing partners will make themselves known and TGN can move from idea to reality. - Rob Snyder, developer of TNG rigs (via Linkedin)
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My issue with “BIM” is that it tries to be way too many things all at once. Trying to add render-quality components to a model, which already is overblown because of all the data contained, can really explode productivity and file sizes.
I prefer using a much more “hub and spoke” approach. Data is linked to objects in the model, rather than being fully contained in the model. Render-quality components are substituted when renderings are done. In that same manner, construction documents are extracted from the model, and then embellished externally.
What’s often missing is the advantages the model has for external generation of these of parts of the project. Why aren’t details requested or pulled from a library when the model has two different types of wall meet? Or two different types of floor material? There’s much which could be developed for the overall workflow if there wasn’t the need for everything being contained within a model and within a single application. - Dave Edwards, editor PragArchDesignTech newsletter
The editor replies: The dream of BIM was that it indeed would contain all information necessary to design and construct a building. But, as we are seeing, the complexity of the dream is overwhelming us and our hardware/software systems.
I think that one fear BIM vendors have is that, by allowing links to external data sources and apps, they lose monopolistic control of their customers.
Mr Edwards responds: If vendors would just open up their applications so that databases could be linked to unique Component Object Indexes, there’s a ton of things which could be done externally long before they are implemented in the software.
Notable Quotable
“For an app to be secure, you need to trust the hardware, the operating system, the software, the update mechanism, the login mechanism, and on and on and on. If one of those is untrustworthy, the whole system is insecure. - Bruce Schneier
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Joel Gregory (small company donation)
Name withheld by request (small company donation)
To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:
Issue #1,115 | Inside the Business of CAD | 29 November 2021
The problem with 3D models, especially ones with high LODs [levels of detail] like of skyscrapers or aircraft, is that the detail overwhelms us. Rob Snyder notes that focusing attention is the role of 2D drawings we generate from 3D models. But 2D plans, elevations, and details fail to provide immediate context: where are these elevations and floor plans in the 3D model, other than by cross-referencing them with section callouts (as illustrated below)?
A floorplan referenced through section callout 1-1 (image source Autodesk)
So, Mr Snyder developed a focusing assistant, called TGN rigs. Rigs return the focus back to the 3D model through a UI and an API. Rigs lets you see, for instance, elevations in the context of the 3D model.
The key to his rigs is the viewing arc (in red, in the figure below). Arcs guide you to specific parts of the model.
Viewing arc in red, view cube in green, stops along the way in blue
You can specify different kinds of visual styles and viewpoints along the arc. For instance, the blue square in the figure above specifies an elevation section (as shown below), where the view filter is set to Section Elevation and the display style to Blueprint, with a markup added manually.
This stop along the viewing arc shows the 3D model in elevation
A second, horizontal timeline lets you specify properties of the view, such as changes of style (like “Blueprint”) and filtering, such as “Glass Off”.
A project could have many TGN rigs. They look like display cubes (in green in the figure below). Clipping planes are optional; click on a face of the cube to toggle specific clipping planes.
You drag a handle to rotate the view along the path from p1 to p3, during which elements can explode or implode, or even show assembly animations. (The square at p2 indicates a parallel projection at this point.) So, while a 2D drawing is static, the TNG rig is interactive.
Viewing arc (left) with its settings (right)
Viewing arcs can be shaped just like an arc, or tilted in space, or S-shaped. TGN includes a library of default viewing arcs.
Every rig has a name, such as “Section Elevation,” and hosts settings that specify the GUID [globally unique identifier], a link to the model source, model motions, graphical styles, sound toggles, and so on. Some of these are dependent on the software. Rigs are stored in TRE files and can be shared through social media.
Mr Snyder writes, “Digital 3D modeling, as it is used in the design and construction industry (and similar industries), has obvious and great value. However, decades of evidence show that its value is commonly overstated, and that the farther one travels down the path established so far for BIM (or for digital twins), the farther one gets from utility, and the closer one is drawn into a never-ending slough through the muck, the purpose of which seems to be only some kind of competition to see who is more macho.”
He describes two limitations imposed by today’s massive 3D models:
As models are wide and expansive things, they surpass our human ability to wrap our minds around them.
Models by themselves provide no means by which we can assert and affirm that at any particular location that what should be shown there is shown there, and that nothing that matters is missing from there.
Mr Snyder hopes that many CAD vendors will take on his API, to make the attention focusing tool broadly available. tangerinefocus.com
And in Other News
nTopology, who we’ve talked about before, lands a fourth series of funding ($65 million), bringing the total to $135 million to further develop its generative design software for 3D printing, which TechCrunch generously described as “The company effectively offers CAD software.” ntopology.com
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SolidSpac3 debuts SolidSpac3 QA/QC [quality assurance, quality control] analysis and reporting system for commercial construction sites. It compares 2D and 3D models with construction site laser scans, identifying construction errors and problems within 24 hours. www.solidspac3.com
CADLine is offering 15% off permanent licences to its ARCHline.XP line of software until, um, today (Nov 29). As the company puts it, “Say NO to forced software subscription pricing. We offer perpetual licenses — now with 15% off. Pay once, use forever.” archlinexp.com/buy
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Meanwhile, Allplan reminds us that “Section 179 allows businesses to reduce their tax obligation by deducting software (including Allplan) purchased or financed during the tax year.” The email blast does not, however, tell us in which country. (It’s USA. But similar deductions are available in some other countries, too.) info.allplan.com/us_en/tax-deduction-section-179
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AgaCAD is cutting 50% or 30% off the prices of all their perpetual licenses until Christmas Eve for their Revit solutions, like the Smart Assemblies add-on. Get the deets at agacad.com/blog/thank-you-offer-2021
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Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
It’s interesting that technical challenges/opportunities that I explored back in the ’80s are still relevant today, if not moreso. You know that old saying, “The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.” - John Callen
On the almost $500 price on that mouse: as I understand it, a vendor may sometimes jack up the price to a “nobody will pay this” level to preserve the product listing, rather than removing it altogether. The in-stock status (in China) may be more aspirational than real. - Rich Webb (via WorldCAD Access)
Re: Flooding
So sorry to hear of your flooding troubles. Sadly, no stranger to disastrous flooding here in Houston. - Becky Stevens
Notable Quotable
“In the end, the term metaverse will be nothing but a bunch of incompatible messy digital constructs from visions of companies who have no idea what exactly it does to improve human life.” - Avadiax
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Talenting Investments (small business donation)
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Issue #1,114 | Inside the Business of CAD | 22 November 2021
C3D Labs produces kernel software, and so can be considered a competitor of Parasolid/D-Cubed (from Siemens) and Spatial from Dassault Systemes.
The C3D kernel was originally developed 25 years ago by ASCON Group for their KOMPAS-3D solid modeler, but then a decade ago spun off the kernel group as an independent company, C3D Labs. The company has been very aggressive at building out functions, such as its new programmable F-curves.
The company has held an annual conference for a while now, but in Russian. Given the modern switch to Zooming conferences, this year it was held in English. (See figure below.)
C3DevCon being broadcast live from St Petersburg
Oleg Zykov, ceo of C3D Labs, reported during his keynote address that the company is doing well, having hired nine more employees and released updates to C3D Toolkit in 2020 and 2021 on time.
The company offers its programming toolkit with five modules for developing software in the areas of MCAD, BIM, CAM, and so on. Each can be used on its own, or together with the others:
C3D Modeler — geometric kernel
C3D Solver — parametric solver
C3D Vision — visualization engine
C3D Converter — data exchange
C3D B-Shaper — polygon mesh to b-rep converter
There are two more modules that C3D is releasing, C3D FairCurve Modeler and C3D Web Vision.
