Monday, September 27, 2021

CAD’s Problem with Fonts

Issue #1,106  |  Inside the CAD Business  |  27 September 2021

 

Guest editorial by Dave Edwards

 

Back in the day, most CAD output was done on pen plotters driven by DOS-based software. Yes, there really was work done before the advent of Windows and the Mac, done with real pens and real ink. This was long before PostScript printers and standardized font formats.

The font format developed by Autodesk for AutoCAD, for instance, is named SHX [short for “compiled shape”]. This is a vector-based font format, which uses only lines and arcs in character (or “glyph”) definitions; no fills. See the figure below.

To get different font weights on the output, specific pen numbers were assigned. To draw a thicker line, you specified a thicker pen, and then the CAD program literally instructed the plotter to pick the specific pen from the pen carousel. See figure below.

Carousel holding pens of various weights (image source softsolder.com)

A typical carousel held up to eight pens of different sizes placed in numbered locations. The sizes were based on standard drafting pen sizes: 0.25mm, 0.35mm, and so on. In the CAD software, you placed all entities that needed to be drawn by a specific pen width on their own layer. It was very restrictive, and pens running dry were a royal pain. This changed so much for the better when inkjet plotters came on the market.

 

C3DevCon 2021

Software Development Conference

Join C3D Labs at its software developers’ conference, October 14 at 10:00am CEST. See the latest developments in the C3D Toolkit SDK, designed for engineering software developers.

To register for the conference, and learn more about the event, visit c3dlabs.com/en/blog/events/software-development-conference-c3devcon-2021/

 

As font technology developed, the need for WYSIWYG — What You See is What You Get — displaying of fonts became standard. But it was still a while before you could see the effect of adding a pen weight to a font on the screen. VersaCAD was an early exception, as it had a system by which the user could select the output scale and it would display the desired pen weights on the screen.

Special Character Standards

When the first CAD systems came out, there was only the ASCII standard for character codes. This was carried over from teletype machines: when a letter was pressed on one machine, the same letter would be printed out at the receiving end.

But ASCII had specifications for only 128 characters, of which the first 30 were for controlling the teletype machine. In CAD, the immediate need was for special characters, such as degree, plus/minus, and diameter. What Autodesk did was add these characters to specific locations in their font definitions.

Later, when the ANSI code was developed for handling 255 characters, it added mostly foreign characters and still there was no location for diameter. (Don’t get me started on using “O-slash” for diameter!)

The advent of modern font formats, such as Postscript and Truetype, permitted large sets of international standards and so Unicode was developed by an international committee. The committee determines character locations for foreign, technical, and graphic characters. Using this system, a font developer can create a font with special characters in these defined locations; applications that want to display those characters know which codes to use when calling a font.

 

How Many Characters? Where’s the One I Want?

Unicode originally had about 62,000 characters; the latest version has specifications for over 143,000. But this doesn’t mean that all fonts have all characters. The Unicode version of the “universal” Arial font, for instance, has only the original 62,000.

Having been a member of the Unicode Consortium in the past, I’m familiar with the process of adding characters to the standard. Applications are submitted each year and then they are voted on. If you ever have the chance to go through the Unicode standard, you’ll see enormous character sets for language systems, such as Japanese Kanji, and even more for “artist” systems like Klingon. (It was never approved.)

The current version of Unicode covers most of the characters needed for architectural projects, but not all of them. This is where it gets hard for users and for CAD/BIM applications. What happens when the font I need to use doesn’t have the character I want?

Most of the “big name” fonts should have most of them. When they don’t, the CAD application handles things in a couple of ways:

  1. First, fall back on characters that look similar. For years AutoCAD had the error of using the “null character” location for the diameter symbol. Many fonts had diameter, but not the null character; in this case, AutoCAD punts on one character location and uses another. Often, this has to be done for several characters and rolling back to several other lookalikes.

  2. Next, fall back to characters in a different font known to have the characters needed. AutoCAD does this with ISO fonts, but this can look terribly strange.

There’s a major problem when the character you need has no Unicode specification and so is not found in any major font. This is the case with the 1/16 and finer fractions. Unicode specifies fractions up to 1/8 and related fractions, but not 1/16. What most CAD systems do is fake fractions by drawing them using individual characters — but that can look weird too.

 

The Real Issue is Height

The real problem with fonts in CAD and BIM software is scaling. This is especially important when going from one CAD system to another. SHX fonts are still used frequently in DWG programs, such AutoCAD; these fonts use a different scaling method than Truetype fonts.

As SHX characters are composed of just lines, the height of characters are set to the exact height of uppercase letters. See figure below.

CAD defines the size of text by the height of capital letters

This is, however, not the case the desktop publishing fonts. To understand why not, let’s look at how typography works.

 

A Bit About Typography

There’s an ancient history that sets standards for typography, which poses problems for the CAD world. When it comes to sizing characters, what is important is the distance from line to line, and not the size of the uppercase letters. In laying out text for printing, the lengths of columns need to be maintained, no matter which typeface is used. In fact, font designers can make the size of uppercase letters any height they wish.

When the size of a font is specified for printing, point size is used (72.72... points to an inch). But this determines the spacing between lines and not necessarily the size of the characters. Huh??? As a CAD font designer myself, it took me years to wrap my head around why it is done this way.

Go into any word processor and pick a handful of typefaces and insert a few capital letters. I created the text seen in the figure below in Microsoft Word, setting the size of the large letters to 72 points. Notice that each one has a different height.

Microsoft Word drawing the capital letters of different fonts at 72 points

So how do you create Truetype text at the correct size in CAD when a contract requires all text be 1/8" tall? This is the trick most CAD and BIM application use that causes the problems:

  1. They inspect the curves that make up one of the characters to determine its actual size. AutoCAD uses the character “A” but the letter “M” should be used, as has been historically done in typesetting.

  2. The application then scales the text slightly up or down so that the size of the characters are at the right size. The figure below shows how the same text appears in AutoCAD:

Autodesk AutoCAD drawing the capital letters of different fonts at 72 points

This poses the next problem when drawings with text are imported into other CAD systems that use different scaling mechanisms. You most likely see this when you use SHX in one application and an equivalent Truetype font in the receiving application. Because Truetype fonts are created using boundaries, CAD often scales them down the text to account for the height of uppercase characters.

The good news is that it has gotten better over the years. For instance, the developers of Revit first used a different scaling system than did AutoCAD. A few years ago, Autodesk changed the font scaling in Revit, which made for loads of fun fixing all the files.

(Years ago I created a system for converting SHX fonts to Truetype format. It’s a very long progress with many steps. The biggest issue is getting the math correct when a boundary is added to characters to correctly compensate line lengths as heights of uppercase characters are reduced. I created a Truetype set to substitute for standard SHX fonts RomanS and Simplex. If you’re interested in them, contact me.)

 

So, What’s the Point?

I just wanted to get this information down so that whenever a question about fonts arises, users will have the information at the ready.

BIM is supposed to collaborative, yet text fidelity is a stumbling block. The round trip of CAD to BIM to CAD can be a nightmare.

This is why most users landed on using something like Arial for all their work. (It is a modern clone of Helvetica, and it’s a boring-looking font.) Arial has some disadvantages when used for technical documents, but it’s become a standard.

Just know that in most applications, you no longer have to be worried about how the fonts are created to get the correct size.

 

Industry Musings

Having fought the good fight and lost over much of this, I naturally have opinions about all this.

In all these years, too much has been just a patchwork-kludge. We have Unicode characters for much of what we need. Why are they not being used? Feet and inches marks used in dimensions should use the prime (') and double prime (") characters, not curley quotes (’ or ”). AutoCAD’s SHX fonts don’t have copyright, registered, or trademark character — just to name a few.

There needs to be an industry committee that specifies font standards for CAD and BIM. Its role  would be to brand fonts approved for having specific sets of characters and sets of internal heights, so that scaling no longer is an issue.

There’s a section in Unicode called a “Private Dictionary,” which AutoCAD uses for locations of needed characters not found in Unicode. There needs to be an effort to get more of these characters to have set locations and then get them published, so that font designers can create their fonts with these characters. This is already being done for fonts needed in music publishing.

 

The Bottom Line

For BIM really to be a collaborative venture, it needs to put into place several standards, and fonts is one of the basic ones that has been overlooked. CAD firms felt that by simply adopting Truetype (and not even OpenType) they covered the issue — not so!

I did what I could while I was still more active, but it fell mostly on deaf years. Vendors have had more important functions to get into BIM, such as handling big projects and multi-user collaboration. Some of the nuts and bolts have, as a result, been left in the dust.

END RANT

- - -

Dave Edwards develops Project Newplex, an advanced SHX font for technical documents. He is an application feature consultant and technical documentation writer. You can contact him through [email protected].

[This article was reproduced with permission from PADT, the Prag Arch Design Tech newsletter in which Mr Edwards explains how to make BIM work. I find it very useful. View his articles at pragarchdesigntech.substack.com.]

 

And in Other News

Looks like Trimble has licensed the Kudo Web-based DWG editor from Graebert GmbH for a cloud-based DWG viewer and editor under the name of Connect CAD. community.trimble.com/viewdocument/product-update-08-24-2021-introd?CommunityKey=2ba352bf-190c-4712-8473-09e331f39bf2&tab=librarydocuments

- - -

GT-SUITE from Gamma Technologies performs 0D/1D/3D multi-physics CAE simulations of the physics of fluid flow, thermal, mechanical, electrical, magnetic, chemistry, and controls. It includes 3D modeling with built-in structural and thermal 3D FEA (with in-situ meshers), 3-D multi-body dynamics with flexible bodies and 3D CFD. gtisoft.com

- - -

Vectorworks launches the 2022 editions of its software:

  • Architect

  • Landmark

  • Spotlight

  • Fundamentals

  • Braceworks

  • ConnectCAD

  • Vision

Vectorworks Designer has been renamed “Vectorworks Design Suite.” Vectorworks is the first major BIM application to run natively on Apple silicon processors, running some processes 4x faster. vectorworks.net/en-CA/2022

- - -

Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:

You can subscribe to WorldCAD Access blog’s RSS feed at feeds.feedburner.com/WorldcadAccess.

 

Letters to the Editor

I thought you might find this interesting, if only to illustrate how some in the academic corner of the computing world view CAD: “A New Era for Mechanical CAD” at queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3469844 by Jessie Frazelle

A few eyebrow raisers, such as “instances” vice “blocks” and missing things like the Blockify command in BricsCAD or any mention of LISP, etc. The author is evidently not a CAD-slinger.
- Richard Webb

The editor replies: Her primary concern appears to be that because CAD is so old, it is not capable of modern computing, such as multi-core. The problem with her argument is not the age of the code (which has been refreshed over the decades) but CAD’s inability to predict user operations, and as a result cannot run on multiple CPU cores.

Ms Frazelle is with a cloud services firm.

 

Re: When the cursor gets erratic, it's the mouse's nano-receiver at fault

I have a similar problem with my M720 Logitech Triathlon mouse. Initially I connected with Logitech’s Unifying USB receiver, when it started doing awkward things in clicking and dragging. Sometimes it didn’t respond with click, but after a while it jumped like I was rapidly clicking.

After I read this thread, and found the comments by H. R. Puffenstuff, I tried switching the connection to Bluetooth and discarding the wireless Unifying USB plug. Then it worked right. It works well, like my first use of wireless USB.

Hence I conclude this is the USB receiver’s problem. Thanks for the inspiration.
     - Adi Dewanto (via WorldCAD Access)

 

Re: My 108 Books in Print

Congratulations Ralph, this is a VERY impressive body of work which helped (hundreds of ?) thousands of people become proficient in CAD!
     - Malcolm Davies

- - -

I wish that Bricsys would team up with you again. Not a fan of the current documentation. Web pages are a pain to navigate and, of course, impossible to highlight and add notes to. The auto-generated (apparently) off-line help files are... not good.
- Richard Webb

 

Notable Quotable

“So when big corporations accuse you of copyright infringement, you can get fined, lose your Internet access, lose all income from your videos, be blocked from the platforms where you make your living.

“But when big corps infringe on our copyright, the war on piracy is forgotten.”
- Nytt år, samme Børge

 

Thank You, Readers

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

  • R L Capper

  • Stanley Przybylinski

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:

Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and use the account of [email protected].

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Posted at 07:00 AM in Guest Editorials, Software | | Comments (0)

Monday, September 20, 2021

A.I.’s Fatal Flaw

Issue #1,105  |  Celebrating 36 years writing about CAD | 20 September 2021

 

Another in the upFront.eZine series on problems posed by complexity

 

In the 2020s, artificial intelligence’s (AI) changed from a technology to a crutch:

  • The blackbox crutch — executives can say decisions were made by AI, and so deny culpability

  • The boombox crutch — marketing departments can claim their products employ AI, unlike competitors, and so you ought to buy the AI-enabled ones

How did AI sink so low?

- - -

Earlier this year, Boston Robotics released a promotional video of three robots “flawlessly and soulfully dancing in rhythm.” An awestruck digital evangelist exclaimed, “Imagine what AI-powered machines will be able to do in the next 5-10 years. 1 ”

We can’t know if the digital evangelist believes his prophecy as he is, after all, an evangelist mandated to spread good digital news.

