Issue #1,129 |Inside the Business of CAD | 2 May 2022
Spatial held its 3D Insider’s Summit in Munich, whose city hall is shown here (image credit ralph grabowski)
The Spatial division of Dassault Systemes is in charge of licensing components to companies wanting to develop 3D software.
It’s best-known product is the ACIS solids modeler, first developed in the late 1980s. Then, a decade ago, Dassault handed its CGM kernel used by Catia to Spatial to license and componentize. (CGM is short for core geometric modeler.) The other major product is the InterOp file translator.
Spatial last month held its first post-Covid 3D Insider’s Summit in Munich, at which it revealed new features to be released this year, as well as its new guiding principles:
“What is important to you is important to us
We are highly motivated to be best, and set the standard”
I won’t comment on Spatial’s past business practices, as my knowledge is based on merely a couple of anecdotes. Nevertheless, I found significant the emphasis throughout the conference on a changed-for-the-better Spatial, as well as during my interview with executives.
I interviewed ceo-since-2010 Jean-Marc Guillard and vp-since-2018 of worldwide business development Frederuc Jacqmin. I was especially interested in understanding what it was like for them being a component supplier of two kernels. The text of the interview is not verbatim, and has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q&A
The room was nearly packed, so don’t be fooled by what my picture appears to show here
Q: What kinds of firms license CGM?
A: Our business is to solve problems for customers, how they want to move in the future, what will make them successful.
We position CGM as going beyond a modeler: it is a set of technologies. What kind of data do you want to use? What are the most common formats you want, the geometric foundation you need, the industries you will target? Hybrid data is more common today. We are checking most of the boxes, we have the most technology. We do not force ourselves on anyone.
Ten years ago, when we started promoting CGM, most of our customers were on ACIS. Today, 1/3 of our 400+ customers are on CGM, two-thirds on ACIS.
It is not a decision between ACIS or CGM; they are just technologies available. Importance is what technology can provide customers over a long period of time. The starting point is what the customer needs not just today, but also over the long-term.
Q: Can you tell me your financial picture?
A: We do not give out financial information, as Spatial is a division of Dassault. I will say that we are increasing new customers each year.
Q: Who do you consider your competitor, other than Siemens Parasolid?
A: OEM-based solutions like Inventor, Tech Soft 3D. It depends on what the need of the customer is.
Q: Are you familiar with C3D Labs?
A: We keep track of our competitors.
Q: I noticed that constraints were not mentioned during the conference.
A: Market for constraints seems to be limited, compared to other components.
Q: Do you get your DWG tech from the Open Design Alliance?
A: We cooperate with the ODA.
Q: Do you license HOOPS [for visualization], or do you have a technology exchange with Tech Soft 3D?
A: We are a reseller for HOOPS Visualize, and so Tech Soft 3D is a partner. But we compete when it comes to InterOp translation and other technology. We try to provide value for customers, and so are working hard on an integrated portfolio.
Q: Why not use rendering from Dassault?
A: There is a cost to making a technology as a component. There are different facets to consider, such as the cost of turning it into a component, what the market size might be. Or is it intellectual property you want to keep, to help you differentiate? We came to the conclusion that it is good for Spatial to partner with Tech Soft 3D.
Q: I am not sure I fully understood your AGM product.
A: Application Graphics Manager accelerates development by providing standard functions for any 3D application, so that the developer doesn’t start from scratch. The cost of our source code is very affordable compared to doing it on your own.
Q: So it is example code, that programmers can copy and paste into their own code?
A: Step by step, you make it your own. The idea is that firms can focus on their IP, their functions. It reduces the number of bugs. Fifty applications already use it.
What people expect from us is to integrate things so that they are transparent to them. Technologies are good for solving specific problems. There are still lots of software developed in-house, but we are good at solving complex problems. We would like to solve every problem, but we are humble and know we cannot solve every problem. In this, we are doing quite well. We want the community to move forward.
[Disclosure: Spatial provided me with hotel accommodation.]