During the conference, customers described how they deployed C3D’s modules, including professor Rushan Ziatdinov of industrial engineering in South Korea (see figure below).
Rushan Ziatdinov describing how C3D FairCurve Modeler works
The C3D kernel has displaced other kernels in nanoCAD, Altium, VR Concept, and so on. It is used by developers at LEDAS Group and is available to members of the Open Design Alliance. c3dlabs.com/en
Thank you to friends and readers checking in to see how we are doing during what is now called “Canada’s worst natural disaster” with thousands displaced by flooding, all Canadian roads out of here cut, and Canada's largest port in Vancouver isolated. The flooding was the result of a tremendous rainstorm last Sunday and Monday, along with warmer temperatures melting snow.
Here is a picture I took last Monday morning of a pedestrian bridge in our local park in which we go for walks. Normally, the water goes under the bridge.
Wrong-way creek
It’s weird: Thousands are stranded by mudslides and wrecked bridges or forced out of homes by flooding. For the other couple of million living in this region, life is normal, other than grocery stores running low on some food staples, gasoline being rationed, and we having to take detours around closed roads.
Restrictions on some grocery items and maximum fills of 30 litres of gasoline
The reason for life being mostly normal is due to our region’s agricultural farmland retention policy: most homes in our region are built on non-agricultural land, which means higher up, and so farms primarily inhabit the flood-prone flat lands, as this aerial photo of flooding at the Watcom interchange of the Trans Canada Highway amply illustrates.
Flooding at the Watcom interchange of the Trans Canada Highway in east Abbotsford, Canada
The unknown is the longer-term impact. While mudslides are being cleared (one highway is already reopened to one-way traffic), the broken bridges on the critical Coquihalla and Trans-Canada freeways will take weeks to get replaced by temporary bridges and then years to fully replace.
Two of the bridges destroyed by flood waters on the Coquihalla freeway
The immediate solution is to work on bringing in goods (food and fuel) through the USA, with which our region has four border crossings and two rail crossings. We are, however, not the EU, so things don’t pass effortlessly between the two countries.
And in Other News
Contact Software launches a new version of its low-code Elements platform for handling digital business processes end-to-end.
Here is one example of its use: If your firm know that parts will have to be replaced at some point in the future due to new DIN standards, then you can define until-when or from-when parts are valid. The new validity takes effect automatically on the specified date, and also updates the parts list. contact-software.com/en/products/integration-platform
It is striking how both Hexagon and Bricsys seem to completely stonewall any mention, or awareness of, photogrammetric reality capture as an essential complement to acquisition by point cloud.
Other firms in the reality capture/digital twins arena, such as Bentley Systems and Autodesk, have a foot firmly in both camps. Point cloud seems to have reached maturity as an expensive technology, while photogrammetry continues to evolve (and democratize) by leaps and bounds. How long can Bricsys ignore photogrammetry? - Tom Foster Tom Foster Architecture
The editor replies: I don’t know that they are ignoring it. BricsCAD has the ability to place images and maps from a variety of sources.
Mr Foster responds: That’s not photogrammetry. Photogrammetry is taking hundreds or thousands of photos of the subject, such as with programs like capturingreality.com.
They identify same object in several images, thus triangulate the object’s 3D position, hence create a 3D model of the subject as a surface mesh (not points), which can optionally be wallpapered with fragments of the JPGs for a solid-looking, photorealistic model, which can be rotated and viewed from any angle.
Photogrammetric models are an alternative to point cloud models. Each is best for different purposes or different kinds of subject. Hybrids using both techniques are possible.
Photogrammetry is widely used in the construction industry. Bentley, for example came to photogrammetry first, then added point clouds later. Bricsys under the influence of Leica has so far done it the other way round. As with point clouds, Bricsys needn’t do the processing in-house (which Bentley does), but can reprocess/display/integrate various proprietary formats of external programs.
Notable Quotable
“Saturday is an adaptive cross-functional work/leisure hybrid day.” - Management Speak (@managerspeak on Twitter)
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Nick Busigin
3dbrains Pte Ltd (small business donation)
To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:
Issue #1,113 | Inside the Business of CAD | 15 November 2021
Re: The State of STEP
Man, that first paragraph was an eye-opener for me!
I worked in the field of MCAD for US Navy surface fleet (new construction and overhaul) starting around 1984. Most general design was still 2D on Mylar film mostly using E0 mechanical pencils. The Navy would not allow any contracts to be done on MCAD until 1985, which were relegated to very specific pilot projects. In 1986 they expanded that to CADAM, Autotrol, and about two others. By 1987, they added Intergraph, Computervision and a few UNIX workstation platforms ( before then, it was all mainframe).
Around the time AutoCAD Release 10 shipped in 1988, the folks in NAVSEA issued a letter to contractors that IBM PC-based systems were not considered accurate or reliable enough for modeling design. But they would allow its use for non-design work, such as title sheets, BOM lists, and notes. After a year of that stupidity, they relented, and by 1990-91 we couldn’t move to PC-based AutoCAD fast enough. As we routinely shared model data with other contracts (forcibly by the Navy, and for good reason), we were all in the same situation.
The period from 1996 to 2004 was a fun time. Writing custom apps to run on AutoCAD to automate things was one of the best times of my career. The old “wild west” of CAD is now a suburban subdivision with shopping centers. I left the field in 2004 to transition to Windows systems admin work and Web development.
Oh, and about IGES and STEP. I remember when all the buzz was around STEP support for each of the MCAD products. They would “support” it alright, but almost always made sure to have some feature or data that was so specific to their product that STEP would lose it when importing into competing products.
I was on a committee once for a government agency doing round-trip integrity testing. We would build a reference model in 2D and another in 3D, then export/import through everything they had at the time — IGES, STEP, DXF, and so on — and then score the results to rank products as being most compatible. That era seems like the 1800s now. - David Stein
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Interesting about STEP. In the ’90s I worked for the Industrial Technology Institute in Ann Arbor MI. Its Center for Electronic Commerce did early STEP work and built early tools for conformance testing of CAD systems to STEP.
Famously, one of my colleagues authored a report citing a Detroit-based automotive supplier that had to manage 17 or 18 different CAD systems to deal with all of their customer relationships.
The number of solutions is fewer today, but the problems remain and it is a tough problem. It is hard to innovate within the bounds of standards, which often lag technology and business process. - Stan Przybylinski, vice president CIMdata
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In the construction industry, we have the same problem of data transfer, with possibly a wider range of conflicting needs (or maybe I am just more familiar with construction than mechanical).
While IFC has ruled the roost for the last decade, it is showing its limitations. It is optimized for transferring physical data and some metadata, especially architectural, but has proved hopeless for transferring engineering design data. Yes, it could be extended, but it has taken two decades of argument and compromise to get to its current state and we cannot afford to wait.
Any transfer of data is done so that it can be enriched, but also (invariably) some data must be left behind. The CNC machine, for example, has no interest in the wind pressure on the facade that led to the design of the bracing, only the resulting number and locations of bolt holes.
Similarly, each program has its specialties, which a neutral file can not be expected to handle. Neither IFC nor STEP can possibly handle all project data, ever, without bloating to an impractical size, and without decades of more committees. They will always be behind what the industry needs, and can only be expected to transfer most of the data, not all.
Due to the limitations of IFC and because most engineering design programs now have an API [application programming interface], data exchange systems are being used more and more, especially by the bigger consulting companies. At Arup, we helped to produce Speckle[for exchanging AEC data in real-time], which is open source so that it is free to grow as needed. There are other, similar offerings.
The BIM [building information modeling] ideal of a centralized database is becoming a reality, but is not centered on IFC, as that, by necessity, can never store everything. Instead we now have federated databases, where each product stores its specific data, and then products like Speckle transfer and coordinate what data is needed between the individual consultant models.