Predictive vision modeler Filip Piekniewski2 pointed to the reality behind the staged dance: “A machine is performing a set of pre-programmed moves assisted with a bunch of PID [proportional integral derivative] controllers, just like any better CNC [computer numerical control] machine 20 years ago. In this case the machine is made in a form of a humanoid to fool naive people into believing it has a shred of intelligence in it.”

 

C3DevCon 2021

Software Development Conference

Join C3D Labs at its software developers’ conference, October 14 at 10:00am CEST. See the latest developments in the C3D Toolkit SDK, designed for engineering software developers.

To register for the conference, and learn more about the four-hour event, visit c3dlabs.com/en/blog/events/software-development-conference-c3devcon-2021/

 

‘Imagine what AI could do in the next x years’ has been a rallying cry of AI [artificial intelligence] proponents since the 1960s. In 1967, cognitive computer scientist Marvin Minsky asserted that “Within a generation... the problems of creating artificial intelligence will be substantially solved. 3 ”

The birth of AI in the late 1950s is now closer to the start of World War One than it is to today, to misquote a meme. Rather than having solved the problems of AI, we are arriving at a better understanding of why AI doesn’t work well.

Melanie Mitchell in her paper “Why AI is Harder Than We Think” 4 proposes that the thinking of AI researchers are infected with fallacies.

 

Fallacy: Narrow Intelligence Is On a Continuum With General Intelligence

After we saw DeepMind’s AlphaGo win a game of Go 5 (apparently the hardest game of all for humans to win), AI enthusiasts used the event as proof general AI is plausible. Then Watson went on to do poorly at predicting cancer diagnoses 6, while GPT-3 wrote lots of nonsensical articles 7.

Small advances are no proof of eventually arriving at an ultimate destination. The engineering brother of philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, Stuart Dreyfus, wrote in 2012, “It was like claiming that the first monkey that climbed a tree was making progress towards landing on the moon.8 ”

Elon Musk had promised Level 5 (unattended) self-driving by 2020 to purchasers of Tesla electric cars. Then in 2021 he lamented, “Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. I didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect. Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality. 9 ”

I’ll rewrite the fallacy as reality: AI completing one task does not lead to AI completing all tasks.

 

Fallacy: Easy Things Are Easy, Hard Things Are Hard

When proponents boast of how AI is better at playing Go or at diagnosing health problems than we humans, they are stating of the obvious. Computers are supposed to be better than us at carrying out boring and complex tasks. I expect software FEA to be faster than me using long division.

AI is, however, terrible at tasks we humans find trivial, like walking through a crowded subway station or playing Charades. Psychologist Gary Marcus notes that Charades “requires acting skills, linguistic skills, and theory of mind — abilities that are far beyond anything AI... 10 ”

What blocks AI from arriving at its ultimate destination is its lack of common sense. Mitchell urges AI researchers to target the abilities of one-year-old children, instead of members of Mensa.

I’ll rewrite the fallacy as reality: Simple tasks performed by AI do not lead to AI completing complex tasks.

 

Fallacy: The Lure of Wishful Mnemonics

“Work on AI is replete with such wishful mnemonics, terms associated with human intelligence that are used to describe the behavior and evaluation of AI programs,” writes Mitchell. She gives examples:

  • “Neural networks are loosely inspired by the brain, but with vast differences.

  • “Machine learning or deep learning methods do not really resemble learning in humans (or in non-human animals).”

IBM boasted in 2011 that “Watson can read all of the health-care texts in the world in seconds” and “...understands context and nuance in seven languages” (emphases added). 11 This fooled us into believing Watson thinks better than humans do and shaped the way AI researchers thought about their field.

If machines learned the way humans learn, then they could apply it to a wide variety of experiences — called “transfer learning.” But machines cannot. What AI software does learn are “shortcuts, statistical correlations to achieve high performance without learning the skill,” kind of like when we memorized facts just to pass a test in school.

I’ll rewrite the fallacy as reality: Calling AI “human-like” does not make AI human-like.

 

Fallacy: Intelligence Is All In the Brain

Whether influenced by the story of Frankenstein or prodded by philosophical materialists of the Enlightenment, AI proponents assume that rational thinking occurs exclusively in the brain.

The goal is the Brain In the Vat: reproduce the brain as AI, and then replace our brains with hardware/software in our human bodies, or else place them in lifelike robots, as fictionalized by television series like Picard and Battlestar Galactica.

The flaw to the brain-in-a-vat approach, Mitchell points out, is that there is nothing physical to the brain that is unique to the brain. The rational part has one job: processing inputs from all of the rest of the body. Isolated in a vat, the brain fails to operate as it was designed to do.

Deep-learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton flippantly predicted in 2017, “We have trillions of connections [in our brains], but the biggest networks we have built so far only have billions of connections. So we’re a few orders of magnitude off, but I’m sure the hardware people will fix that.” 12 Declaring AI solved after throwing more hardware at the problem is myopic.

This may explain why enthusiasts have been pushing the date of the Singularity out into the future. (The Singularity is the date when technology exceeds human ability.) First proclaimed to arrive by 2029, then around 2039, and now by 2045 or later. 13

I’ll rewrite the fallacy as reality: AI replicating the functions of living brains does not bring AI to life.

 

What Ralph Grabowski Thinks

We see obsessiveness over AI because it is the ultimate computing problem. Once AI is solved, there is nothing left for us to solve; AI will then go on to solve all other problems for us.

As humans, we benefit from a litany of perceptual twists that help us cope with what we don’t know, irrationalities like linear predictions, rationalizations, cognitive dissonances, confirmation biases, intuitions, group thinking, free will, common sense, bigotry, and analogies.

So AI researchers face this question: do they incorporate our irrationality into their computer code, or do they leave it out? Judging by the outrage expressed when AI results show race and other biases 14, the current sentiment is to edit out human irrationality.

For Singularity-level AI to work, it needs to incorporate the irrationality of human metaphysics; but it can’t. Yet, if it could, the Singularity would find itself becoming like the fictional Cylons, who launched a war to destroy humans just because we were too war-like 15 .

In the 1960s, we were promised better brains. Instead, in the 2020s we are getting better emoji-picking: “Your Chromebook is getting a new emoji picker this month and 992 new emoji later this year” (Chrome Unboxed 16).

What is AI’s fatal flaw? It cannot replicate human metaphysics; the rational cannot conceive of the irrational.

 

Can CAD Do AI?

Some CAD vendors state that their software employs AI. In my opinion, I don’t think it does. Here are some of the claims.

MRU. One CAD program says it uses AI to predict the next command(s) users will want to choose. Let’s take a example in which the user has just drawn a circle. What would AI suggest as the next command? It doesn’t take a computer to guess:

  • Draw another circle, or draw a different entity.

  • Edit the circle, or erase it (undo).

  • Print the circle.

This is not AI, in my view; this is a variation of MRU [most recently used], which keeps records of commands commonly employed by users.

S&R. Another CAD system says it uses AI for mundane tasks, such as replacing junctions with details, like bolts and cuts to connecting beams. You choose one junction containing the detail, and as the software finds similar junctions, it adjusts them.

This is not AI, in my view; this is search and replace.

MRU and S&R reduce tedium and so are useful to CAD users. Just don’t call it AI.

- - -

There appears to be a match between AI and parallel processing. Neither works well in CAD, and for the same reason.

Parallel processing cannot be used in most areas of CAD, because user actions cannot be predicted. Prediction is required before the software can split the command being processed among multiple CPUs, then merge the results together afterwards. It is the nature of CAD that the software cannot predict the outcome of our actions. The same holds for AI: the actions of users cannot be predicted sufficiently for AI to assist.

(Parallel processing is indeed used in areas of CAD outside the control of users. Examples include loading files, performing renderings, and calculating finite element analyses.)

Creativity is chaos, as George Guilder brilliantly exposits in “Knowledge and Power.” AI can only take over the design process after human creativity is exhausted.

 

PS: 1950s AI’s Link to 2020 CAD

The inventor of AI, John McCarthy, wrote in 1958 the specifications for LISP as a programming language that could operate on its own source code as a data structure. LISt Processor was an early attempt at AI. 17

LISP subsequently appeared in many DWG-based CAD programs, after Autodesk embedded and extended XLISP — the free version written by David Betz 18 — into AutoCAD in 1985. It still runs today 19.

[You can download the 12-page paper “Why AI is Harder Than We Think” by Melanie Mitchell as a PDF from arxiv.org/pdf/2104.12871.]

 

And in Other News

Sadly, most conferences are still online. Here are six I plan to watch in the next six weeks:

Sept 21: Open Design Alliance “Summit 2021”
conference.opendesign.com

Oct 12-14: Hexagon MSC “HxGN LIVE Design & Engineering 2021”
events.hexagon.com/hxgnlive-designandengineering

Oct 13: Dassault Systemes “3DEXPERIENCE Modeling & Simulation Conference”
events.3ds.com/2021-modsim-conference

Oct 14: C3D Labs “C3DevCon 2021”
c3dlabs.com/en/blog/events/software-development-conference-c3devcon-2021/

Oct 20-21: Allplan “Build the Future”
meetyoo.live/register/1/ALLPLAN-Build-the-Future

Nov 1-3: Vectorworks “Design Summit”
vectorworks.net/vectorworks-designsummit-registration

 

Notable Quotable

“Tech can deliver many wondrous and terrible things, but it will always fall short of really knowing what makes us human.”
            - Peter Pomerantsev

 

Thank You, Readers

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

  • Neil Peterson (small company donation)

  • Ewen @ CADbloke: “Cheers for all the insights and outlooks. :) ”

 

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, I suggest the following amounts:

Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and use the account of [email protected].

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Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

 

*4716

3

M. L. Minsky. Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines. Prentice-Hall, p. 2, 1967 (cited by Mitchell)

8

Hubert L Dreyfus. A history of first step fallacies. ‘Minds and Machines’, 22(2):87–99, 2012 (cited by Mitchell)

10

G. Marcus. Innateness, Alphazero, and artificial intelligence. arXiv:1801.05667, 2018 (cited by Mitchell)

11

S. Gustin. IBM’s Watson supercomputer wins practice Jeopardy round. ‘Wired’, 2011 (cited by Mitchell)

12

J. Patterson and A. Gibson. Deep Learning: A Practitioner’s Approach. O’Reilly Media, p. 231, 2017 (cited by Mitchell)

Posted at 07:00 AM in Software | | Comments (0)

Monday, September 13, 2021

While We Were Away: Stuff still happens in our favorite industry during the summer holidays

Issue #1,104  |  Inside the Business of CAD  |  13 September 2021

 

Press Releases Of the Summer

FORAN ship design and construction software

Acquisitions that were (and weren’t) made while we were off vacationing:

  • Autodesk gave up on its attempt to acquire Altium, after the EDM firm purportedly wanted too much. Altium makes software for designing printed circuit boards. “While we did verbally improve our initial proposal, we were unable to agree on the basis to advance discussions,” Autodesk said.

  • In July, Sanvik acquired GibbsCAM milling and turning software, Cimatron molds and die design software, and SigmaNEST nesting software from Battery Ventures. Then in August, Sandvik, which has 100,000 users, purchased MasterCAD and its 270,000 users.

  • Epic Games acquired SketchFab, which will keep its name but drop its store fee to 12%. SketchFab’s Web site offers four million 3D models.

  • Siemens bought FORAN from Spain’s SENER for its ship design and construction software. FORAN is used by 150 shipyard and design offices in 40 countries.

  • Vectorworks established its Australia office by acquiring 20-year-long distributor OzCAD Pty. OzCAD manager Annabel Carr stays on to run operations for the new Vectorworks Australia office.

- - -

In financial news, we have…

  • Ansys, the simulation people, reported Q2 revenues of $447 million, up 16% from a year earlier. The company plans unspecified acquisitions with its “growing cash horde.” Details from Monica Schnitger at schnitgercorp.com/?p=18783. If Ansys were a CAD vendor, it would be the 4th biggest.

  • PTC had Q3 revenues of $436 million, up 23% year over year, of which over half came from its oldest lines of software, Creo and PLM. “Sales of ThingWorx [Internet of things] are still growing more slowly than expected,” reports Monica Schnitger at schnitgercorp.com/?p=18730.

- - -

C3D Labs enhanced their C3D Toolkit 2021 with the addition of a FairCurveModeler module to draw smooth Class-F curves and surfaces (fairings) that are smoother than Class-A curves. Learn more at c3dlabs.com/en/blog/products/c3d-labs-bringing-advanced-surfacing-to-3d-modeling-updated-c3d-toolkit-2021-boosts-high-end-3d-soft.

The toolkit also gains a Web Vision module for client-server viewing of CAD models in Web browsers. A no-charge evaluation version of the entire toolkit’s SDK is available by making your request at c3dlabs.com/en/evaluation/.

- - -

Graphisoft shipped ArchiCAD 25 at the start of the summer. At 37 years old, the company has the longest-running BIM program in the world. This year’s release has these features:

  • Custom-shaped openings and custom stairs designed according to regional standards

  • Import and export of 40+ file formats, including Revit MEP 2021

  • Surface textures on section and elevation views

  • BIMx viewer and BIMcloud collaboration integrated, with BIMx handling 100K files and now working with Android

And more. Get the full details from graphisoft.com/solutions/archicad/archicad-25.