And in Other News
Simulation giant Ansys acquires Web-based upstart OnScale (no relation to Onshape), which scales simulations online using a variety of open-source solvers, even though Ansys already has Web-based solvers. Monica Schnitger puzzles through the story at schnitgercorp.com/?p=19674.
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IMSI Design updates its TurboCAD line to 2022 with these new functions:
Keep Size scales distances between objects, not objects themselves
Smart dimensioning is associative between model and paper spaces
Intersection curves are associative with 3D objects
Physics-based rendering
...and lots more. The line of TurboCAD programs varies in capabilities but always comes with permanent licenses:
TurboCAD Platinum - $1,500
TurboCAD Professional - $1,000
TurboCAD Deluxe - $250
TurboCAD Designer - $70
“2022” really doesn’t do this software justice, as at 36 years old TurboCAD (first written in Turbo Pascal) is one of the longest running PC CAD packages chugging along. More at turbocad.com.
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Transoft Solutions lands a patent for using video cameras to record and analyze vehicle traffic at intersections, while filtering out errors. I’m old enough that as a transportation engineer I hired part-timers to record those movements on clipboards, back in the day. transoftsolutions.com/transoft-video-analytics-patent-approved/
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Nanosoft ships version 22 of its AutoCAD-workalike nanoCAD software with floating drawing windows, associative arrays, and an interactive interface for 3D clipping volumes. It’s a free update to existing users. All the details here at nanocad.com/products/nanocad-platform/updates.
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Lumafield emerges from stealth with $32.5 million for the world's first x-ray scanner for engineers. Neptune uses CT [computed tomography] to look inside products and then create a 3D reconstruction of external and internal features like cracks and voids. Price is $3,000/month (hardware+software) when it ships by the end of this year. lumafield.com
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Pulsonix updates its 3D PCB design software, Pulsonix, to version 12.0 with one hundred new functions, such as 64-bit multi-core processing, additional design rules, and collision detection useful for folded board designs. It’s always good to see a software company giving its customers value through three-digit feature upgrades. pulsonix.com/latestversion
Notable Quotable
“I’m confused why @elonmusk bought Twitter for like billions of dollars when i downloaded it for free.” - Carter Andrews (on Twitter)
Thank You, Readers
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Issue #1,114 | Inside the Business of CAD | 22 November 2021
C3D Labs produces kernel software, and so can be considered a competitor of Parasolid/D-Cubed (from Siemens) and Spatial from Dassault Systemes.
The C3D kernel was originally developed 25 years ago by ASCON Group for their KOMPAS-3D solid modeler, but then a decade ago spun off the kernel group as an independent company, C3D Labs. The company has been very aggressive at building out functions, such as its new programmable F-curves.
The company has held an annual conference for a while now, but in Russian. Given the modern switch to Zooming conferences, this year it was held in English. (See figure below.)
C3DevCon being broadcast live from St Petersburg
Oleg Zykov, ceo of C3D Labs, reported during his keynote address that the company is doing well, having hired nine more employees and released updates to C3D Toolkit in 2020 and 2021 on time.
The company offers its programming toolkit with five modules for developing software in the areas of MCAD, BIM, CAM, and so on. Each can be used on its own, or together with the others:
C3D Modeler — geometric kernel
C3D Solver — parametric solver
C3D Vision — visualization engine
C3D Converter — data exchange
C3D B-Shaper — polygon mesh to b-rep converter
There are two more modules that C3D is releasing, C3D FairCurve Modeler and C3D Web Vision.
During the conference, customers described how they deployed C3D’s modules, including professor Rushan Ziatdinov of industrial engineering in South Korea (see figure below).
Rushan Ziatdinov describing how C3D FairCurve Modeler works
The C3D kernel has displaced other kernels in nanoCAD, Altium, VR Concept, and so on. It is used by developers at LEDAS Group and is available to members of the Open Design Alliance. c3dlabs.com/en
Thank you to friends and readers checking in to see how we are doing during what is now called “Canada’s worst natural disaster” with thousands displaced by flooding, all Canadian roads out of here cut, and Canada's largest port in Vancouver isolated. The flooding was the result of a tremendous rainstorm last Sunday and Monday, along with warmer temperatures melting snow.