IFC might still be used for transferring data to models outside the system. What was BIM is now becoming digital workflows. - Peter Debney, senior consultant Arup Digital Technology
The editor replies: When Autodesk released AutoCAD Release 13, they added the ability to create custom (user-defined) objects. This made AutoCAD incompatible with itself, and so Autodesk provided two solutions:
Object enablers, which understand what custom objects are. This approach failed to catch on industry-wide, as every DWG editor would conceivably need every object enabler ever written.
IFC, which transmits data between incompatible AutoCAD drawings in the form of neutral format. Autodesk quickly handed responsibility for maintaining IFC to an industry group, and then in a reversal earlier this year joined the IFC part of the Open Design Alliance.
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I was gobsmacked by the upFront.eZine article on STEP files. I write a monthly column for The Fabricator that dances around CAD topics. Your article with Martin and Neil on STEP is a gold mine of interesting and possibly useful trivia regarding same.
I remain devoted to Solidworks. It’s been the tool I’ve know for a quarter-century. Scanning heresy of other brands of CADs is useful and keeps me humble. - Gerald Davis, owner GLD Designs
The editor replies: My entry into the world of CAD was AutoCAD v1.4, and then writing about it in CADalyst magazine, starting in 1985. When Intergraph ran an ad with CADalyst headlined “Follow the Leader,” we were gobsmacked. Other CAD dare say that? As you note, it is important to peer above the ramparts from time to time.
Mr Davis responds: We punched paper tape with a PDP-8. My first CAM was OptiPlot running on a Textronix vectorscope. My first CAD was AutoCAD v2.5 running on a Tandy 2000. Color! Luxury. When I saw Solidworks 98 my love of wireframes vanished. My excellent keyboard shortcut skills gave way to yanking a 3D puck.
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Isicad has translated your recent posts about STEP and the ODA Summit into Russian:
I have been dealing with CAD conversion for over 40 years and for many years was a member of the IGES/PDES Organization. I led the development of the IGES converter for CATIA V5 as a joint Boeing/Dassault project in 1986.
In those days we referred to IGES and other formats as “write-only formats,” because converters from CAD companies were good about writing proper IGES (or PDES) files but were horrible at reading other CAD systems IGES files.
The marketing groups of the various CAD companies liked to talk about how good their “round trip” conversions were — going from CAD system A to IGES and then back to the same CAD system A. What they were bad at was going from CAD system A to IGES to CAD system B.
That was infinitely more important, and they were usually pretty poor at that job. At times, it seemed intentional. When I formed Tailor Made Software in 1990, most of our business for the first several years was in IGES flavoring: taking the flavor of IGES produced by CAD system A and massaging it so CAD system B could read it properly. - Scott Taylor, president Tailor Made Software
Re: From Facets to Solids to Facets
The period of time that I was at Evans & Sutherland (’81-’91) really could be seen as the golden years of the computer graphics industry. So much technology was being developed that never really saw the light of day (at least not at E&S). I’m sure this is true with many other companies, but E&S barely gets a mention in most histories of computer graphics or modeling systems.
Dave Evans should really be considered the Father of the Digital Twin. His vision for E&S was to create digital models that would allow you to do things that you normally couldn’t do in real life cost-effectively, like pilot training, mechanical design and analysis, and molecular modeling.
E&S’s graphics systems were only developed because there were no systems capable of displaying the various models. There was a famous ‘Fireside Chat with Dave’ where he announced to the company that “E&S was not a computer graphics company,” totally confusing most employees. He later explained to me his vision of creating digital models, which totally jives with his statement. - John Callen, Director of eTools Marketing Lutron Electronics
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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 lansd@okino.com.
EngineeringPaper.xyz solves complex mathematical expressions through documentation cells and math cells, while keeping track of units conversion. To display results in different units, specify them in square brackets. Also, it plots.
You can share your sheets with others through shareable links. Try it out free at engineeringpaper.xyz.
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Agacad comes up with Panel Packer in Revit 2020-2021 for sorting, packing, and loading trucks with prefabricated wood and metal panels. Free demo at agacad.com/products/tools4bim/dock/download.
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IronCAD LLC ships IronCAD 2022 today, and here is some of what’s been added:
Place multiple ordinate dimension at once, and edit more than one dimension at a time
Specify snap increments on parts, and set limits to sizes
Generate structured bills of materials with collapse/expand sections
This 3D design software pioneered concepts common today, such as drag and drop smart parts and 3D at-cursor interactions. IronCAD is most popular among metal fabricators and custom machinery manufacturers. A free trial version is available, following registration, from ironcad.com/free-online-trial.
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The Spatial division of Dassault Systems announced the general availability of Release 2022 1.0 of its geometric kernels. Just skimming the surface, here is one thing new for each module:
3D ACIS Modeler extracts sheet bodies at mid-surfaces between faces of solid bodies
CGM Polyhedra smoothly blends between boundaries of two meshes
CGM Modeler automatically detect cylindrical bends and then unbends them
3D InterOp imports large-scale models whose dimensions range from 1 to 100km
3D Precise Mesh’s Hybrid CFD mixes prismatic and hexahedral elements in boundary layers
SimScale, the first engineering simulation cloud platform, lands an extra €25 million in Series C funding (now totaling US$60 million) so as to add rotating machinery, electronics, and automotive simulations. The press release says the firm has 300,000+ users. www.simscale.com
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Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
Issue #1,112 | Inside the Business of CAD | 8 November 2021
Guest Editorial by John Callen
In the upFront.eZinearticle on Solid Edge 2022, Dan Staples makes the following comment: “I do think [convergent modeling] is a final frontier here, because meshes for a long time were the domain of the film industry and character modeling.”
It turns out that faceted models were the very first b-rep [boundary representation] structures, referenced in 1977 by CMU’s GLIDE, a polygonal modeler.
The Start of It All
GLIDE stands for “graphical language for interactive design” and was a research program in the architecture department at Carnegie Mellon University. The GLIDE program was funded by the Army Corps of Engineers who wanted a system to model their various facilities.
It was headed up by Chuck Eastman, who is generally acknowledged as the father of BIM [building information modeling]. Kevin Weiler, who originated non-manifold topology b-reps as his PhD thesis at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was one of the members of Eastman’s GLIDE team. I was a member of the GLIDE team 1979-1981, where I was responsible for implementing the Euler operations from the original BDS [Building Design System], which were written in BLISS, to GLIDE’s Pascal.
Defining polyhedrons with GLIDE
GLIDE was an extension to the higher-level programming language, Pascal. Solid modeling operations were incorporated into an interpretive version of the programming language. Procedural constructors were developed to model aspects of buildings.
GLIDE pre-dated non-polygonal surface representations. Booleans were performed with the faceted representation; the intersection code was relatively straight forward. Later on, b-rep modelers introduced non-polygonal surface types.
GLIDE subtracting polyhedrons (left) to arrive at a new shape (right).
Romulus. Being developed in parallel to GLIDE was Ian Braid’s BUILD project at Cambridge University in the UK, another b-rep program. The BUILD research was commercially spun off into Shape Data, which was the precursor to ACIS and Parasolid.
Romulus introduced analytics and had discrete intersection routines to do surface/surface intersection calculations based on surface type.
Only later were NURBS surfaces introduced and there was a big debate over whether analytics should be converted to NURBS equivalents and all intersections done in NURBS — or whether to continue to maintain the discrete surface types for precision and efficiency.