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Open Design Alliance is holding its annual ODA Summit 2021 this year on September 21. It is, sadly, virtual again, but I hear in-person next year might be in Munich, if possible. Details of the two-hour event and free registration are here -> conference.opendesign.com

As well, the ODA is working on a STEP [STandard for the Exchange of Product data] SDK so that ODA members can incorporate the translation standard in their software. The software development kit is due to ship by year’s end. opendesign.com/blog/2021/july/oda-starts-development-step-support

- - -

Lots of companies that employ visualization are jumping on the DLSS [deep learning super sampling] system from nVidia.

Enscape is using it for improving performance of its virtual reality walk-throughs for architects, such as going from 20 frames per second to 60fps. They call it “visualize as you design.” enscape3d.com

- - -

Hexagon updated MSC Apex Generative Design to v2021.2 with these new functions:

  • Simulation with 3D transversely isotropic and 3D orthotropic materials

  • Tsai Hill and Tsai Wu failure criteria

  • Faster facets-to-NURBS partitioning

  • Clone existing loads with the Copy Loads function

amendate.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ApexGD212H/pages/2619211781/What%27s+New+in+2021.2

- - -

CAD Exchanger from CADEX now supports 30 CAD formats with the addition of 3D XML and Solid Edge import, mesh colors for Solidworks, asynchronous model loading in Unity, and more. Try the desktop program 30 days free (after registration) from cadexchanger.com/products/gui/try.

- - -

Siemens updates Parasolid 33.1 with more commands for working with integrated models that mix B-rep designs with facet-based shapes: blending, tapering, offsetting, hollowing, and thickening mixed models. The company notes that its geometric kernel is in software used by four million people. plm.automation.siemens.com/global/en/products/plm-components/parasolid.html

- - -

IntelliCAD Technical Consortium in mid-summer released a beta of IntelliCAD 10.1 to the general public, and then in mid-August did the full release.

Some of the new features include the following:

  • Supports 3Dconnexion devices, like 3D Space Mouse and CAD Mouse

  • Inserts geographic maps from Esri shapefiles, Autodesk .sdf, and Spatial .sqlite

  • Clones existing entities to activate their command and draw new entities

  • Adds sheet sets, tables, enhanced grips, real-time spell checking, dimension breaks, layer filters in ribbon and toolbar droplists, and layer states.

More details at intellicad.org/intellicad-10.1-release. You can’t download a demo version of IntelliCAD from the ITC, as it acts as a distributor, but you can still access the beta after registering (and getting approval) from intellicad.org/intellicad-beta-registration.

Member company progeCAD plans to release an IntelliCAD 10.1-based progeCAD 2022 Professional software in the second half of October, 2021. www.progecad.us

- - -

Nemetschek Groups owns about 14 companies that run largely independently of each other, and refers to them as “brands.” Now the company has merged two of its brands: Graphisoft (BIM design software) with Data Design Systems and its MEP design software.

The reason given for the merger is this: “The merger of Graphisoft and DDS in the Planning & Design Division is another strategic step in harmonizing the Nemetschek portfolio.”

- - -

IFC.js is a JavaScript library for reading and writing IFC [industry foundation classes] files, with its parsing engine based on WebAssembly and C++. The library is designed to allow compatible Web browsers into BIM viewers. Developers are looking for coders:

  • If you know C++, WebAssembly, or the technical part of IFC — work on the parsing engine

  • Three.js coders — work on the geometry side of the library

  • Contribute — by building application on IFC.js

More info about IFC.js at ifcjs.github.io/info/docs/Introduction.

- - -

The primary flaw in uploading photos to sites like Google and Facebook is that it lets those nosy behemoths abuse our images and embedded metadata. A solution is to encrypt photos transparently, such as described by schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/07/storing-encrypted-photos-in-googles-cloud.html.

- - -

PROSTEP’s OpenCLM [configuration lifecyle management] is a Web application for generating digital threads. The software creates a web of relationships between objects in their domains, throughout a product’s life. openclm.prostep.com/?L=1

- - -

Voxelmaps has the modest goal of creating a digital twin of the entire planet to 10cm-position accuracy with its MRVOGs — multi-resolution voxel-occupancy grids. voxelmaps.com

- - -

An ABI Research headline made my eyebrows bounce: “Manufacturers to Spend US$2.6 Billion on Simulation Software by 2030.” The number seemed low, given that ANSYS alone generates nearly $2 billion/year in revenues selling its line of simulation software.

So I asked them if their headline perhaps had the decimal in the wrong place. They replied, “We are only considering simulation software supporting industrial and manufacturing firms designing their products and looking to optimize their production lines. We are not considering construction or firms in the defense sector nor automotive firms using simulation in the work on autonomous vehicles.

“In addition, the forecasts covers software license revenues and not any maintenance or service revenues. I see in the latest annual report for Anysys that the firm’s $1.7bn 2020 revenue is split between software license ($780mn) and service & maintenance ($900mn). Ansys is certainly a leading player in this market.” abiresearch.com/market-research/product/7779549-simulation-software-in-a-manufacturing-set

- - -

In other bad news from Autodesk, it found that one of its servers was part of the supply chain attack on SolarWinds’ Orion software. The good news is that no customer operations or Autodesk products were disrupted. The bad news is that this shows that making customers dependent on servers isn’t safe over the long run.

Shown below is Autodesk’s new logo looking like sheet metal.

 

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

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

What often takes days using blindly incorrect methods takes minutes or an hour with Okino's well-defined optimization and compression methods using its DWF-3D conversion system.

Popular CAD data sources include SolidWorks, ProE/Creo, Inventor, AutoCAD, Revit, Navisworks, DGN, IGES, STEP, Parasolid, and JT. DCC data sources are Cinema-4D, 3ds Max, Maya, FBX/Collada, and many more.

Perfected over three decades, we know 3D data translation intimately, providing you with highly personalized solutions, education, and communication. Contact CTO Robert Lansdale at [email protected].

www.okino.com

Letters to the Editor

I was thinking about how different the coalescence of CAD vendors/products was from the ’80s and ’90s, into maybe 2010, compared to cloud vendors. Rather than a pool of many cloud vendors, it started as basically three, maybe even two, from a shareholder aspect. What happened? I’d say it was the incredible initial investment costs that immediately cut out all but the biggest players.

Cloud never really started with the same organic base that most every other software category has been through: word processing, spreadsheets, databases, graphic editors, publishing, Web platforms, CAD/CAM, even operating systems. Most of them grew to six competitors or more before narrowing down through mergers or strategic annihilation.

I like competition. It benefits the masses, usually. But, as you mentioned, the CAD playing field has reached maturity, maybe even saturation. What will happen when cloud competition reaches that point? I find it weird how most assume the big players will remain forever, when tech history has shown otherwise.
            - David Stein

The editor replies: I think the difference is due to the nature of the two types of technology.

  • One person can write a CAD program; only a regular computer is needed. Here the focus is on the software, which is cheap, and so anyone can write it.

  • The cloud needs thousands of computers right off the bat. Here the focus is on the hardware, which is expensive, so only a very few can afford it.

The cloud came about when Amazon, which already had server farms handling its online shopping network, realized it could rent out its machines during off-peak periods. Things grew from there.

What is interesting is that Google didn’t clue in until too late, and so it, of all people, is running a distant 4th:

  1. Amazon

  2. Microsoft

  3. IBM

  4. Google

 

Re: A Contractor’s View of BIM

This is absolutely spot on. Your point about design intent resonated with me especially, as does the point about getting BIM data into the right hands. Interoperability is what will make or break BIM ultimately.

I also wonder whether reality capture data might help designers to create more construction-friendly plans.
            - Mark Senior (via WorldCAD Access)

 

Notable Quotable

@merbroussard: How would you define “AI ethics” in 1 sentence?

@MadamePratolung: Marketing device for some, pressing social and technical challenge for others.

@kbish: Balancing between cool & creepy all the time.

@neilturkewitz: An unfortunate anthropomorphic expression that suggests that questions of ethics may be addressed in a silo, divorced from the world in which they operate, & that AI is capable of possessing intent, whether good or bad.

@MLeiser: A waste of time. The only thing corporations will respond to is a law backed up by the threat of sanctions for non-compliance.

@AndrewOrlowski: Job Creation Scheme

 

Thank You, Readers

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

  • Ross Goulter

  • Steve Hunter

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:

Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and use the account of [email protected].

Or ask [email protected] about making a direct bank transfer through Wise (Transferwise).

Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

*4720

 

 

Posted at 07:00 AM in Software | | Comments (0)

Monday, June 21, 2021

What We Know About Project Wukong: ZwSoft's next-gen platform

Issue #1,101  |  Inside the Business of CAD  |  21 June 2021

 

ZwSoft is pivoting from traditional CAD software to an all-in-one CAx platform meant for design work in both manufacturing and buildings. During its annual user conference held last month online (see figure below), the company gave attendees initial details of its long-range plans.

Stage of the ZwWorld 2021 online conference

ZwSoft’s “all-in-one CAx” phrase appeared two years ago. Initially, it involved integrating CAE [computer-aided engineering] applications into the company’s Zw3D MCAD program through a new ZwSIM platform. The first solver was for electromagnetic simulation.

ZwSoft is now expanding the meaning of All-in-One CAx to be “model-defined and data-driven collaboration,” and to be developed over quite a few years. It has been tagged “Project Wukong,” possibly named after the fast, zoomorphic Sun Wukong character in a Chinese novel from 1592, Journey to the West.

More specifically, Project Wukong is ZwSoft’s next-gen 3D CAD platform meant to expand its traditional market of general and mechanical CAD to AEC [engineering, architecture, construction]. ZwSoft plans to reorganize the data, technology, and functions found in their three base programs — ZwCAD, Zw3D, and ZwSIM — to a single platform (see figure below).

Overview of ZwSoft’s future

The company’s three base programs currently are the following:

ZwCAD. The 19-year-old ZwCAD 2D/3D DWG editor is like many other AutoCAD workalikes on the market. It had been based on IntelliCAD and uses the ACIS kernel, and now the company says it is again developing its own kernel.

Zw3D. The solids-surfacing CAD/CAM program began in 1999 as Varimetrix, better known as “VX” and has its own Overdrive kernel. It was acquired by ZwSoft in 2010, and continues to be based in Florida, with co-founder Mark Vorwaller still heading it up under the title of president of ZwSoft America.

ZwSIM. The platform for simulation was launched in 2018 with a geometry engine, pre-processor, solver, and post-processor. ZwSIM so far handles structural and electromagnetic simulation, and is due to receive acoustic, thermal, fluid, and optical solvers in the future.

 

About Project Wukong

Project Wukong involves big changes in how ZwSoft develops software:

  • Files become databases

  • Serial workflows become parallel ones

  • Offline collaboration becomes real-time

At first, it seemed to me that conference presenters were saying that Project Wukong would become the future of all ZwSoft software. Then the lead developer stated that Project Wukong will be the company’s new cross-disciplinary platform and that its primary purpose is to expand ZwSoft’s market into BIM. ZwCAD-Zw3D-ZwSIM would continue on the desktop, and would gain links to software running on the Wukong platform.

ZwSoft plans that Project Wukong-based programs offer the following functions:

  • Concurrent execution of cross-disciplinary applications, including BIM, shipbuilding, and aerospace design. (ZwSoft calls all these verticals “AEC.”)

  • Multiple clients accessing a single data source.

  • Cloud-native (private and public) databases that “will not rely on local file storage.”

  • Top-down product lifecycle management.

  • Large-scale assembly modeling that can handle tens of millions of parts (needed more for BIM than MCAD).

  • Programming APIs that are more extensible than those from competitor CAD systems.

A hundred programmers have been working on the Wukong platform for a year now, which is scheduled to be “realized” three years from now. (See figure below.) A demo of Wukong was not given during the presentation.

Timeline for Project Wukong

ZwSoft plans to have BIM as the first application running on Project Wukong. It is meant to handle design in the areas of massing, structures, HVAC [heating, ventilation, air conditioning], and electro-mechanics. More distant plans include pre-fab design, and construction planning and management. The initial release of “ZwBIM” won’t, however, be ready for five years.

Zwsoft promises to keep updating its file-based desktop software “for as many years as it serves your collective needs.” In any case, file-based software gives ZwSoft a fall-back position, should unforeseen roadblocks change the path it had planned to take towards its future (c.f. Solidworks V6).

 

Zwsoft Stats

Earlier this year, the company went public with an IPO on the Shanghai STAR exchange, China’s NASDAQ for science and technology firms. From what I can tell, ZwSoft has a market capitalization of approximately US$5 billion at a very high P/E [price to earnings] ratio of 210 (20-25 is considered normal). Bloomberg documents that ZwSoft had 2021Q1 revenues of US$13 million (approx.).

During the online conference the company provided us with no financial picture, other than to report that it spends 30% of revenues on R&D [research and development]. ZwSoft indicated it is interested in looking at acquisitions.