Here is a picture I took last Monday morning of a pedestrian bridge in our local park in which we go for walks. Normally, the water goes under the bridge.
Wrong-way creek
It’s weird: Thousands are stranded by mudslides and wrecked bridges or forced out of homes by flooding. For the other couple of million living in this region, life is normal, other than grocery stores running low on some food staples, gasoline being rationed, and we having to take detours around closed roads.
Restrictions on some grocery items and maximum fills of 30 litres of gasoline
The reason for life being mostly normal is due to our region’s agricultural farmland retention policy: most homes in our region are built on non-agricultural land, which means higher up, and so farms primarily inhabit the flood-prone flat lands, as this aerial photo of flooding at the Watcom interchange of the Trans Canada Highway amply illustrates.
Flooding at the Watcom interchange of the Trans Canada Highway in east Abbotsford, Canada
The unknown is the longer-term impact. While mudslides are being cleared (one highway is already reopened to one-way traffic), the broken bridges on the critical Coquihalla and Trans-Canada freeways will take weeks to get replaced by temporary bridges and then years to fully replace.
Two of the bridges destroyed by flood waters on the Coquihalla freeway
The immediate solution is to work on bringing in goods (food and fuel) through the USA, with which our region has four border crossings and two rail crossings. We are, however, not the EU, so things don’t pass effortlessly between the two countries.
And in Other News
Contact Software launches a new version of its low-code Elements platform for handling digital business processes end-to-end.
Here is one example of its use: If your firm know that parts will have to be replaced at some point in the future due to new DIN standards, then you can define until-when or from-when parts are valid. The new validity takes effect automatically on the specified date, and also updates the parts list. contact-software.com/en/products/integration-platform
It is striking how both Hexagon and Bricsys seem to completely stonewall any mention, or awareness of, photogrammetric reality capture as an essential complement to acquisition by point cloud.
Other firms in the reality capture/digital twins arena, such as Bentley Systems and Autodesk, have a foot firmly in both camps. Point cloud seems to have reached maturity as an expensive technology, while photogrammetry continues to evolve (and democratize) by leaps and bounds. How long can Bricsys ignore photogrammetry? - Tom Foster Tom Foster Architecture
The editor replies: I don’t know that they are ignoring it. BricsCAD has the ability to place images and maps from a variety of sources.
Mr Foster responds: That’s not photogrammetry. Photogrammetry is taking hundreds or thousands of photos of the subject, such as with programs like capturingreality.com.
They identify same object in several images, thus triangulate the object’s 3D position, hence create a 3D model of the subject as a surface mesh (not points), which can optionally be wallpapered with fragments of the JPGs for a solid-looking, photorealistic model, which can be rotated and viewed from any angle.
Photogrammetric models are an alternative to point cloud models. Each is best for different purposes or different kinds of subject. Hybrids using both techniques are possible.
Photogrammetry is widely used in the construction industry. Bentley, for example came to photogrammetry first, then added point clouds later. Bricsys under the influence of Leica has so far done it the other way round. As with point clouds, Bricsys needn’t do the processing in-house (which Bentley does), but can reprocess/display/integrate various proprietary formats of external programs.
Notable Quotable
“Saturday is an adaptive cross-functional work/leisure hybrid day.” - Management Speak (@managerspeak on Twitter)
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Nick Busigin
3dbrains Pte Ltd (small business donation)
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Issue #1,109 | Inside the Business of CAD | 18 October 2021
This issue is sponsored by CCE:
EnSuite-Cloud ReVue:
The Zoom Alternative for Online Engineering Meetings
Hold visual conference calls with your team and suppliers to review 2D/3D CAD designs in real-time. It’s secure with no software to install, no proprietary design data left on a server. Our online meetings support models made in CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, NX, Inventor, Creo, and more.
The Open Design Alliance may well be one of the most important organizations in the world, for what the ODA develops is then implemented by many of its CAD member companies. And we use CAD to design the world.