Performance and Interactivity
Kepler. After graduating from CMU, I joined the Kepler project at Evans & Sutherland. Kepler was an application development environment front-end to Romulus that provided a design space, giving designers a degree of interactivity not possible with solid modelers at the time. (Kepler really wasn’t an acronym; the project lead chose the name due to the historical individual’s role in astronomy.) Objects were built in the Kepler environment, and then the corresponding modeling commands were passed to Romulus to instantiate the design, often taking many minutes to calculate on a DEC VAX 780 mini-computer.
When the Kepler project’s proof-of-concept was completed, it was decided to no longer pursue the approach.
D-Cubed. Shape Data Ltd was the company that originated Romulus and later Parasolid. John Owen at Shape Data developed his dimensional constraint technology, which is the basis of D-Cubed . It can trace its roots to the earlier D/T-D [dimension/tolerance-draughting] work in Romulus.
After Kepler, I ended up relocating to Shape Data and led a project to implement encoding dimensions and tolerances in Romulus and automatically generating engineering drawings, easily a decade or more before PMI. The D/T-D function was released with Romulus v5.2.
During a design review I had with Bob Sproull, Bob pointed out that the D/T-D framework we had implemented in Romulus could be extended to be a parametric modeling system.
The company, unfortunately, had some very strong positions on how a solid modeler ought to be used and, as a result, did not realize advances like parametric modeling and PMI when they presented themselves. The D/T-D function was later removed from Romulus.
Evans & Sutherland was a distributor of Romulus, and then later acquired Shape Data. This was just the first of a long series of acquisitions passing Shape Data from one company to another, ultimately ending up at Siemens.
ACIS. The managing directors of Shape Data split off to form Three-Space Ltd, the company that created ACIS.
The Continual Development of Representations
Gradually, b-rep modelers expanded their geometry classes to support analytics (cylinders, spheres, toroids, and so on), and eventually a variety of surface representations, such as NURBS.
Facets became the primary method of representing scenes in image generation, such as for flight simulators, where the image generation pipeline was built on facets for performance. This need for image generation performance then moved over to the film industry and character modeling. Highly detailed visuals required many, many facets, though. Eventually facets were replaced by texture maps with which image generation reached new levels of realism.
Non-manifold topology (NMT) b-reps introduced the next level of representation, which allowed for interim Boolean results to exist (but not necessarily persist). ComputerVision’s Liberator project of the early 1990s, headed up by Gary Crocker, implemented NMT and supported mixed model representations — wires, sheets, and solids. An example was a chair with wire legs, sheet back, and a solid box seat.
Unfortunately, a real-world application never materialized. At one point, I proposed that NMT be used to model machineable models and associated machining processes, but CAD companies were only focused on design, not manufacturing.
Meshes are again making a resurgence with 3D printing. Again, this is based on the basic technology used to process STL files for 3D printing. By the way, most CAM systems operate off of a faceted representation. This is, again, due to the nature of the algorithms not operating directly off of the source geometry and the fundamental geometry of most CNC controllers, which are predominantly lines and arcs. The ability to specify NURBS curves to a controller is a fairly recent and limited advancement.
Defining a spiral staircase with GLIDE
Interestingly enough, it seems that modeling systems cover the two representation extremes (b-reps and facets), but to my knowledge have pretty much skipped over cellular (homogeneous or adaptive) representations, such as voxels [3D pixels] and dexels [depth pixels]. These are gaining some pickup through today’s scanning and 3D printing technologies.
Through all this time, it has been interesting to see the advances on-going in modeling technology. Probably the most compelling is advancing the model beyond just a geometric representation, but also encoding all the corresponding product data. Who knows where this all will lead? Maybe someday geometric tolerances might be encoded in the solid model similar to how RESABS [numeric precision] and RESNOR [angular resolution in ACIS] are maintained.
- - -
There is so much that isn’t known about the early days of the industry. And there was so much shelved back in the day, because the hardware wasn’t up to it. Imagine if someone dusted off that stuff and migrated it to today’s hardware so that, as the saying goes, “Everything old is new again.”
[John Callen is an architect by training, and spent his 40-year career in marketing and engineering positions at high-tech companies. Much of his career was with mechanical design and manufacturing systems, and now he has returned to his architecture roots as Director of eTools Marketing at Lutron Electronics.]
And in Other News
Companies like PTC and Facebook just know that moving to the next level of abstraction gives them an advantage over competitors. They’ll be spending years and billions on Atlas and Metaverse. Companies should understand what their core is, according to Daniel Jackson.
They’ll fail, because full MCAD doesn't belong on the cloud and people don’t wear shoes on their faces. Better technology is not better humaneness. As technology becomes more abstract, Romanticism is the natural backlash.
Take, for example, the natural technological superiority of ebook readers over dead-tree books: even so, ebook titles now cost more, and the digital format is sinking in popularity to paper.
- - -
Cubic Orb’s plugins for land surveying work with most CAD programs, including those based on AutoCAD, IntelliCAD, ARES, Microstation, BricsCAD, and TurboCAD:
KaliBro - georeferences, edits, manages raster images in CAD
GeoView - operates on sets of coordinates in CAD
Wms2Cad - displays maps from WMS/TMS and WMTS services
TranMap - transforms CAD drawings between coordinates systems
And more.
Demo versions are available to download at cubicorb.com.
- - -
Lantek celebrated its 35th anniversary and reported that Q3 sales of its machining software were 30% higher than a year earlier. It has big plans for the future: increase R&D spending by 70% (from what, we don’t know), and adding 130 more employees from the current 260. www.lantek.com
- - -
Open Design Alliance adds a validation engine for IFC [Industry Foundation Classes] files to its SDK [Software Development Kit]:
Performs multi-level validation on IFC models
Customizable for a range of tasks
Supports simple low-level syntax checking
Custom validation defined in IFC files
Higher-level checking specified by the IDS [Information Delivery Specification] and MVD [Model View Definition] standards from buildingSMART.
The validator is part of Open IFC Viewer v22.9, which is available free from openifcviewer.com.
You wrote that the BricsCAD acquisition was “For Hexagon to get deeper into the AEC space.” Did you choose not to comment on this, to give us readers time to mull this over?
I’m interested in knowing what you think about that statement. It's been three years since the acquisition [of Bricsys by Hexagon] and nothing has really jumped out at us yet. - Name withheld by request
The editor replies: Here is my initial take on the statement. From what I see (I am a beta tester of BricsCAD), Hexagon is putting a lot into BricsCAD, and that is the good news.
Hexagon’s origin is in CCM [computer coordinate measurement], which is a post-MCAD process, so they don’t have experience in AEC [architecture, engineering, construction]. They see BricsCAD as the path to entering the market, surrounded by all their other products, like point cloud acquisition and plant design software
Their mirror is Trimble, which started with surveyor’s equipment and is also trying to get into AEC, starting with the acquisition of SketchUp nearly a decade ago. We’re not, however, seeing any impact on the industry, as SketchUp is not a great entry point for a corporation trying to target a discipline dominated by Vectorworks, ArchiCAD, and Revit; SketchUp began as conceptual design software, not as design design software.
BricsCAD has a reasonable chance of making an impact in AEC, but continues to suffer from the same problem it’s always had: lack of mindshare.
I would say the most important aspect of BricsCAD is that it also works as a DWG platform, which is why the CADWorx division of Hexagon fostered the acquisition of BricsCAD in the first place. I am watching to see if BricsCAD-as-platform spreads to other areas of Hexagon, keeping in mind that Hexagon already owns several other CAD packages.
Re: Rådgivende Ingeniørers Forening
Your conclusion could also be “forming purchasing pools” to buy stock in the design software companies, because those companies listen far more to shareholders than to users.
I would guess that the Norwegian government has sentiments similar to the RIF, so perhaps they could pool resources to buy a larger share of Autodesk stock, which would give them a louder voice in how things work at that company. - Peter Lawton
The editor replies: Good idea, but.