The 1,000 who took in the online conference learned these other statistics:

  • 900,000 users

  • 90 countries with customers

  • Annual growth rates:

    • 2018 - 39%

    • 2019 - 42%

    • 2020 - 26%

  • 260 business partners and 200 application developers

 

What Ralph Grabowski Thinks

As with a few MCAD programs like Solidworks and Inventor, the doomsday clock for desktop-based ZwCAD and Zw3D has begun counting down. One presenter stated that the timeframe to continue developing Zw3D in parallel with Wukong is 10-15 years. This discouraging news is tempered by the good news that ZwSoft sells permanent licenses for its desktop software.

The Project Wukong strategy is not uncommon among a few large (c.f. PTC) and new (c.f. Onshape) CAD vendors nowadays. It is, however, a task that’s unusual for a medium-sized (defined by me as around a million users) firm to take on, given the immense scope of work involved. Extrapolating, it could cost ZwSoft 600 person-years to program the first release of “ZwBIM.” Perhaps the IPO [initial public offering] is funding Wukong development.

ZwSoft’s timeline for releasing an initial version of their new BIM software is five years from now, a long time given our industry’s changing priorities during such a period — never mind the additional years that will be required for ZwSoft to add catch-up functions. Here is how I imagine the programming is being scheduled:

  1. By 2026: ZwBIM attains basic BIM functions

  2. By ????: Attains advanced BIM functions

  3. By ????: Adds the BIM functions competitors added since 2021

On the other hand, ZwSoft benefits from learning from competitors the function needed by today’s BIM programs, such as intersections of multi ply walls and slabs, and facades of irregular arrayed shapes. It won’t be wasting time stumbling down dead ends.

BIM in China. The American Revit dominantes in China. From Chinese government-agency documents I perused, there appears to be a desire for China-developed BIM authoring software. There are, however, none in BIM (as best as I could determine), other than support software like project management and add-ons for localized disciplines.

For example, ZwSoft’s closest competitor is Caxa. It has a general/electrical CAD program and an American-developed MCAD system (IronCAD), but no BIM aspiration. Having the field to itself, ZwSoft has plenty of incentive to build BIM.

When the Open Design Alliance first announced it was creating APIs to access, edit, and create data for Revit and IFC files, I wondered if CAD vendors might jump on the chance to develop a Revit of their own. In the years since, we’ve seen lots of CAD systems incorporating RVT/IFC data handling, including ZwCAD. But no one has built a BIM system from scratch, as ZwSoft plans to do. It’s a tough job.

Going beyond Project Wukong, ZwSoft has a vision of becoming the world’s leading CAx software provider. The hitch to this Guangzhou company’s ambition, however, is the lowered-enthusiasm some international markets have for services developed in China.

- - -

You can view the entire presentation at zwsoft.com/zworld/2021 (after registering).

 

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

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

What often takes days using blindly incorrect methods takes minutes or an hour with Okino's well-defined optimization and compression methods using its DWF-3D conversion system.

Popular CAD data sources include SolidWorks, ProE/Creo, Inventor, AutoCAD, Revit, Navisworks, DGN, IGES, STEP, Parasolid, and JT. DCC data sources are Cinema-4D, 3ds Max, Maya, FBX/Collada, and many more.

Perfected over three decades, we know 3D data translation intimately, providing you with highly personalized solutions, education, and communication. Contact CTO Robert Lansdale at [email protected].

www.okino.com

And in Other News

AllPlan 20022 is shipping in October, but Nemetschek Group has already released a sneak peek of some of its new functions:

  • Automatic placement of rebar and rebar shape manager

  • Void management

  • Improved modeling of roofs, stairs, and framing

  • Parametric roads and terrains

  • OpenBIM extended to structural analysis software

  • Visual scripting tool

See more at allplan.com/us_en/buildability.

- - -

CCE updates its EnSuite-Cloud ReVue real-time 3D collaboration software with ReVue LiveLink integrations for Inventor, Solid Edge, Solidworks, and SketchUp. Creo and Revit links are to be added in the near future.

As CAD models are edited, changes are updated in real-time with everyone participating. More info at cadcam-e.com/EnSuite-Cloud-ReVue/CATIA-NX-SolidWorks-Creo-Inventor-Collaboration.

- - -

CAD Software Solutions’ SparePartsPlace Toolkit for Autodesk Inventor v2021.4 optimizes calculation times of surface and combined solid/surface models.

A new build of the SPP Viewer is available from www.sparepartsplace.com.

- - -

Cambashi reports on past and predicted growth rates in the BIM, CAD, and PLM markets at cambashi.com/our-services/market-data-engineering-software/#software%20segments.

Letters to the Editor

Re: Overview of Engineering Math Software

I read with interest the article on engineering math by Gustav Näslund. I guess he does not know about our software GrafiCalc that virtually eliminates tedious mathematical calculations from the product design process. GrafiCalc is trusted by thousands of users worldwide.
     - Shyamal Roy, owner
       GEOMATE Company, www.graficalc.com

- - -

To me, engineering math software is very much associated with CAD and all the other engineering tools in my box, so I was delighted to see the review.

I did not know about Maple Flow and SMath Studio. Mathcad is great, but I’m still using a copy from 20 years ago. The complexity of my calculations has not changed over the past 20 years, so thousands of dollars of additional fees for unneeded features are not justified. Collaboration with others is not critical to me.

I’ll be experimenting with Maple and SMath. If they work, I’ll encourage others to go that route too.
     - Chuck Moore

- - -

It’s nice to see SMath referenced in your publication. This is an excellent free program that I’ve been using for over a decade. I written hundreds of programs using it. Programs can be written to incorporate units of measurement. Arrays can be written with the column values containing units.

There are a few minor hiccups, but these can easily be worked around. The only other issue with it is that it is Russian and for political reasons, this may preclude the use of in for some businesses.

This is a link to some information on Eng-tips, one of the better technical websites: eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=484114.

I’ve attached a bit of a clip of some of the code. It can get a lot more complicated and the units are taken care of directly.

The units in the answers are provided by SMath, based on the unit values of the variables automatically. I display the answers in both Imperial and metric. I'm a bit of a dinosaur; I work in Imperial and metric (SI), but think in Imperial; the metric values are for those that work in metric.
     - Dik Coates, P. Eng.

 

The editor responds: Me, too. Those of us of a certain age.

Most products sold in Canada are still Imperial, even though we have been officially metric since 1970. So, I asked my kids’ high school teachers to include Imperial instruction — no-can-do.

I’ve come to realize that imperial units are human units — inch, foot, yard relate to the human body, and are closer to the kind of e*-scaling that is common in nature. (Metric units and their power-of-10 scaling are inhuman, IMHO.) Even carpentry is easier: half of 3/8" is 3/16"; half of 37mm is who-knows-what.

*) e = Euler’s constant = 2.718281828459045235…

 

Notable Quotable

“Reducing our dependence on the Internet is a good goal. Kind of like aiming to smoke fewer cigarettes each day.”
- Ralph Grabowski

 

Thank You, Readers

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

  • Marco Lucini of ProgeSoft (small company donation)

  • Christopher Cleary

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:

Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and use the account of [email protected].

Or ask [email protected] about making a direct bank transfer through Wise (Transferwise).

Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

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Posted at 07:00 AM in Software | | Comments (0)

Monday, June 14, 2021

Overview of Engineering Math Software

Issue #1,100  |  Inside the Business of CAD     | 14 June 2021

 

Written by Gustav Näslund

 

Mathematics software for engineers is not something I am especially familiar with. When I took calculus, we had no calculators, and in my field of study at the time, transportation engineering, we tended to work with simple trigonometry, rather than advanced equations.

So, reader Gustav Näslund suggested running an article about the software available in the engineering math editor space.

- - -

Software for engineering math are not strictly CAD, but I think nonetheless that they are essential and powerful tools for design engineers to perform and document engineering calculations.

I think this class of software is not as well known, nor used, as much as it should be in our industry, which is why I would like raise awareness of them.

If you are not familiar with this kind of software, think of it as a free form digital notepad that does calculations interactively. It supports units of measurement and live links between all variables and equations. The figure below is typical:

Math software doing calculations and units conversion

In general, this kind of software lets you add equations, text, and images in a freeform manner, and you can rearrange them as you like. All equations are live-linked, so that they update their values when something changes.

Because you work in a paper-like format, the format is self-documenting. When you are done, just save it as a PDF file, and you have your calculations documented.

The equations support all units of measurements. This means, for example, that we can mix imperial and metric units in equations without fear. The mandatory reference here is to the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter debacle; see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter.

I find that the programs have a very low threshold for getting started, and run fast, so they are suitable for even the simplest calculations — never mind the most advanced.

 

Math Software Packages

The figure below is of SMath Studio; MathCAD and Maple Flow look similar.

SMath Studio from Andrey Ivashov

MathCAD has long been a player in engineering math editor field, 35 years in the business. It was taken over by PTC in 2006, and then received a total makeover as MathCAD Prime in 2011.

The latest version of MathCAD is available now by subscription only, in the ballpark of $1,000/year for a commercial licence. Educational licenses are available. www.mathcad.com and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcad

Maple Flow is a very recently released (2021) direct competitor to MathCAD from Canadian company MapleSoft. It appears to me to be aimed directly as a competitor to MathCAD, as it has a very similar interface and works in the same way.

Maple Flow seems to be priced at $2,390 for a single perpetual commercial license. Educational licenses are available. maplesoft.com/products/mapleflow

SMath Studio is a free alternative created by Andrey Ivashov, first released in 2006. It has capabilities that are very similar to the original MathCAD, before its remake as MathCAD Prime.

Being free, it is not as advanced as MathCAD, but for 90% of engineers it will be just what they want (and need). It has a thriving community that creates plug-ins and so on, and is funded through donations. www.smath.com

[Gustav Näslund owns GN Tech of Sweden, and specializes in product development and mechanical design. www.gntech.se/en]

 

And in Other News

The next release of NX is shipping later this week on June 18, while Solid Edge 2022 is scheduled to become available later this year in October.

In other Siemens news, the company acquired Nextflow Software of France for its meshless simulation technology. Smooth-Particle Hydrodynamics does particle-based computational fluid dynamics for gas and liquid flows. www.nextflow-software.com

- - -

Radica Software’s Electra Cloud schematic electrical design software now exports BOMs (bills of material) directly to OpenBOM for report creation, with further links to accounting systems. A future upgrade will export data from OpenBOM back to Electra and its Vecta.io SVG [scalable vector graphics] editor. radicasoftware.com

- - -

3D Systems has divested itself of its on-demand additive manufacturing service, named On Demand Manufacturing, for $82 million to Trilantic, which promptly renamed it Quickparts. Details at schnitgercorp.com/?p=18523

- - -

Jon Peddie Research reports that the GPU market last year grew by 39% to 199 million units. The market share between suppliers remains unchanged:

  • AMD - 15%

  • Intel - 17%

  • nVidia - 68%

www.jonpeddie.com

 

Letters to the Editor

Re: U-Splines for Predicting Failure

Though well outside of my profession, I find FEA [finite element analysis] interesting. Does Coreform run on GPUs [graphics processing units]? I searched their forum for the term, but there was only one unrelated result.

How does the speed of their software compare to competitors that do run on GPUs? Many FEA software packages are optimized to run on nVidia GPUs: nvidia.com/en-us/gpu-accelerated-applications.

It would seem that if their core calculations are more efficient on CPUs, writing the code to get their software to run on GPUs would be a further advantage.
            - Peter Lawton
            Affiliated Engineers, Inc.

 

Greg Vernon replies: Currently, we only execute on CPUs, but we’ve architected our algorithms and code to be maximally parallelize-able. GPU-compute is definitely on our roadmap.

A large bulk of our compute time is spent within the linear and nonlinear solvers provided by the open-source PETSc project, which is currently developing GPU support. See mcs.anl.gov/petsc/features/gpus.html.

We’re currently focusing on classes of problems that have [in the past] required incredible amounts of compute resources, but rather than throw more resources (more CPUs and GPUs) at the problem, we’re consistently finding that throwing better math at the problem is giving us orders of magnitude faster solves.

I like to think of it in terms of Exascale* ambitions. If the point of Exascale compute is to solve problems, then there are two ways to achieve this:

  1. Build faster/larger parallel computers

  2. Use better mathematics that make the problem smaller for existing computers

We’re taking the second approach!
            -Greg Vernon, director of product management
            Coreform

 

*) Exascale = computing systems capable of calculating 10¹⁸ floating point operations per second, or more.

 

Mr Lawton responds: The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, of course, so Corefrom may consider using both — the outcome will be even greater advantage over competitors.

It sounds, too, like the math they are improving requires a different coding team than would be required to get Coreform to run on CUDA, so the two improvements can happen in parallel, once you have the right personnel.

 

Notable Quotable

“He’s at home recovering for a few days. He saw an offensive tweet.”
     - Management Speak

 

Thank You, Readers

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

  • Martin van der Roest: “One of those decisions that is a no-brainer. I really appreciate your perspectives and contribution to our industry. Thank you!”

  • Dairobi Paul

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, I suggest the following amounts:

Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and use the account of [email protected].

Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

 

*4720

 

Posted at 07:00 AM in Guest Editorials, Reviews, Software | | Comments (0)

Monday, June 07, 2021

U-splines for Predicting Failure

Issue #1,099 |  Inside the Business of CAD | 7 June 2021

 

 

Nearly all analysis software works the same way: break up 3D models into many small pieces, and then do an analysis on each small element to find out when the model might fail. The concept goes back Boris Galerkin, who mused that just because something can be proven physically doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be proven mathematically.

And so in 1915 Mr Galerkin developed an approximation method using differential equations, following which Richard Courant developed the finite element method as a special case of Galerkin’s Method. That was 1943; today, FEA [finite element analysis] is overwhelmingly the most common form of model analysis.

IGA [iso-geometric analysis] is a different way of splitting 3D solids into those chunks before performing analyses on models. Mike Scott, Derek Thomas, and Kevin Tew pioneered R&D on IGA under the name of Isogeometrx LLC. IGA is based on U-splines (unstructured splines, patented by Mr Thomas). The company rebranded as Coreform when Matt Sederberg came on board in 2016 to commercialize IGA.

IGA and FEA applied to a part: 1,000 elements vs 1,000,000 elements

Then about a year ago, Coreform developed a new IGA formulation, generalizing the finite cell method. The idea is to adjust simulation speed and accuracy, coarser or finer, according to the needs of each stage of the product development process. By decreasing meshing time and eliminating steps, Coreform speeds up design and analysis. (See figure below.)

Coreform software speeding up design and analysis

Coreform IGA handles both material and geometric nonlinearities, as well as nonlinear constraints, including contacts. For a given degree p, the bandwidth is the same but the fill-in is greater for smooth functions. Most customers define their own subroutines and material models through Julia, an open-source programming language. See julialang.org.

The following figure shows how Coreform fits into the panoply of FEA programs:

The place of Coreform IGS among analysis software

Before U-Splines

Before co-founding Coreform, Mr Sederberg commercialized the T-splines technology developed by his father, Tom Sederberg. T-splines were an improvement over meshing, which usually limits meshes to rectangles; T-splines meant that meshes could come to a stop before covering the entire surface. (See figure below.)

A simple T-spline (image source SourceForge)

One catch is that it takes a lot more computing power, but today’s computer can handle it. Another, more serious catch is that unlike U-splines, T-splines were never invented to be used for analysis.

The stand-alone T-Splines software was bought by Autodesk in 2011, which integrated the technology into its Inventor and Fusion 360 programs – much to the disappointment of customers who had been using the CAD-agnostic version of T-Splines.

 

Cubit and IGA

Coreform offers two software products:

Coreform Cubit is the mesher using hexagonal and square meshes (see figure below). It cleans up poorly-made CAD models, and everything can be automated with Python scripting. With coarse bounding-box analysis, the result from Cubit is nearly instant.

Course bounding box and detailed adaptive quadrature

The free version Coreform Cubit Learn for non-commercial use limits exports to 50,000 elements.

Coreform IGA implements IGA with linear and nonlinear solvers to solve static and dynamic physics made of nonlinear materials and contacts. Input files are in human-readable JSON [JavaScript object notation] format. Subroutines are implemented in Julia.

Visualizing IGA results inside ParaView open-source visualization software at www.paraview.org

Coreform is especially useful for complex assemblies. The company is interested in working with early adopters to understand their needs.

 

Q&A

Q: Traditional FEA is many decades old and is very well known. How would one go about explaining IGA to management that is comfortable with FEA, but has no idea what a spline is?

A: Here’s what I tell them: Every traditional FEA mesh is a spline. However, it has historically been so intractably difficult to build “high-order, smooth splines on unstructured meshes” that it hasn’t been worth encoding traditional FEA meshes as a spline.

Any practical, commercially-viable simulation tool needs to have unstructured meshes; real world parts are unstructured and complex.

Academics have known for years the benefits that smooth splines provide in FEA. See the section titled “The piecewise polynomial spaces” at the bottom of page 8 of doi.org/10.1090/S0002-9904-1973-13351-8. The last sentence in the paper reads, “But the actual construction of the psi^i is genuinely an open problem,” and refers to the problem of creating smooth, high-order splines on unstructured meshes. U-splines are a solution to this problem.

Smoothness is often referred to as “continuity.” We would say that traditional finite elements are “continuous (C^0)” while IGA is “smooth (C^1, C^2, C^3...).”

In fact, for special cases, we already use smooth splines in FEA, we just give the elements different names like “Euler-Bernoulli beam element” or “Hermite shell element.” However, even these haven’t been recognized or implemented as splines.

What IGA does is implement the finite element method upon the recognition that all meshes are splines. This means that certain critical parts of the finite element method are generalized, such as integration and assembly. Critically, IGA is FEA, but with a whole new set of rich mathematical theory and tools that are more effective at solving FEA problems.

 

Q: How much of Coreform is based on T-splines?

A: T-splines are not part of the Coreform IGA solution. Our U-splines are a general form of spline designed to support simulation.

T-splines technology was a stepping stone to U-splines. Coreform’s technical founders learned from the shortcomings and positives of T-splines when they began developing our U-spline technology.

 

Q: Can we use user-defined materials (UMAT) in Coreform?

A: Yes, we have a fully defined user interface that leverages Julia. It can handle user-defined materials and other subroutines for assembly, element definition, and so on.

 

Q: Is there a discontinuous Galerkin function in Coreform?

A: We do leverage some techniques that are closely related to the discontinuous Galerkin method [which converts continuous functions to discrete ones].

 

Q: Solving time?

A: We use the open source PETSc [portable, extensible toolkit for scientific computation] parallel solver library. We have 15x fewer elements and 20x fewer degrees of freedom for a typical part, so it will solve much faster. However, with the same number of elements, we are slower because of the setup time.

 

Q: Why is accuracy per degree-of-freedom [DOF] an important quantity to measure/report? As the stiffness matrix gets denser for spline basis, wouldn’t the solve time also increase, despite the smaller number of DOFs?

A: This is highly problem dependent, but as the complexity increases (such as due to nonlinear materials, geometry, contacts, and dynamics) the disparity between Coreform IGA solve times and traditional FEA increases, in that Coreform IGA is much, much faster.

 

Q: Do you have the ability to report the uncertainty in the calculation of the results?

A: We do not yet support uncertainties in computed quantities.

 

Q: Does Coreform IGA model [analyze] contacts between parts?

A: We are actively developing contact capabilities. New capabilities will be rolled out with every release. We have a fully-defined (self-) contact algorithm that can be deployed over both body-fitted and immersed contact surfaces.

 

Q: Can Coreform simulate any kind of partial differential equations set by the user? Not only stress mechanics or Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics, but also flow fields of electrolyzer systems, for example?

A: You can add additional physics through our user-defined interface. Our code is designed to be highly customizable, as this has been a requirement by all our customers.

 

Q: Is MPI [message passing interface] solver (for parallel computing) supported in Coreform?

A: Yes, it is fully parallelized.

 

Q: Geometry is obviously very important, but I am sure you are aware that materials’ parameters have been calibrated based upon element technology for traditional solvers, so that certainly applies to IGA. Users will have to look carefully at their material properties. Any comment about this?

A: We have quite a bit of experience porting advanced (often proprietary) material models from commercial FEA codes to Coreform IGA. We have never encountered a situation where special techniques were used in addition to what is commonly used in FEA.

 

Q: Is there Bezier extraction in IGA?

A: We use Bezier extraction extensively in Coreform IGA. In fact, the U-spline technology is defined in terms of Bezier extraction.

 

Q: BEM [boundary element method] can have even smaller DOFs for isotropic homogeneous models. However, the resulting stiffness matrix isn’t sparse anymore. How about IGA and sparsity patterns?

A: The sparsity patterns for IGA are exactly the same as p-FEM except there may be more fill-in due to smoothness. This means that the matrices are still sparse, just less sparse than traditional FEA. The matrix is the same size as the number of degrees of freedom in the model. For an IGA solution that has 1000x fewer DOFs it’s okay that this smaller matrix has a higher relative density.

 

Q: Can we directly use CAD files (such as Solidworks) in Coreform?

A: Coreform Cubit includes data importers that support most CAD inputs. Some of these importers are free with a standard Cubit license, while others are licensed separately. See coreform.com/products/translators for details.

 

Q: Is there a way to improve the quality of the display of the results, such as smoothing out the results?

A: Yes. The ability to see the results directly on the underlying CAD model is literally days away.

 

Q: Is the process during decomposition using multiple adjacent subdomains, and using same or different material— Is it a single mesh or multiple meshes?

A: Both scenarios are fully supported.

 

Q: Can we solve fluid-structure interaction problems (FSI) in Coreform?

A: We don’t currently have fluids/FSI capabilities, but it is on our roadmap.

 

Q: Heat transfer?

A: That is the next simulation we plan to implement. We never implement a feature without a customer request.

 

Q: Any plans to support a “Coreform IGA Learn” version?

A: Yes! It will be very similar to Coreform Cubit Learn. Stay tuned.

 

Q: May I know the immersed technology behind Coreform IGA? Is that adaptive quadrature or reparameterization?

A: We accommodate both workflows. One can be preferred over the other depending on the application. The immersed technology is a generalization of the finite cell method.

 

Q: What advantages do you see using Coreform IGA over known open-source IGA solvers considering an academic environment? Sadly, we have to take care of possible fees, etc. at academia.

A: Contact us and we can discuss fees.

We’re committed to supporting the open-source community:

We believe there will always be a space for open-source IGA solvers, and that it is mutually beneficial for Coreform to support open-source solvers.

 

Q: How do you suggest forming an IGA structural model based on point clouds of geometry (based on measurements of parts from something like LIDAR)? What would be the workflow in the context of Cubit?

A: That is of great interest to us. It is not a clean way to build a model. For a point cloud, is a point inside or outside? You still need to build triangulations but it does not need to be clean.

www.coreform.com

 

And in Other News

A solution for CAD vendors stuck on Amazon’s cloud-rental hamster wheel: “Analysis of 50 public software companies finds that repatriating workloads from public cloud infrastructure could help them reduce their cloud spend by 50%.” (Sarah Wang and Martin Casado)

- - -

After burning through $2+ billion in funding from SoftBank and other venture capital firms, construction startup Katerra last week told its 8,000 employees that after six years in operation it is shutting down. The company wanted to revolutionize building construction through off-site modular-panel factories and lots of technology. katerra.com/vision

- - -

NCG CAM Solutions releases NCG CAM v18.0 with new features like

  • Create a patch from two 3D curves

  • 3D tool guide

  • Horizontal area passes from outside to inside

  • Waterline offset passes (see figure below)

Another new function, Trim Surfaces to a Boundary, will be added later. As the company says, “Perpetual Licensing (This will NOT change).” Download the demo version from www.ncgcam.com/demo-download (after registration).

- - -

Precast Software Engineering is now a subsidiary of Allplan, operating under the name Allplan Software Engineering. www.allplan.com/us_en

 

Letters to the Editor

Re: A 2021 View of the PLM Market

Here are 171 programs that claim to be PLM at capterra.com/product-lifecycle-management-software: “Find the best Product Lifecycle Management Software for your business. Compare product reviews and features to build your list.”

Can you imagine giving an employee this task from this list?

PLM was never to be this. Those that created it, American Motors, started with a drawing archive. Today, they are trying to manage engineering documentation. The major programs are associative and create a nightmare for document control. The Info-techs have devised many unworkable processes to solve this problem.

Boeing’s engineering was taken over by Dassault’s Catia 5 PLM, the result was the failed MBE [model-based engineering]. They eliminated the drafting group and document control without preparing the staff or doing a test run, all cold turkey.

In the past, all documentation was controlled by drawings (part and assembly drawings) The drawing package defined the complete project and stood alone. PLM’s efforts to take over document control has made a mess of engineering. But it was just part of a perfect storm!
     - Joe Brouwer

 

The editor replies: As PLM is meant to do all things, then all things belong to PLM:

  • P = product = everything that ever was made, is made, and will be made

  • L = lifecyle = the duration of every product, from before it was designed until after it is torn apart by the recycling biz

  • M = Management = managing it all with software and, more recently, using IoT for feedback.

- - -

Part of the problem with the PLM market seems to be that it is compelled to make up new names for the same thing. I’m sure that PLM, PDM, MRP, ERP, and MES have some differences, but all appear to do the same thing.

Or maybe they don’t all do the same thing, but they all — no matter what they started as — now claim to be the total solution to running businesses.

My direct experience of all of them is limited to the ways they impact the engineering world, but it’s always interesting to listen to a CAD company explain that their engineering software is now ready to take care of your accounting system, and vice-versa.
      - Jess Davis

 

The editor replies: That is the ulterior motive behind CAD and other software vendors pushing their PLM: one software to rule your whole business, reaping subscription fees until the day your business ends.

 

Notable Quotable

“Apple is second to none in this field, perpetuating an obscene throwaway culture, candy-coated with neat videos and communication extolling their green posture. (A note in passing: a lack of further investigation into this is a major journalistic failure.)”
     - Frederic Filloux

 

Thank You, Readers

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Posted at 07:00 AM in Interviews, Q&A, Software | | Comments (0)

Monday, May 31, 2021

A 2021 View of the PLM Market

Issue #1,098 |  Inside the Business of CAD  |  31 May 2021

 

Research firm CIMdata says their definition of PLM is “much broader than how most organizations see it” as it covers cradle-to-grave processes involved in making products. From this point of view, “PLM” includes the software we are primarily interested in, CAD.