Producing the ODA Summit
Some of the 1,200 members are well-known CAD vendors, but most are corporations who develop CAD viewing and editing tools for internal use. Members save time in not needing to develop code themselves.
At last month’s ODA Summit 2021 (sadly online, not in Munich as first planned — darn you, coronavirus!), we got a deep dive into what the ODA is working on. The ODA works on a lot of new stuff. I found myself on the drench end of a fire hose of information.
With the ODA’s founding in 1998, it first offered individual SDKs [software development kits] for DWG and DXF, and then DGN, general formats used by the CAD industry. During his keynote address, ODA president Neil Peterson described how much has changed in the last five years. (See figure below.) The first shift was for the ODA added SDKs that read and wrote PDF and 3D PDF files.
From there, it went to offering complete sets of interoperable technology packages for members working with CAD or BIM on any platform, including the Web. We see this in the recent explosion of CAD programs reading IFC [industry foundation classes] and/or Revit files; this is not the result of Autodesk being open, this is the Open Design Alliance opening things up.
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With so much information at the conference, I decided for this article to focus on just a few areas, and then present info about STEP support in a later issue. The conference is available as a four-part video at youtube.com/opendesignalliance:
Complete CAD Interoperability
Complete BIM Interoperability
Beyond Data Interoperability
Scan-to-BIM Panel Discussion
ODA president Neil Peterson during his keynote address
How Autodesk Helps Make the ODA Popular
Mr Peterson stated that 3Q 21 was the strongest quarter in the organization’s history for membership growth. Part of the reason for this is Autodesk’s changes and lack of changes.
Autodesk has had a tumultuous history with the ODA, from initially insisting there was no need for open access to the DWG file format (DXF was good enough, it declared), to a FUD campaign over the un/trustworthiness of DWG, to blocking use of “DWG” through the registered trademark process (it failed), to suing the ODA, to mimicking it with RealDWG, and then partially capitulating by become an ODA member, albeit on the IFC side of things.
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MicroCAD Software produces kitchen design software, where the quality of renderings and walkthroughs is crucial. The company had been an AutoCAD OEM customer for 23 years, but felt constrained by its limitations. To see where to go, MicroCAD made a list of pros and cons.
The advantages to using AutoCAD OEM is that it “transmits trust and is instantly recognized by designers”; it has a powerful and reliable ACIS-based modeler. MicroCAD told us that the disadvantages to AutoCAD OEM include
Limited rendering that has not changed since 2016
A walkthrough module that is the same as in AutoCAD 12; the technology is 30 years old
A form of GDI that prevents AutoCAD from showing rendered print previews as they will be printed
Shadows in fast-shade mode that cannot be updated with the kinds of normal computers used by MicroCAD’s clients
Response time for technical service that is long
Cost of royalties that has risen more than 50% in the last three years
With little development by Autodesk in recent releases of AutoCAD, MicroCAD had no ability to improve renderings of kitchens and other interior designs.
So, three years ago they began the switch to the ODA’s platform, which afforded them access to high quality renderings, speedy fixes, higher quality technical support, and an affordable fixed fee not based on sales. Improvements and fixes to ODA offerings are based on what programmers need, and not the wants of AutoCAD end users.
AutoKitchen running on the ODA-based DWG engine
Switching to the ODA, however, had its drawbacks:
Programming took MicroCAD longer, as tools available in AutoCAD had to be developed for use with ODA; DLLs (dynamic link libraries) could, however, be re-used with minor changes
Rendering isn’t great, but this drawback allowed MicroCAD to use a third-party renderer better suited to its needs
Solid modeling kernel is not as powerful as AutoCAD’s ShapeModeler
Most blocks worked correctly in ODA, but some had to be redrawn to work correctly
Most of MicroCAD’s time was spent on making the new UI look like the old UI (see figure above)
It took about two years for MicroCAD to make the ODA-based AutoKitchen run like the AutoCAD OEM-based one.