There have been suggestions in that past that users buy up a majority of ADSK stock, but that would never happen. Sovereign wealth funds do not interfere with the running of companies.
Mr Lawton responds: Some of the stock-purchase suggestions to which you refer have come from me, as I have been championing that cause for the past 15 years, at least. 😎
However, to state flatly that it ‘would never happen’ is rather defeatist and I would respectfully submit that big companies count on that very attitude to continue to get away with being poor corporate citizens. “What are those two million frustrated users gonna do about (our latest rip-off maneuver), hunh? Fire the board?!”
Well, if those two million frustrated users are also shareholders, the board will be far less dismissive of our requests. Does that make sense? Not everyone connects those dots.
It will take time, perhaps a decade, but if enough of Autodesk’s corporate victims pool enough resources to purchase a significant portion of Autodesk stock, the company will have to listen.
Also, it may be true that sovereign wealth funds don’t deliberately ‘interfere’ with corporate governance, but they do influence it, if only by virtue of their purchase of stock. If RIF writes a letter to Autodesk, and Norway’s SWF (in conjunction with RIF) is holding 5% of shares (about $3.4B today, or 2.6% of the SWF), how do you think Autodesk will react? It’s just a matter of time and money, and there are many parties interested in getting Autodesk to change its ways. All those parties need is organization and patience.
Notable Quotable
“A model is not evidence. It is a theory expressed in arithmetic terms.” - John Hinderaker
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Stephen Schuller
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Issue #1,111 | Inside the Business of CAD | 1 November 2021
There was no need, in the early days of mechanical CAD, to exchange files. MCAD was rare enough that it did not matter that systems were incompatible. But by 1976, MCAD had become common enough for the US Air Force to demand a way to reduce costs associated with moving files from the design floor to manufacturing contractors. The solution was found in a common format named “initial graphics exchange specification” — IGES, for short.
From IGES to PDES to STEP
IGES became verbose and unwieldy as over time it supported more and more data types specific to the increasing number of MCAD systems. In Germany, the automotive industry came up with its own widespread standard for exchanging surface data of the skins of automobiles, VDA-FS. What was needed as a modern replacement.
So the IGES Steering Committee began work on a new file format, PDES (product data exchange specification), to do a better job at defining an all-encompassing format: “PDES is envisioned to support all aspects of product description, from initial conception through product design, manufacture, support, and disposal,” said the US Department of Commerce, sounding a lot like PLM today.
In 1985, the committee contributed PDES to an ISO initiative that was creating a universal file format flexible enough to handle “anything from a microchip to a battleship.” This became known as STEP, the “STandard for the Exchange of Product model data.”
STEP was an extensible format, one that could be extended as new technology came along. It handles inheritances, such as a spoke inheriting the properties of the steel wheel in which it resides. Definitions are determined by an object-oriented data programming language, EXPRESS.
The first release of STEP came out in 1995. Sometimes you also see it referred to as “AP203” (short for application protocol level 2). Today, STEP consists of 800 standards (see figure below), of which four are for end users, with the remainder a library of reusable definitions.
To learn where STEP is headed next, I spoke with Martin Hardwick, CEO of STEP Tools, and Neil Peterson, president of the Open Design Alliance.
STEP for Machining
The original purpose of IGES was to make it easier for manufacturers, like General Electric, to deal with 3D models arriving from suppliers using incompatible MCAD file formats. The process looked like this, and today still looks a lot like this:
CAD operator makes drawings with no regard for the manufacturing process
CAM operator designs the manufacturing process
Postprocessor in CAM software generates the G-code that instructs the machine
CNC operator closely supervises the machining to make sure the initial parts were made correctly
The desire today is to go direct from CAD to CNC, Martin Hardwick told me.
CAD operator makes the 3D model suitable for manufacturing
Postprocessor in CAD makes the STEP-NC file
CNC machine uses STEP-NC for automated, optimized machining (see figure below)
STEP has been extended to parts machining, where it is known as STEP-NC (numerical control):
AP238 version 1 for precision machining (2005)
AP238 version 2 for precision assembly (last year)
It was the addition of AP242e2 tolerances that allowed STEP to expand into automated manufacturing. When you know the tolerances that manufacturing needs to meet, you can machine parts to those tolerances. Before this, machines controls worked blindly, not knowing what was allowed.
A NIST-created test file showing AP242 presentation and semantic geometric tolerances
There is complexity inherent in CAM. “Before, the operator figured it out; now software has to be rewritten to figure it out,” said Mr Hardwick. The change means a massive rewrite of CAM software, something not all firms can afford. Partly as a result of this industry change, many CAM firms — like Cimitron, GibbsCAM, MasterCAM, SigmaNEST, and Vericut — have in recent years sold themselves to larger companies, like Sandvik.
Year by year, STEP-NC is adding more to the process data needed to know how to mill, drill, or lathe a part, how to lead in, the speed at which to run, and so on. The key is to know which operations have to be done in which order with the minimum viable tool path. When the data is rich, intelligent software on the controller should be able to figure out the rest.
Each year since 2017, STEP-NC has been used to machine millions of 5-axis parts for commercial aircraft, such as the Boeing 787. Now STEP-NC is being prepared for direct-CAD-to-CNC 2.5-axis milling for features on airframes. As well, it is getting ready for 3D printing, leading Mr Hardwick to call STEP-NC “the PDF of machining.”
ODA Expands to STEP
The Open Design Alliance develops code, such as for reading and writing DWG and PDF files, that is used commercially by its CAD software member companies. By developing the code on behalf of them, the 1,200 members don’t need to develop it themselves.
Five years ago, the organization expanded its offerings dramatically. It moved from offering individual SDKs (since 1998) to a complete technology package for working with CAD and BIM files, including Web collaboration, version control, and visualization on any platform, supported by a natively developed solid modeler and constraints engine.
Then earlier this year, the ODA announced support for STEP based on a strong demand from ODA members, because existing STEP libraries are expensive and are royalty-based, ODA president Neil Peterson told me in an interview. In some cases, STEP is not licensed as an individual component; rather it is bundled with a larger group of converters. Some libraries are in the public domain, but suffer from insufficient development. So there is no economical, high-quality library on the market that’s affordable for small firms, he said.
How STEP fits into the APIs/SDKs offered by Open Design Alliance
Some ODA members just want access to STEP files. Other members, who make use of the ODA’s IFC APIs for architectural design, want both: IFC for building designs, STEP for machinery that goes inside the buildings. ODA is taking on STEP support as a long-term priority.
With STEP files and the EXPRESS programming language being hugely complex, I wondered how the work could get done so fast. PDES, after all, had been working on the problem for nearly three decades.
“We gained expertise by developing IFC,” said Mr Peterson. “Similar to IFC, STEP is defined using EXPRESS schema, and so we can reuse the automation framework we developed for IFC to quickly build a high-quality STEP solution.” As well, the ODA is a member of PDES, the group that maintains the STEP standard, just as it works with buildingSMART on IFCs. From PDES, the ODA gets test data and works on committees that establish extensions to the standard.
The ODA’s timeline looks like this:
By the end of this year, it plans to release an initial version of the STEP SDK (software development kit) with read/write support for AP203, AP214, and AP242 (all conformance classes).
By the end of 2022, the ODA plans full visualization support for the same three APs running on desktop, mobile, and Web, including a free-to-all, commercial-grade STEP viewer similar to the ODA’s IFC and DWG viewers.
The alliance plans to offer publishing of STEP models to 2D/3D PDF, and conversion of STEP to formats, such as Navisworks and DWG.