Peter Bilello, ceo of Cimdata, reported on the results of a survey his firm made in the first part of 2021. It had 151 respondents. Most were OEMs or tier-1 firms in auto/transportation, aerospace/defense and medical devices. Here are my notes from his presentation. You can view the presentation in full at register.gotowebinar.com/recording/7167860752449997581 (following registration).

- - -

A year ago, PLM sales slowed due to coronavirus, but then more than made up for it in the rest of 2020 as companies looked to solutions for work-from-home and for increasing efficiency.

Firms use PLM to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Respondents to the survey have been working with PLM for more than a decade, some for more than 20 years. One-third spend under $500 thousand in their annual PLM budget; ten percent spend more than $20 million (see figure below).

Sizes of firms responding to PLM survey

Most firms use PLM in areas traditional to PLM like engineering change management, pre-release data management, configurations, and global collaboration. Perhaps more interesting are the areas thought natural for PLM but where use is nearly non-existent:

  • Recycling and disposal

  • AI and machine learning

  • Social media

About 60% of respondents use the PDM [product data management] part of PLM. Engineering middle management and end users find PLM most valuable. About 60% of respondents’ firms use two or more PLM solutions, usually due to acquisitions, or due to one department in a company picking an industry-specific PLM system.

The reality is that most companies are inefficient and have learned to live with it. So, what problems affect the use of PLM? The primary one is the overlap between PLM, ERP [engineering resource planning], and MES [manufacturing execution system] functions. Then there are culture and practice differences across business units, and conflicts in priorities over multiple digital initiatives. And there still is the problem in understanding the payback from implementing PLM.

These problems are caused primarily by a lack of executive sponsorship. Other times, problems are created by priorities that are driven by PLM providers, or the lack of user involvement/training. Only 20% of corporate management says it could not live without PLM; the other 80% think it is too expensive, that it is just for engineering, or that just don’t know what it is.

There are so many trends bombarding manufacturers these days, such as IoT, digital twins with digital threads, big data, AR/VR, social media, and more (see figure below). Mr Bilello says that properly implemented PLM can help enable these.

Technology coming at CAD and PLM users

Q&A

Q: By “social,” do you mean using PLM for social media functions, like chats?

A: Yes, as a form of looser collaboration, for capturing data inside and outside the firm, and so on.

 

Q: What is the current status of IoT?

A: The Internet of Things continues to grow. There still is a need to connect devices, to close the loop between the factory and the design.

 

Q: What are three biggest challenges experienced by PLM customers?

A: They are:

  • Organizational resistance — people are used to doing things a certain way, but that’s because they had no choice, as that was the only way to do things at one time in the past.

  • Resource unavailability — not having resources, like education and training, to make the changes required by PLM.

  • Sustainability of the PLM environment — the difficulty of getting out of old systems, where a lot effort was needed to implement them, and so not moving to a sustainable system long-term.

 

Q: Any surprises in this year’s survey?

A: Nothing was surprising, once the initial slowdown ended in mid-2020. I was surprised that people are now less likely to say that PLM has run its course.

www.cimdata.com

 

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www.okino.com

 

Letters to the Editor

RE: Dassault’s Disconnect with Solidworks Users

To be accurate, Solidworks 2021 was released October 5, 2020 and is certainly not currently in beta. New releases have traditionally occurred, once a year, around that time for several years now. The beta test for the 2022 version will probably start in the next month or so.

You wrote, “It needs, however, to be shut down. Solidworks, like Inventor and AutoCAD, is reaching the limits of its capabilities. So much more could be possible were it cloudified.”

Since this is in the “what you think” section, it sounds like this is your opinion, but I expect that is what Dassault executives want. Most customers are happy with the functionality they have now, so the real problem for Dassault is that they are having trouble coming up with enhancements that justify to perpetual-license customers the cost of paying for upgrades. They need to get them on a term-license model to ensure a continued revenue stream.

Unlike your characterization that Solidworks is sold to one- and two-man shops, there are many large companies with Solidworks installations of dozens to hundreds of licenses building assemblies with tens of thousands of components. Almost none of them are begging for a cloudified solution where they have no control of the process. Especially when the cloud solutions are so inferior to what they have now with SolidWorks.

Gian Paolo Bassi stated recently “3dexperience Solidworks can do everything you do with Solidworks desktop plus more,” but he conveniently ignores huge holes missing in functions. Lack of 2D drawings output is one pointed out most often, but there are many more if you look at detailed functions, rather than just checkboxes like “Sheet metal” and “Weldments.”
     - Name withheld by request



The editor replies: If Autodesk, PTC, and Dassault truly think that the cloudCAD is the future (actually, the present, by now), then they ought to get rid of all their desktop software. With the experience that comes from time, the drawbacks to cloudCAD have become clear, and so desktop CAD remains.

Thank you for correcting the version number of Solidworks.

As for the size of typical Solidworks customer workplace, I should have written “SME” (small and medium-size enterprises). I have made the corrections to the archive copy.

- - -

Access to 3dexperience is acquired by purchasing licenses to “roles” that generally define what capabilities or apps a user needs. XDesign is still around as an app in one of the roles.

DraftSight is still available as a desktop program and was not rebranded. 3dexperience DraftSight is a cloud version using Kudo technology.
     - Mike DeKoning

- - -

You wrote that staff at Ikea “use Solidworks Composer to drag parts away from one another [and then] monochrome vector drawings are made from the disassembled model for use in the assembly brochures.”

To me, this is one of the baffling things about Solidworks. I do that exact process routinely, but I do it in Solidworks. We do parts manuals, assembly instructions, and graphics for all kinds of brochures, Web sites, and so on.

They keep trying to sell me Composer, but they can never quite explain why I need it. I really hesitate to even discuss it with my reseller, because I’m afraid that if enough people say it, it will get back to Dassault, and they will figure out a way to kill the feature in Solidworks to force us to buy Composer.

Composer, by the way, costs about the same as Solidworks Professional.
            - Jess Davis, president
            Davis Precision Design

 

The editor replies: Yikes! (to the price).

- - -

In your article about Solidworks you said, “So much more could be possible were it cloudified.”

You got me laughing considering your historic articles when you were so negative about CAD + cloud. Back then, you got called out by your press peers that you were underestimating the cloud, and you continued to throw shade on those companies that worked to innovate towards the cloud. Now today you are throwing shade on companies that don’t use the cloud.
     - Brian

 

The editor replies: You may have misunderstood where I was going with this thought. More is possible with the cloud (like collaboration), true, but more is not what Solidworks users want — or, indeed, most CAD users.

I continue to stand with sensible CAD vendors like Siemens and Bricsys who find that CAD works best on the desktop.

 

Notable Quotable

"Does a press release use ‘could’ a lot? Replace ‘could’ with the equivalent ‘might or might not,’ and it reads very differently.”
     - Rupert Goodwins

 

Thank You, Readers

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Posted at 07:00 AM in Software | | Comments (0)

Monday, April 26, 2021

Q&A From Onshape's User Conference (part iii of iii)

Issue #1,093  |  The Business of CAD  |  26 April 2021

 

 

The first Onshape software conference took place online last month, and I transcribed many of the questions asked by users and answered by PTC staff.

- - -

Q: Does Onshape use parallelism in the cloud, and if so, when?

A: This is one of the big promises of the cloud. We use it in some places. Updating lots of parts in an assembly simultaneously causes Onshape to do it on multiple geometry servers. We plan to use parallelism for more things, like engineering design studies.

There are aspects of CAD that are inherently serial. Regeneration itself is inherently serial, for the most part. We cannot regenerate certain features until we have regenerated other features before them. We rent the Amazon machines with the highest single-thread performance.

 

Q: Might you be able to share how Atlas works with Onshape?

A: A lot of how Onshape data is structured is the foundation of Atlas’s data model. Atlas uses a lot of the same code we do at our end.

There are going to be parts of Atlas that are not currently part of Onshape, to develop an ecosystem of applications that do more than what Onshape currently has. That is where a lot of the effort is currently going in building it out.

 

Q: What details can you tell us about the future of FeatureScript?

A: FeatureScript is not the only mechanism for automation of Onshape. It is very specifically tailored to Part Studio and in other things it works well. But it is not necessarily the best thing for scripting in all systems.

For that, we have API [application programming interface] capabilities that we are improving, especially in light of Atlas development. The expansion of these API capabilities will make a really convenient system for automating things, like ECAD [electrical design] and rendering simulation.

 

Q: How do you decide which functions to add to Onshape next?

A: It is a juggling act. On the one had, we have things we think are important to do; on the other hand, we have a finite set of developers.

The most important thing is [to implement] whatever is blocking our existing customers from doing their work. Next priority are functions that will help us get new customers.

While doing that, we have to keep investing in performance, fixing bugs, and code infrastructure. We make sure we leave some room for risk-taking, functions customers are not necessarily asking for. Summer interns let us have more bang-for-the-buck features.

 

Q: How can I optimize Onshape’s performance?

A: Performance is a really complicated topic [for server-based CAD programs]. For instance, ISPs can route you to a server not closest to you, which increases latency. Some of the factors that the user has control over are their network and hardware:

  • Onshape can use two discrete GPUs in a computer; check that onshape.com/setup knows this

  • Follow Onshape’s best practices for modeling, such as avoiding giant assemblies, like a car as one part in Studio; avoid long drive chains.

 

Q: Does OnShape pull in Solidworks Simulation data?

A: You cannot pull in Solidworks simulation data, unless it comes in the form of video or pictures.

 

Q: Do direct editing tools work on tessellated geometry?

A: Tessellated data comes in as a bunch of triangles. You can delete triangles, and then use the surfacing tool to smooth over sections.

 

Q: Any option to bring in PCB data?

A: We would bring in printed circuit board(PCB) data just as solid mechanical geometry [today]. We are working on ECAD with one of our acquisitions.

 

Q: What other file formats can Onshape import?

A: We can bring in files from Unigraphics [sic], Creo, those standard big-name CAD types. You can also bring in non-CAD data, like images. The help system lists the things you can bring in.

 

Q: What is the benefit of using Cassini over just doing the import yourself?

A: Custom properties are brought in automatically. Assemblies with many shared components have components brought in just once.

 

Q. Can I connect Onshape to my PDM [product data management] system, which is connected to Solidworks?

A: No, but it might be possible with Cassini.

 

Q: Are there any tools to edit DXFs or DWGs?

A: ARES Kudo in Onshape is read-only; to edit, you have to purchase it from the app store.

 

Q: Is there a best way to get [imported] assemblies into working shape?

A: If no movement is required, the easiest way is highlight the whole thing and use a group mate. In Onshape, all assemblies are considered flexible. If there is some movement [needed], then you have to get into mates.

 

Q: How can we manage our standard content libraries?

A: Onshape has its own standard content library, but you do not have a lot of ability to customize it: you can put in your own part numbers, descriptions. There is a request to make it more customizable.

For your parts library, make a folder, share it with the whole company, and then put each part in its own document.

 

Q: Do we have to import our own commercial parts, or do you have parts suppliers?

A: You would have to import them. If you download them, choose a ParaSolid format (like Solidworks), because that is the kernel we are built on.

 

Q: Do you use Git for change control?

A: We use Git for developing our software, but wrote our own change control for models.

 

Q: Is simulation being driven by Ansys Discovery Live [used by PTC’s Creo]?

A: No, not Ansys Live. We are not planning on talking about the tech behind our simulation, but we have something that is very efficient and accurate, and will scale well in the cloud.

 

What Ralph Grabowski Thinks

PTC is betting its future on Atlas, something the company has admitted in another venue that might take as long as a decade to complete, while costing customers 2x higher subscription fees.

Here’s the But: the design side of CAD isn’t moving wholesale to the cloud, as some players in the CAD industry seem to be finding. Not only is it really hard to put it there, but customers aren’t even particularly keen on the concept. Cloud is useful primarily for ancillary operations like collaboration, PLM, and many-cored calculations.

We could suppose that PTC bought Onshape for the technology, not the MCAD. Onshape will, in my opinion, stay at the low-end, paving the way for Creo to become sufficiently cloud-enabled, by which point PTC may even have lost interest in Onshape, given that Creo and Onshape use incompatible kernels.

- - -

Looking back to part i: Update on Onshape; PTC Visualizes the Gig Economy; Jon Hirschtick’s Keynote; How Onshape Works

Last week in part ii: Onshape for Solidworks Users; The Future of Onshape

To watch the archive of the online conference, register at events1.social27.com/onshapelive21/home.

 

And in Other News

IMSI Design celebrates its upcoming 30th year with the release of TurboCAD 2021:

  • Constraint animations show ranges of motion issues

  • 2D-edit mode turns off 3D objects and related tools

  • Apply to Pattern applies solid operations to all elements in a pattern (array)

  • Imprints can use 2D contours from inserted blocks

TurboCAD is available with permanent and subscription licenses starting at $70. Download the 15-day trial version from turbocad.com/content/free-trials.

- - -

Nemetschek ALLPLAN 2021 automates recurring processes, such as converting cutouts to voids, applying rules to rebars, and placing PythonParts from Allplan Bridge accurately.

Get more details at allplan.com/products/allplan-2021/features.

- - -

CIMdata holds a free educational “2021: PLM Status & Trends” Webinar on 13 May at 11:00 a.m. EDT to report on results from its recent global PLM Status & Trends research. Learn more about the Webinar contents and register through cimdata.com/en/education/educational-webinars/webinar-2021-plm-status-trends.

- - -

Vectorworks revealed that the native Apple M1 version of Vectorworks software will be ready in September, but it may lack some ancillary items, such as SketchUp import because it requires SketchUp to also run on M1.

No Vectorworks app is planned for iPad or other iOS devices due to the huge difference in platform capabilities. For more on Vectorworks’ future plans, see forum.vectorworks.net/index.php?/topic/77760-2021-public-roadmap.

- - -

Plex-Earth ports its aerial and satellite imagery from AutoCAD to BricsCAD ($299/year and up). Place CAD models in maps like Google Earth, or place maps in CAD drawings.

Recent, historical, and high-quality imagery and terrain data are accessed from Maxar, Airbus, Nearmap, Hexagon, and Google. Free trial for either CAD package from plexearth.com/free-trial.

- - -

Here is one of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:

You can subscribe to the WorldCAD Access blog’s RSS feed through Feed Burner at feeds.feedburner.com/WorldcadAccess.

 

Letters to the Editor

If you’ve already seen the new Solidworks forum you can quit reading this email. If you haven’t seen it check out the latest way Dassault Systemes has antagonized Solidworks users.

I clicked on a Solidworks Google search and got nothing but one forum post with a little Coming Soon tag. I signed up for the new board (you can’t view the site without signing up) and still couldn’t find an answer, because only 2020 forum posts have been moved to the new system. They’re working on 2019 and older but it takes time. They should’ve done that before they moved to the new system. I need to find a different forum.

Here is background on a forum user focus group meeting with Dassault: cadforum.net/viewtopic.php?p=3760. You should be able to view it without logging in.

I enjoy reading the weekly eZine. Keep up the good work.
            - Andrew

 

Re: More Notes from OnShape's First User Conference

I wonder how many failed startups would exist if no “free money” was available to them via banking and investors? Nothing like a rigged game filled with dreamers who produce little to nothing of value for the world!

Excellent Notable Quotable!
            - Chris Cadman

The editor replies: There is so much cash sloshing around these days, and so with interest rates below 1%, investors are desperate to invest for better returns somewhere, anywhere. Hence the crazy prices in houses, the too-high stock market, and the billions ploughed by venture capital funds into firms with any idea: the long lists of new investments posted by techcrunch.com each day is unimaginable!

 

Notable Quotable

“Don’t be fooled by fashionable subjects. Do whatever you like, if it’s really what you want to do.”
     - Isamu Akasaki, winner, Nobel prize for inventing the “impossible” blue LED

 

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:

Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and use the account of [email protected].

Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

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Posted at 07:00 AM in Interviews, Q&A, Software, Travel | | Comments (0)

Monday, April 19, 2021

More Notes from OnShape's First User Conference (Part ii of iii)

Issue #1,092  |  The Business of CAD  |  19 April 2021

 

Here are more notes I took during Onshape’s first annual user conference.

Onshape for Solidworks Users

One of the aims of Belmont Technologies was to capture Solidworks users. The founders were, after all, mostly ex-Solidworks folk. I don’t know if there was some kind of animosity going on (as sometimes happens with ex-employees) or if they were just targeting the largest mid-range MCAD market with its 1.5 million commercial users (today).

The campaign didn’t go well. By the time Onshape sold itself to PTC, it had merely 5,000 commercial customers, let alone 1.5 million. There is, after all, little reason to switch away: Solidworks users are comfortable with their software running on speedy desktop computers while accessing more functions than Onshape.

OnShape has its advantages, naturally, but they aren’t the ones that Solidworks users would necessarily find useful. They have largely ignored Dassault Systemes’ entreaties to “come on over” to the 3dexperience cloud. In 30 years in this business, I find that any CAD vendor’s entreaties to switch falls mostly on deaf ears; it simply doesn’t compute.

The dream of luring Solidworks users hasn’t, however, died. And so the Onshape user conference offered a “making the switch” session by Lindsay Early, technical services engineer at PTC.

The process involves these steps:

1. Evaluate what you have, as only parts and assemblies can be imported into Onshape, albeit back to Solidworks 1999.

2. Export parts and components out of Solidworks to a single folder in a Zip file named after the assembly

3. Import the Zip file into Onshape using these strategies:

  • Small assemblies: Combine into a single composite part in a single Part Studio

  • Medium assemblies: Import to a single document, with separate tabs for each assembly

  • Large assemblies: Split into multiple documents

4. Following import, direct model editing is needed as feature lists are not imported.

5. As an alternative, Cassini offers bulk migration at a cost of $10,000 for a thousand files.

Onshape cannot import the following items:

  • Feature lists

  • Mates

  • Configurations

  • Simulation data

  • Drawings, although you can save drawings separately as DWG files

Post-import, you will have to repair and modify imported models, add in metadata, add mates, and move sub-assemblies to other documents, if you want. While attached DWG, DXF, and PDF files can be imported, they are detached from the 3D model.

One solution suggested by Ms Early is to do new projects in Onshape, and then transfer from Solidworks only models as you need them, such as library components. (Unlike Onshape, Solidworks licenses are perpetual, so you can keep a copy of the software running for as long as you need it.) This advice applies no matter which 3D CAD system you switch away from -- or to.

Other issues: In Solidworks, Y is up, but Z is up in Onshape. Imported components are all individual entities. Assemblies have no mates. In some cases, all imported parts end up centered on the origin -- the result of an unwanted explode. If the drawings are changed in Solidworks, you can right-click in Onshape to update them.

Ms Early demo’ed how direct editing works on imported Solidworks models, something that programs, such as BricsCAD, also do.

PTC technical services engineer Lindsay Early importing a Solidworks model into Onshape

Overall, the process looks to me a bit of a mess. It’s seems like importing Solidworks files was not a priority development. After all this bad news, the good news is that Onshape uses the same Parasolid geometry kernel as Solidworks, which is a big barrier for Dassault, whose 3dexperience uses the incompatible CGM kernel, making translation tough.

 

The Future of Onshape

Here is some of what users can expect in future releases of Onshape:

Frames will gain custom profiles from any edge, combine geometry with different profiles, and generate custom cut lists. Another goal is tight integration with drawings, and edit cut lists in drawings.

Computed property functions will be in Feature Studio and bills of materials, such as calculating the shipping size, area, and mass. It works with parts now, and will work with assemblies at some point in the future. Your access to computed properties depends on your license level, and you need to know how to use FeatureScript.

For 2D drawings, Onshape will edit cross-hatching in section views, apply patterns to faces, and add to the pattern library.

As mentioned earlier, PCB design will be done inside the mechanical model. We were shown designing a PCB board in Onshape, exporting it in IDF format for designing the circuitry with ECAD.MCAD, and then back into Onshape to check the fit; traces do not come into Onshape.

Onshape MCAD with ECAD.MCAD ECAD

It was hard for me to tell, but it seemed that the ECAD was visually integrated into Onshape but not data-integrated -- there was a lot of IDF translation back and forth during the demo, but maybe that is the way it is supposed to work. For instance, while electronic components can be added in Onshape, the presenter said “it is kinder to do it within the ECAD.MCAD system,” because ECAD.MCAD might not fully recognize components models in Onshape. When a component is moved in Onshape, the IDF export tells ECAD.MCAD to also move it, and adjust the traces. Messy.

Simulation in Onshape will let you place loads on assemblies, and then run the simulation in a separate panel, which is performed in the cloud, then returned to the Onshape window. The stress plot results can be exploded or driven by displacement. Simulation is highly parallelizable, so it can be computed with many cores or GPUs. “We are not targeting post-design validation at this time; we have great partners apps that will continue to provide facilities for that,” says Evan Nowak, director of graphics at Onshape.

Colorized stresses on an exploded model

A new change management page named “Changes” lists and adds change requests and orders. An auditor function checks whether all change orders are implemented. This technology is adopted from PTC’s Windchill PLM software, and will be available for enterprise accounts only.

The new RealityServer rendering facility operates in near-realtime. As former ceo of Migenius Paul Auden made changes to rendering parameters, updates took about a second or two, according to my eye. Renderings are run in a separate tab, then sent to Onshape when done.

User interface of the soon-to-be-integrated RealityServer renderer

- - -

To watch the archive of the online conference, register at events1.social27.com/onshapelive21/home.

 

== Okino's PolyTrans|CAD Software
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Popular CAD data sources we support include SolidWorks, ProE/Creo, Inventor, AutoCAD, Revit, Navisworks, DGN, IGES, STEP, Parasolid, and JT. DCC data sources are Cinema-4D, 3ds Max, Maya, FBX/Collada, and many more.

Perfected over three decades, we know 3D data translation intimately, providing you with highly personalized solutions, education, and communication. Contact CTO Robert Lansdale at [email protected].

http://www.okino.com

And in Other News

Highlights from Monica Schnitger’s interview with Siemens Digital Industries Software ceo Tony Hemmelgarn:

  • To protect IP [intellectual property], vehicle manufacturers are developing their own chips.

  • Battery-operated vehicles expose sounds not audible with combustion engines.

  • WFH [work from home] means less access to labs, and so more use of simulation software.

  • Customer interest for CAD (aka “PLM authoring”) in the cloud is low.

Read the full article at schnitgercorp.com/?p=18114.

- - -

MachineWorks Ltd releases MachineWorks 8.3 with complex concave polygonal tools, improved surface detection, direct access to dexel grid in Visicut sampled stocks for rest machining analysis, and better bending simulation. Get your details from machineworks.com/news/machineworks-8.3-release.

- - -

Product update 1 for Ironcad 2021 offers enhancements to sheet metal design, point clouds, drawings, and all kind of miscellany. Detailed details at ironcad.com/blog/whats-new-in-2021-update.

- - -

Here is one of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:

Subscribe to the WorldCAD Access blog’s RSS feed through feeds.feedburner.com/WorldCadAccess.

 

Letters to the Editor

Love this PragArchDesignTech blog, after being pointed to it by Grabowski. BricsCAD is my tool.

I like how you’re starting from ‘for dummies’ principles, while jumping straight in at the level of BIM’s sophisticated capabilities.

Now what I would love someone to do is similar but without the assumption that architecture is all rectilinear. Yes, 2D CAD can go off-angle but far less easily; 3D CAD including BIM can, too, but multifold less easily again. Off-angle is like a clunky afterthought.

I’m not talking ‘freeform’ or even curvy, but strictly geometric straights and flats precisely intersected (like 2D) -- not just in plan or just in section, but in multiple planes. Stuff that can be built (given exact dimensioning) by a local builder from straight, flat, commodity materials from the Builders Merchant [construction materials supplier in England].
     - Tom Foster
       Tom Foster Architecture

 

Re: Keynotes from OnShape's First User Conference

I like the happy delusion that what separates <success> and <a guy with a product idea> is simply a week of a designer's time.
- Jess Davis

- - -

A small correction to #1,090. OSArch.org supports the aims and work of the organizers of the FOSDEM [free and open source developers European meeting] conference. We were glad our friend Dion Moult could make a presentation to their track on Open Source Comput-Aided Modeling and Design.

However, we weren't involved in organizing it. Maybe next year though. Thanks for mentioning our project.
     - Duncan Lithgow

 

Notable Quotable

“When the software company holds your tools in their cloud, they have control over your productivity.
When your data is in their cloud, they have control over your business.”
     - RC, quoted by Robert Green, Cadalyst magazine

 

Thank You, Readers

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

  • David Moore

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:

Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and use the account of [email protected].

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Posted at 07:00 AM in Software, Travel | | Comments (0)

Monday, April 12, 2021

Keynotes from OnShape's First User Conference (Part i of iii)

Issue # 1,091  |  The Business of CAD  |  12 April 2021

 

by Ralph Grabowski

 

Onshape’s first annual user conference began with a keynote from the CEO of owner PTC, Jim Heppelmann. Here are some of the notes I took.

- - -

Talks by PTC to acquire Onshape began in August 2019 and were completed in November 2019.

CEO Jim Heppelmann said he watched, at a distance, Onshape’s development right from the beginning. Each year, he checked with his staff to learn if Onshape was making progress in bringing CAD to SaaS [software as a service]. In 2019, his staff reported to him, “We think it’s going to work.” He decided he needed to convince Onshape to join PTC.

(SaaS is a computer term adopted by PTC to describe what we call CloudCAD: CAD software that runs on servers and is paid for repeatedly through subscriptions. Mr Heppelmann considers SaaS the future of CAD.)

Mr Heppelmann readily admits that his own company could not develop SaaS as cheaply or quickly as Onshape did (estimated at $100 million in three or more years). Even so, in paying $470 million net cash, it became PTC’s most expensive acquisition “of a rather small company.” Net means that PTC paid off Onshape’s debt (such as $169 million in funding by outsiders), which means the full price tag might be around $640 million.