The cost of getting the STEP APIs from the ODA will be “free.” That is, members, who pay an annual membership fee to the ODA starting at $1,800 a year, pay nothing extra once STEP becomes available, and there are no royalty payments involved. This presents the possibility of undercutting other STEP suppliers, such as STEP Tools in USA, EPA in Sweden, and ProSTEP in Germany.
Longer term, the ODA is interested in AP238 STEP-NC, and the conversion of model data to formats like IFC and Revit. Mr Peterson notes that “Priorities in these areas will be based on requests from our members.”
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
The MCAD/CAM industry needs a universal file format to minimize the cost and inconvenience of translating data between CAD systems, and for the machines that do the manufacturing.
Other industries like AEC/BIM have found, however, that arriving at universality is a terribly complex problem. That’s because every CAD vendor desires to maintain unique advantages over competitors, and so prefers to stay with its unique file formats.
Lip service is given to data interoperability, so while data flows easily into CAD systems, it emerges rather reluctantly. There is, after all, a programmer cost to implementing exchange standards like STEP and IFC, both of which are increasing in complexity as they expand in capability.
The 2020s find the STEP standard expanding in two directions, towards greater complexity with STEP-NC, and towards lower cost with ODA STEP. The toolkits provided by the ODA, one can hope, ought to make implementing data exchange universality in architectural and mechanical worlds easier.
Rådgivende Ingeniørers Forening represents 140 Norwegian engineering consulting firms with 500 offices and 13,000 employees. RIF is unhappy with “major software developers hiking up prices by 30% annually with only a few months warning.” The one vendor mentioned is Autodesk, for its disparate country pricing.
It seems to me that organizations like hospitals and design firms ought to be forming purchasing pools to negotiate rock bottom pricing from suppliers.
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Nanosoft launches release 21 of nanoCAD as a CAD platform supporting five modules:
3D Modeling — direct, sheet metal, mesh, and parametric 3D solid modeling with 2D/3D constraints
Mechanica — mechanical drawing, engineering calculation utilities, and library of parametric parts
Construction — AEC drafting utilities and library of parametric parts
Raster — (new) import, correct, and vectorize raster images
Topoplan — digital terrain modeling
nanoCAD 21 starts at $200/yr; each module is $150/yr. Permanent licenses are provided with a three-year subscription. nanoCAD 5 is available free. https://nanocad.com/
[Disclosure: I produce training videos for Nanosoft.]
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At the Bricsys conference last week, Hexagon answered the question that puzzled executives when I asked them two years ago: Where does the BricsCAD acquisition fit into Hexagon?
We have the answer from ceo Ola Rollén: For Hexagon to get deeper into the AEC space, and for BricsCAD to get into the discrete manufacturing market.
[Disclosure: I have written books and produced training videos for Bricsys.]
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Stratasys turns GrabCAD into a software pipeline for 3D printing (aka additive manufacturing). Its new GrabCAD AM Platform manages multiple 3D printers at multiple locations, monitors output quality, automates materials management, and integrates all this with the enterprise.
The platform is a combination of GrabCAD software, software from partners, and an SDK. Wannabe partners pay an SDK licensing free, following approval. https://grabcad.com
[Disclosure: Following the launch of GrabCAD as a 3D part sharing site, the founder joked he named the site after me.]
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Here is one of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
For most attendees (at least for non-media, but I suspect also for media) the real value of conferences is the networking and informal discussions that take place during and outside the conference. After attending dozens of AU and a few other CAD conferences for many years in different capacities, it became clear to me that the best conferences are
a) in-person, with at least one or more organized social event
b) small enough that individuals don't get lost in the crowd
c) with wide coverage area (i.e. national or worldwide, not local)
d) including vendors and their cool new tech (plus free swag)
It surely is not easy (nor inexpensive), but if I was running a CAD company I would pounce on the opportunity created by the pandemic to capitalize on the natural human hunger for fellowship. - Owen Wengerd (via WorldCAD Access)
The editor replies: I suspect the difference between small conferences (which we like) and monster conferences (which we don’t) is that it’s the staff of the small company that puts together the small conference and who are in touch with the needs of users. I’ve had organizers of small conferences ask me what I would like to see.
The giant conferences put on by giant companies are, I am guessing, organized by marketing departments, whose day job is to promote the company. Hence the disconnect.
Notable Quotable
“With a few exceptions, most previously successful founders rarely replicate their success in their second company. Financial success weakens determination and fighter mentality.” - Don Dodge
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Novedge LLC (small company donation): “Keep up the great work!”
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Issue #1,110 | Inside the Business of CAD | 25 October 2021
We’re all too familiar with big-spending CAD vendors like Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, and Siemens and their millions of users. We might even have some familiarity with smaller CAD vendors, who are content to serve tens of thousands of customers.
Then there’s a class of CAD vendor that never made it big – or at all. For instance, the years 2012 to 2014 were the start of a fresh era that saw the birth of a brand-new style of design software: collaborative, cloud-based CAD.
Companies had names like Onshape, sunglass.io, TinkerCAD, and To3D. All took advantage of the power granted by then-new WebGL and JavaScript APIs that made interactive 3D CAD graphics possible in Web browsers. None did well.
One that you may not have heard of is SolidFace. (See figure below.)
User interface of SoldFace
I was alerted to this MCAD vendor when a reader told me of the company’s odd condition for getting their free 30-day demo: before downloading, you need to provide a credit card number.
Typically, demo software simply de-activates after 30 days or significantly cripples the available functions. What isn’t immediately apparent is that downloading SolidFace represents acceptance by the potential customer of the software’s terms and conditions, a link to which is alluded to during the download process. Within those terms is a paragraph revealing that using the software past the 30-day demo period incurs a monthly charge.
Searching around, I found others caught off guard by the company’s terms. In online forums like Reddit, SourceForge, TrustPilot, and Better Business Bureau and as recently as in May of this year, users complained of credit cards being charged for amounts ranging from $65 to $89. Said one complainant, “I requested a refund and they said it would take 1-3 months for it to be processed due to the COVID situation.”
The Many Pivots of SolidFace
Curious, I spent two weeks digging deeper. The history of SolidFace appears to have begun in 1994 with the launch of a Brazilian 2D CAD program named UniCAD. Over its life, it gained 4,000 customers, primarily in Latin America. According to tech startup community site F6S, SolidFace co-founder Oscar Leite spent more than 20 years at UniCAD before exiting the company in 2008 with $2.8 million. He describes himself as a back-end programmer and UI/UX designer, obtaining his university training in Germany
In 2013, Mr Leite formed SolidFace with Rafael Lima, according to Linked-In. Mr Lima, then 28, had spent his first post-university years dabbling in Bitcoin mining. “During the dark days of BTC [bitcoin] as a younger, savvy tech teenager, I was looking for something different to do with my computers and found BTC in the corners of the Web or dark-Web,” Mr Leite wrote on Linked-In.
The idea developed by Messrs Leite and Lima was to release a collaborative 3D parametric CAD program by combining Mr Lima’s knowledge of bitcoin mining with Mr Leite’s CAD experience. The program would be free of charge, making money through the novel idea of mining bitcoins in the background on the computers of SolidFace customers, with their permission. According to Austin Business Journal, the company could make 4 cents/minute per user through this technique.
At the time, Mr Leite described the new software as “Google Docs for 3D models”, even though SolidFace would run on the desktop, save files to the desktop (for intellectual property protection), and use the cloud to store files and to collaborate. Today, this hybrid approach is common among CAD programs.
According to its Tumblr account, the company spent $2.5 million developing SolidFace, releasing the first beta version in the middle of 2012.
By 2014, the company was working to attract dealers and looking to advertise in publications, such as upFront.eZine. Potential dealers were told, “SolidFace’s growth is in the mid-range CAD market. SolidFace is fully compatible with SolidWorks, Solid-Edge, AutoCad and others through SIEMENS-Parasolid core. The core also allows us to use full 3D modeling power.”
An overseas dealer approached by SolidFace told me, “I tried SolidFace once. For me it wasn’t worth the extra learning curve compared to Rhino and BricsCAD, and also no money in it as far as I could see.”
Pivot to Solid Share
Nor was SolidFace itself making enough money: “Bootstrapping both of our CAD companies, UniCAD and SolidFace, has proven to be a significant challenge. During this period we’ve invested over $1.5 million in research and development...” So in 2015, the company pivoted to services by launching a Kickstarter campaign for Solid Share.
Solid Share was to be a 3D printing, scanning, and modeling service that used SolidFace as the CAD engine. Users would design models with the CAD program for free, and I presume Solid Share would collect a fee on the services accessed by customers.
The campaign failed, raising just US$1,823 toward its US$385,000 goal. (See figure below.)
Solid Share’s page on Kickstarter
That same year, the company took a stab at selling SolidFace 2015 through Steam, the online computer games portal. For the first and only time, pricing was on a non-rental basis; the student version went for US$199, while commercial versions seemed to range in price from US$500 to $1,000. This sales channel fell through after the company decided the software was “considered not profitable enough to warrant bringing [version] 2016 to Steam.”
By 2017, SolidFace had sold just 600 licenses. Of these, 100 were paid for by bitcoin mining, making the company $1,400 a month, according to the Austin Business Journal. The non-mining version was $29.99/month.
The same year, the company looked to raise $500,000 as a seed round. According to CrunchBase, it landed $50,000 from four venture capital funds, lead by growth accelerator firm Turn8. (See figure below.) I contacted Turn8 about the investment, but received no reply.
Funding report on SolidFace by CrunchBase
Pivot to Solid Network
In either 2018 or 2019, Messers Leite and Lima formed Solid Network for distributing software packages. “We partner with software companies to distribute their software for free in our marketplace using their user’s hardware (GPU) to monetize it while the device is online,” Solid Networks reported on its Linked-In page. I found a solidnetwork.com domain, which appears to have been set up in early 2020, and today resolves to an empty placeholder site.
I contacted Mr Leite about the software, but received no reply. I wrote to SolidFace company, and also received no reply. The SolidFace Web site still lives today. (See figure below.)
A page on the SolidFace Web site today
The site offers these software packages:
SolidFace PTV — 2D CAD at $89 per quarter with “30 days free and cancel anytime.”
SolidFace 3D Pro — 3D modeler at US$129 per month and listed as “coming soon.”
That the 3D version is not available could perhaps be due to this possibility: I speculate that the firm could no longer afford to pay Parasolid’s royalties.
While the company’s software does not seem to have found success in the marketplace, the training materials it provides are very good. There are lots of 2D and 3D tutorial videos on Youtube (some of which which I watched) and the user manual (which I skimmed) is well written. The most recent video was posted in July of this year.
To test SolidFace, I downloaded a 2015 version from C|Net, installed it in Windows 10 Sandbox, but it did not run. So, I cannot attest to its abilities, but in videos it appears to have supported advanced functions like parametrics.
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
The story of SolidFace is a remarkable one, as two founders, flush with cash and full of ideas, launch a CAD program, and then pivot repeatedly in multiple attempts to succeed.
As the founders of Onshape, sunglass.io, TinkerCAD, and To3D discovered, launching a MCAD program as new does not predict success.
Onshape, for example, spent $100 million on development to gain just 5,000 paying customers, and then sold itself to PTC. Sunglass.io was acquired by Wikineering, a engineering knowledge sharing platform. TinkerCAD sold itself to Autodesk just as it was running out of funds. To3D, as best as I can determine, disappeared.
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Virtual reality/augmented reality metaverses are bound for failure with consumers, because VR/AR demands increased inconvenience, the face goggle. Consumers don’t do inconvenience. Smartphones replaced digital cameras slung around the neck not because they were better, but because they were more convenient.
VR/AR does have a niche in environments in which inconvenience is expected, such as with safety gear in workplaces, or spending what it takes to get an edge in gaming.
“One day son, all this will be yours” (cartoon by Matt Percival)
- - -
TestFit is algorithmic configuration software for optimizing the design of “commodity buildings” — like apartments, offices, hotels, industrial buildings, and parking structures — during the feasibility phase, which I wrote about in upfrontezine.com/2020/02/upf-1040.html. The software is now integrated with Enscape for real-time visualizations; TestFit in turn is Enscape’s first SDK partner. More info from testfit.io/lp-enscape-in-testfit/.
- - -
EnSuite-Cloud ReVue from CCE always has been a Web-based viewer of 3D models, and now the software has taken its first step into the realm of 2D.
The first to be supported are CATIA V5 2D Drawing viewables, with 2D drawings from Solidworks and NX coming in the next few months. You can try it out free for 15 days at viewer.cadcam-e.com/EnSuite-Cloud/Login/index.html.
- - -
Matrox celebrates 45 years in the business, having been launched in 1976 with the VideoRAM alphanumeric display controller as its first product. In 1979, the Canadian firm released the first ever video board to handle four monitors. More on the history of the longest-lasting graphics hardware company in the world at matrox.com/en/corporate/history-of-innovation.
- - -
CIMdata reports that “…with free registration to Autodesk University’s virtual live content and streaming sessions, they expected over 100,000 global participants. According to Autodesk, the first three days attendees watched more than 51,000 hours of content.”
Notable Quotable
“We need to find an emotion that hasn’t been hijacked by one of the big brands.” - Management Speak
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Denis Senkinc
Rod Levin: “Thanks for your consistent attention to this industry that has seen so much change over the last 30 years.”
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Issue #1,109 | Inside the Business of CAD | 18 October 2021
This issue is sponsored by CCE:
EnSuite-Cloud ReVue:
The Zoom Alternative for Online Engineering Meetings
Hold visual conference calls with your team and suppliers to review 2D/3D CAD designs in real-time. It’s secure with no software to install, no proprietary design data left on a server. Our online meetings support models made in CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, NX, Inventor, Creo, and more.
The Open Design Alliance may well be one of the most important organizations in the world, for what the ODA develops is then implemented by many of its CAD member companies. And we use CAD to design the world.
Producing the ODA Summit
Some of the 1,200 members are well-known CAD vendors, but most are corporations who develop CAD viewing and editing tools for internal use. Members save time in not needing to develop code themselves.
At last month’s ODA Summit 2021 (sadly online, not in Munich as first planned — darn you, coronavirus!), we got a deep dive into what the ODA is working on. The ODA works on a lot of new stuff. I found myself on the drench end of a fire hose of information.
With the ODA’s founding in 1998, it first offered individual SDKs [software development kits] for DWG and DXF, and then DGN, general formats used by the CAD industry. During his keynote address, ODA president Neil Peterson described how much has changed in the last five years. (See figure below.) The first shift was for the ODA added SDKs that read and wrote PDF and 3D PDF files.
From there, it went to offering complete sets of interoperable technology packages for members working with CAD or BIM on any platform, including the Web. We see this in the recent explosion of CAD programs reading IFC [industry foundation classes] and/or Revit files; this is not the result of Autodesk being open, this is the Open Design Alliance opening things up.
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With so much information at the conference, I decided for this article to focus on just a few areas, and then present info about STEP support in a later issue. The conference is available as a four-part video at youtube.com/opendesignalliance:
Complete CAD Interoperability
Complete BIM Interoperability
Beyond Data Interoperability
Scan-to-BIM Panel Discussion
ODA president Neil Peterson during his keynote address
How Autodesk Helps Make the ODA Popular
Mr Peterson stated that 3Q 21 was the strongest quarter in the organization’s history for membership growth. Part of the reason for this is Autodesk’s changes and lack of changes.