“We were fortunate in the timing, too, because we didn’t know that a world-changing pandemic was about to hit. Cloud and SaaS have become more appreciated than ever.”

Update on Onshape

Onshape just crossed one million education users — teachers and students who use the software free, plus those who pay for additional support. Onshape commercial sales have grown “over 70%, recently.”

  • Acquisitions made by PTC made on the request of Onshape: ECAD [electrical CAD] and rendering

  • Other acquisitions by PTC that can be used by Onshape: Frustum generative design and Arena PLM [product lifecycle management]

It was Jon Hirschtick’s idea that Onshape become PTC’s platform for collaborative SaaS applications. The underlying platform is named “Atlas” (after the Greek god who carried the world on his shoulders, although no longer, I think). Programs running on Atlas will have the same UI as Onshape.

So far, only Frustum and the already-SaaS Vuforia AR program are being moved to Atlas. Arena PLM is to use it soon. Future versions of Creo and Windchill will work on Atlas. From these and other statements by PTC, I am surprised how long it is taking PTC to integrate cloud software with cloud software.

PTC hopes all its customers will eventually use SaaS in some form. As PTC now requires customers to pay annual subscription fees for desktop software, there wouldn’t be much of a change in how they pay for SaaS software.

PTC Visualizes a Gig Economy

Mr Heppelmann thinks the CAD industry is at the dawn of a new approach to product development. He sees Onshape as the “Uber of CAD,” which is attempting to eliminate the cost of owning cars. “You just use it when you want, where you want.” His analogy is broken; whereas Uber can be rented for 20 minutes, as he himself noted, you cannot rent OnShape for 20 minutes; the shortest duration is 525,600 minutes.

Mr Heppelmann went on to enthuse about the gig economy, the “new” economy that some governments are trying to shut down, including in his home country of USA. In his description, an entrepreneur at a kitchen table wants to bring his idea to life, but has no expertise in engineering or design or manufacturing. So he uses the Onshape’s new Gig Finder application, which Mr Heppelmann admits exists only as a fantasy. “I pursue the different gig worker options, as if I were looking for a vacation home... and schedule a week of [an industrial designer’s] time to nail the design.”

This kind of service already exists from independent firms; upFront.eZine reported on an architectural version a few years ago. As a result, we know that the results by gig designers can be uneven, to put it politely -- kind of like the broad range in quality of 3D models at online library sites. Mr Heppelmann did not explain how gig workers would be verified, a problem that poster child Uber also hasn’t solved.

PTC General Manager Jon Hirschtick Keynote

For many people, 2020 was a terrible year, but for Onshape 2020 was a great year:

  • completed the acquisition by PTC

  • staff at Onshape nearly doubled

  • 16 product releases, one every 3 weeks

  • launched Atlas, which uses the core services from Onshape

  • acquired Ecad:Mcad for electrical design; to be released in the future

  • acquired Migenius for cloud-based near-realtime photorealistic rendering; to be launched in the future

Former Onshape CEO and now PTC general manager Jon Hirschtick

PTC general manager Jon Hirschtick noted that there are functions Onshape does not yet do. First up to be added are ECAD and rendering, to be followed by integrating the simulation software PTC already has.

He called rendering in Onshape “unique,” because of its full-SaaS, full-cloud approach. Rendering jobs are not batched to the cloud (as some CAD vendors have implemented it); rather, Onshape performs interactive rendering. In the demo, we saw renderings updated in about a second or two. Unlike CAD, rendering is something that definitely benefits from hundreds of GPUs.

Mr Hirschtick described in general terms some of the additional functions users can expect to come to Onshape: “More part and assembly modeling features, more drafting features, more performance (we’re never fast enough), more data management features.

“We are still the only ones in the industry with a true full-cloud architecture.” Well, there are other true full-cloud CAD systems, such as Graebert’s Kudo used by Onshape in its drawing tab.

How Onshape Works

Ilya Baran, vp of architecture at Onshape, explained why some CAD functions aren’t available yet: “Most of us have worked at Solidworks; we know how to build a CAD system. So, let’s make sure we [first] put in place the things no one has done before, and then we build out the CAD functionality.

“If our competitors want to provide the benefits of a full-cloud CAD system, they have to build it from scratch, like we did,” said Mr Baran. CAD systems can be classified today by where the code runs and how the data is stored:

Desktop CAD
Local install (code runs on desktop computers)
Data stored in files

Hosted CAD
Code runs on remote virtual machines
Data stored in files

Thick-client CAD
Local install
Data stored in a database

Cloud CAD (SaaS)
Code runs on cloud (remote servers)
Data stored in a database

Some of how OnShape works is dictated by the capabilities of the Web browsers through which Onshape interacts with users; the rest of its capabilities are possible because it runs on server farms. See the figure below for an overview of the topology.

Modules making up Onshape

The Onshape client is the portion that runs in a Web browser, and is written in TypeScript. It handles user interactions, and it draws the model as triangles using WebGL, so there is no latency in this particular operation. (Mobile apps for Android are written in Java; for iOS, in Objective C. Their functions lag behind the Web version.)

The Onshape client communicates over the Internet with Web servers rented from Amazon. They handle login, permissions, serving up client code, billing, and account settings. The code is written with Java, which enables memory management and makes multi-threading easier than with C++.

Modeling servers (also written with Java) handle interactions with open documents (models, drawing, and so on), like geometry, assembly lists, feature trees, and user events like parts editing and workspace merging. These servers save the changes users make (more below), but do not operate on the geometry.

Geometry servers use Siemens’ Parasolid for modeling and DCIM for constraints. They run code written in C++ for performance and efficiency, like desktop CAD systems. These servers generate display-geometry, sketch interactions, handle hidden lines, solve assemblies, and run FeatureScript.

Models are stored in a MongoDB database. Data is encrypted, and continuously backed-up. With geometry handled by a separate server, crashes do not affect stored data. In a worst case scenario, only the last edit is lost if it was not written to the database. Onshape assigns an internal unchangeable ID number to documents, versions, and tabs. As the ID never changes, there are no broken references.

“Hardware failures are a fact of life,” said Mr Baran. When the hardware fails, users may notice hiccoughs like page reloads.

Onshape naturally runs on the Amazon server farm closest to your location; but when demand increases during your daytime, server availability scores tell Amazon when to switch to servers in other regions of the world. In either case (high utilization on nearby servers or usage on distant servers) can lead to slower response times.

One of the drawbacks to Onshape being Web-based is that programmers have to keep constant track of changes made to Web browsers, so that Onshape does not break with a browser update. This is done by pre-testing code on beta versions of major browsers.

- - -

  • Coming up in part ii: Onshape for Solidworks Users; The Future of Onshape

  • And then in part iii: Q&A

To watch the archive of the online conference, register at events1.social27.com/onshapelive21/home.

 

And in Other News

What BIM could use is more practical advice and less marketing and fewer Yet-Another-Applet applets. Dave Edwards offers a newsletter with practical tips and opinions on the topic. You can read back issues of his PargArcDesignTech newsletter and sign up for it at pragarchdesigntech.substack.com.

- - -

C3D Labs adds flanges swept along paths to its set of sheet metal methods, a part of their C3D Modeler geometric kernel. Paths can include circles, arcs, ellipses, elliptical arcs, conic sections, and splines. See figure below.

More about the new method at c3dlabs.com/en/blog/tech-tips/what-s-new-in-c3d-modeler-swept-flanges-in-sheet-metal.

- - -

ARM is like the ODA of the mobile CPU world; what ARM designs today you can expect to see in smartphones later this year. In bits of good news for 3D CAD users, Armv9 boasts

  • Ray tracing and variable rate shading added to Mali

  • Matrix multiplication upped from 128 to 2,048 bits

  • 64-bit apps to become the norm for 64-bit Android phones and tablets

www.arm.com/company/news/2021/03/arms-answer-to-the-future-of-ai-armv9-architecture

- - -

Siemens has said that CAD belongs firmly on the desktop, but the tug of infinite revenues from SaaS is strong, and so we see new software emerging from the cloud, such as PCBflow for electronics designers on the one side and manufacturers on the other based on Xcelerator, analyzing a range of DFMs [designs for manufacturing] of each manufacturer’s capabilities. www.pcbflow.com

- - -

Here is one of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:

Subscribe to the WorldCAD Access blog’s RSS feed through feeds.feedburner.com/WorldCadAccess.

 

Letters to the Editor

Re: A Contractor’s View of BIM (part ii)

Interesting read. Paints an idealised workflow that has its benefits as well as problems. See this video on how GC-led modeling worked for a new firehall:

I agree with the laundry list of problems, but I don't think just going GC [general contractor] is going to solve that much. In the Mid East and Japan, big construction companies have always done the bulk of the detailed design work in-house. In France, the contractors also use Bureau d'Etudes as in-house design and coordination resource. In would be good to get their views, as they have done this a lot longer [than in North America].

At the end of the day, Pentels [mechanical pencils] and sketch paper for everyone is unrealistic, except for very simple buildings. Looking at a lot of the complaints, what is needed is better collaboration and information transparency. This means better digital tools.

Designers may lack technical nous, but contractors are not much better, bro. They have specialised, have been at it longer, and are commercially incentivised.

Starting with paper CDs [construction documents] contradicts the real benefits made thru BIM, as problematic as BIM is. Analytical models (structural and energy etc) are here to stay.

Drawing duplication inefficiency is a red herring. How is “creating a new series of models from scratch” better? The key is to filter and harness whatever info is available.

The key problem for contractors is that they have always struggled to identify problems in time in the bid documents. IPD was meant to give them the time to price the job so you don't have to rely on your “rainmaker” estimator weighing drawings in his hand. What a mad idea!

Instead of going voodoo, contractors have been using 3D estimating tools like Destini and RiB to cost-model the bid design using the 3D model as a basis. This is not the same as cleanroom semi-reverse engineering the design, as suggested.

I also think that the savings with respect to foreign standards and modeling oddities is overblown. Sounds to me like they just haven’t figured how to work with Ideate to remap info.

Hiring experienced modelers and engineers in-house is not as easy as portrayed. The main reason IPD fails is that your specialist subbies’ [subcontractors’] biggest asset is their design staff and knowhow; they make their money from the install, not the design service. Good luck with getting the expertise in-house at low rates. What you will end up with is BIM jockeys who don’t have the tech knowhow, importing risk to the GC.

Lots of complaints listed in the article are the result of making the best of the existing BIM tools blind spots:

  • Bad 2D/3D CAD in BIM interop (Revit)

  • The clash detection fiasco, mainly because Revit can’t xref [place] live .dwg files very well and relies on asynch declashing using Navisworks

  • Ditto on lack of modeling in-context

  • Low or no LOD [levels of detail] mainly because Revit etc bogs down when things are overmodeled

  • Etc, etc

It would be better to focus on these issues instead of grand gestures. I am not against GC-led modeling, but that will only go so far.
     - Dwy Seah (via WorldCAD Access)

 

The editor replies: In the video, I loved seeing the many paper prints in the background.

- - -

One of the things which has confused me about most BIM applications is that they have a separate command (and code base) for each object category. This may make sense at first, limiting the commands to most common 3D forms.

But one of the major issues with all BIM applications is they try to create ease-of-use by confining each object category to a set form. A Wall is a long extruded rectangle; a Slab is a flat extruded surface.

These kinds of assumptions causes the most failures when a designer wants to create an object whose shape is out of the norm. For example, a slanted Wall or a doubly-curved Wall or an undulating Bezier-based Slab. What, geometrically, is the difference between a Wall, a Rail or a Fence? What about a Slab, a Roof, a Pad or a Ceiling? What about a Roof Hatch or a Door? BIM applications developers get into trouble because they develop commands for the most common object forms.

I think a better approach would be have a set of 3D object creation commands which could be used for all object categories. This way users wouldn’t have to wait for developers to add new creation commands to individual category commands to create exceptions. If a new creation command is added, it should be available for all objects. This would prevent application development Whack-a-Mole and allow users more freedom for object creation which seems to be always on their Wish Lists.
     - Dave Edwards

 

The editor replies: I am no expert in BIM, I just know about it theoretically.
I think commands are object-specific so that the software can tag the object automatically. You select the Wall command, the software goes, “I’ll tag this as a wall and look really smart.”

BricsCAD has a Bimify command that reads 3D objects and then categorizes them in to BIM elements. This is done by looking at their relative sizes and positions: a broad but thin solid is most likely a slab; a tall one a wall; an opening starting at floor level probably a door; and so on.

ArchiCAD is one BIM program does the special kinds of walls you are asking for.

 

Notable Quotable

“Nobody knows who or what is in charge right now: is it humanity’s deep technological prowess, or is it Mother Nature herself?”
- Chris Martenson

 

Thank You, Readers

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

  • Greg Burkhart, Key Glass, Inc: “[The Contractor’s View of BIM series] reminded me to contribute to your upFront efforts, so that you may share nuggets of information like this that hit close to home and in today’s reality.”

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:

Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and use the account of [email protected].

Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

*4736

Posted at 07:00 AM in Software, Travel | | Comments (0)

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