Autodesk has had a tumultuous history with the ODA, from initially insisting there was no need for open access to the DWG file format (DXF was good enough, it declared), to a FUD campaign over the un/trustworthiness of DWG, to blocking use of “DWG” through the registered trademark process (it failed), to suing the ODA, to mimicking it with RealDWG, and then partially capitulating by become an ODA member, albeit on the IFC side of things.
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MicroCAD Software produces kitchen design software, where the quality of renderings and walkthroughs is crucial. The company had been an AutoCAD OEM customer for 23 years, but felt constrained by its limitations. To see where to go, MicroCAD made a list of pros and cons.
The advantages to using AutoCAD OEM is that it “transmits trust and is instantly recognized by designers”; it has a powerful and reliable ACIS-based modeler. MicroCAD told us that the disadvantages to AutoCAD OEM include
Limited rendering that has not changed since 2016
A walkthrough module that is the same as in AutoCAD 12; the technology is 30 years old
A form of GDI that prevents AutoCAD from showing rendered print previews as they will be printed
Shadows in fast-shade mode that cannot be updated with the kinds of normal computers used by MicroCAD’s clients
Response time for technical service that is long
Cost of royalties that has risen more than 50% in the last three years
With little development by Autodesk in recent releases of AutoCAD, MicroCAD had no ability to improve renderings of kitchens and other interior designs.
So, three years ago they began the switch to the ODA’s platform, which afforded them access to high quality renderings, speedy fixes, higher quality technical support, and an affordable fixed fee not based on sales. Improvements and fixes to ODA offerings are based on what programmers need, and not the wants of AutoCAD end users.
AutoKitchen running on the ODA-based DWG engine
Switching to the ODA, however, had its drawbacks:
Programming took MicroCAD longer, as tools available in AutoCAD had to be developed for use with ODA; DLLs (dynamic link libraries) could, however, be re-used with minor changes
Rendering isn’t great, but this drawback allowed MicroCAD to use a third-party renderer better suited to its needs
Solid modeling kernel is not as powerful as AutoCAD’s ShapeModeler
Most blocks worked correctly in ODA, but some had to be redrawn to work correctly
Most of MicroCAD’s time was spent on making the new UI look like the old UI (see figure above)
It took about two years for MicroCAD to make the ODA-based AutoKitchen run like the AutoCAD OEM-based one.
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Graebert GmbH is working with a special interest group inside the ODA to overcome the problem customers face when Autodesk stops supporting some software. (For instance, I have a side service in which I covert Actrix drawings abandoned by Autodesk to DWG.) For instance, this year the ODA added new internal classes to its MDT-compatible Mechanical SDK for converting mechanical objects to older versions.
“New product design has migrated away from DWG-based solutions,” said Graebert cto Robert Graebert. (See figure below.) Mostly, product design is now accomplished on proprietary systems from PTC, Dassault Systemes, and Siemens. “But drawings continue to be a key workflow in the industry.”
So, at the conference, Mr Graebert announced that his company was taking on the challenge to maintain Mechanical part information, “maintaining legacy drawings in the product design market.”
Customers tell him that there still a need to maintain part information in drawings. “In our estimation, there are billions of DWG part drawings that need to be updated for products still being manufactured or in active maintenance.”
Graebert GmbH cto Robert Graebert introducing ARES Mechanical
This led Graebert GmbH to write ARES Mechanical to handle custom objects originally created with AutoCAD Mechanical, such as part information, bills of materials, standards-compliant parts and annotations. “These objects are all inter-related and contain a lot of hidden complexity,” Mr Graebert said.
The ODA’s DWG support is insufficient, as it cannot update part information. “The part information in these drawings is not static. It is not sufficient to visualize balloons and bills of material; it is also important to access and edit all properties of referenced parts.”
So, the Mechanical SIG [special interest group] has import, export, and rendering (display) of mechanical objects working well. But not all versions of AutoCAD Mechanical are supported yet; more will be added. DXF export/import is missing; public APIs are being extended.
Q&A
Q: Is ODA planning to develop a DWG server engine to allow several users read and write the same DWG file? It seems like multiple editors could use merging similar to what software developers do with Git, by adding a visualization layer to help with conflict resolution.
A: At the moment we have no plans to develop such a fully functional server engine. But we have developed DWG Revisions technology that supports collaborative editing and can be used on servers.
Q: With ODA software, can you change the camera type to orthogonal? Do you have an example?
A: Yes, it is possible. Here is a code snippet (GS API):
From the DWG database side, it is also possible to use command PERSPECTIVE = 0.
Q: In which version will these new improvements and features mentioned today come out?
A: Most of new features presented are available in the latest release 22.8. Some feature may be in beta state, but in any case they are going to be ready this year. We have a release every month, and the last one this year will be 22.12.
Q: Were can I find documentation about all the features supported by the newest IFC format?
Al Dean, co-founder and former editor of Develop3D magazine in England, is now Global Communications Content Manager at Siemens Digital Industries Software.
Cyrena Respini, former editor-in-chief at CADalyst magazine, is now in marketing for Graebert GmbH.
You’re right, in that Intergraph patented OLE4DM [object linking and embedding for design and modeling], but you’re incorrect (by my recollection) on why the technology never went far. The OLE4DM Consortium was really starting to gain broad adoption and people were beginning to realize the potential of the technology.
It was then that Intergraph announced their submarine patent with a licensing agreement that was unacceptable to the consortium. It was this licensing deal that really killed OLE4DM, not the validity of the technology.
At the time that it all went dormant, multi-system demonstrations were being held involving multiple CAD vendors demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach. To this day, I still maintain that providing encapsulated data with associated evaluators is really the preferred way of exchanging data between systems.
This approach avoids translation and the even bigger issue of mis-evaluation of geometric data between systems. Boeing advanced this in their procedural surfaces where they “black-boxed” their representation and associated evaluators of their surfaces so that they could be seamlessly incorporated into other modeling systems.
Parasolid also introduced this notion of user-defined, procedural surfaces, though it’s unclear who all makes use of this function. Most people look at ACIS- or Parasolid-based systems as examples of how to avoid translation, but even more importantly, using a common kernel supports identical evaluation of the geometry.
Based on what is being said about CAD Direct, there aren’t corresponding evaluators being carried with the foreign geometry, but there is a B-rep “equivalent” created and maintained.
It sure is unfortunate that the OLE4DM approach never had a chance to really address multi-system interoperability. It would have made a considerable impact on the industry. - John Callen
The editor replies: I vaguely remember something about a consortium, so thanks for reminding me of it. In my experience, I never found OLE to work well, including my tries with OLE for D&M. Maybe the problem is that CAD vendors seemed to implement OLE only half-heartedly.
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I would say that Solid Edge is playing catch-up with CAD Direct. Solidworks (3D Interconnect) and Autodesk Inventor (AnyCAD) have had the ability to reference other native CAD models without conversion for years. - Mike DeKoning
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Dan Staples spotted the Solid Edge article that went out on the upFront.eZine and the caption for the first slide with him pictured, where it reads, “Dan Staples announcing that CAM Pro (for 2.5-axis milling) and Simcenter Flomaster (for fluid and thermal analysis) is available to any Solid Edge 2022 customer with a subscription.”
Solid Edge 2022 does not actually include Flomaster; it is in fact an extra-charge product.
Convergent modeling is proprietary Siemens technology, tightly integrated into Parasolid. It is available to third parties to license at extra cost, above a standard Parasolid license. This is unlike Synchronous Technology, which Siemens has chosen not to license. - Alice Bonasio, global public relations Siemens Digital Industries Software
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