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Graebert GmbH is working with a special interest group inside the ODA to overcome the problem customers face when Autodesk stops supporting some software. (For instance, I have a side service in which I covert Actrix drawings abandoned by Autodesk to DWG.) For instance, this year the ODA added new internal classes to its MDT-compatible Mechanical SDK for converting mechanical objects to older versions.
“New product design has migrated away from DWG-based solutions,” said Graebert cto Robert Graebert. (See figure below.) Mostly, product design is now accomplished on proprietary systems from PTC, Dassault Systemes, and Siemens. “But drawings continue to be a key workflow in the industry.”
So, at the conference, Mr Graebert announced that his company was taking on the challenge to maintain Mechanical part information, “maintaining legacy drawings in the product design market.”
Customers tell him that there still a need to maintain part information in drawings. “In our estimation, there are billions of DWG part drawings that need to be updated for products still being manufactured or in active maintenance.”
Graebert GmbH cto Robert Graebert introducing ARES Mechanical
This led Graebert GmbH to write ARES Mechanical to handle custom objects originally created with AutoCAD Mechanical, such as part information, bills of materials, standards-compliant parts and annotations. “These objects are all inter-related and contain a lot of hidden complexity,” Mr Graebert said.
The ODA’s DWG support is insufficient, as it cannot update part information. “The part information in these drawings is not static. It is not sufficient to visualize balloons and bills of material; it is also important to access and edit all properties of referenced parts.”
So, the Mechanical SIG [special interest group] has import, export, and rendering (display) of mechanical objects working well. But not all versions of AutoCAD Mechanical are supported yet; more will be added. DXF export/import is missing; public APIs are being extended.
Q&A
Q: Is ODA planning to develop a DWG server engine to allow several users read and write the same DWG file? It seems like multiple editors could use merging similar to what software developers do with Git, by adding a visualization layer to help with conflict resolution.
A: At the moment we have no plans to develop such a fully functional server engine. But we have developed DWG Revisions technology that supports collaborative editing and can be used on servers.
Q: With ODA software, can you change the camera type to orthogonal? Do you have an example?
A: Yes, it is possible. Here is a code snippet (GS API):
From the DWG database side, it is also possible to use command PERSPECTIVE = 0.
Q: In which version will these new improvements and features mentioned today come out?
A: Most of new features presented are available in the latest release 22.8. Some feature may be in beta state, but in any case they are going to be ready this year. We have a release every month, and the last one this year will be 22.12.
Q: Were can I find documentation about all the features supported by the newest IFC format?
Al Dean, co-founder and former editor of Develop3D magazine in England, is now Global Communications Content Manager at Siemens Digital Industries Software.
Cyrena Respini, former editor-in-chief at CADalyst magazine, is now in marketing for Graebert GmbH.
You’re right, in that Intergraph patented OLE4DM [object linking and embedding for design and modeling], but you’re incorrect (by my recollection) on why the technology never went far. The OLE4DM Consortium was really starting to gain broad adoption and people were beginning to realize the potential of the technology.
It was then that Intergraph announced their submarine patent with a licensing agreement that was unacceptable to the consortium. It was this licensing deal that really killed OLE4DM, not the validity of the technology.
At the time that it all went dormant, multi-system demonstrations were being held involving multiple CAD vendors demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach. To this day, I still maintain that providing encapsulated data with associated evaluators is really the preferred way of exchanging data between systems.
This approach avoids translation and the even bigger issue of mis-evaluation of geometric data between systems. Boeing advanced this in their procedural surfaces where they “black-boxed” their representation and associated evaluators of their surfaces so that they could be seamlessly incorporated into other modeling systems.
Parasolid also introduced this notion of user-defined, procedural surfaces, though it’s unclear who all makes use of this function. Most people look at ACIS- or Parasolid-based systems as examples of how to avoid translation, but even more importantly, using a common kernel supports identical evaluation of the geometry.
Based on what is being said about CAD Direct, there aren’t corresponding evaluators being carried with the foreign geometry, but there is a B-rep “equivalent” created and maintained.
It sure is unfortunate that the OLE4DM approach never had a chance to really address multi-system interoperability. It would have made a considerable impact on the industry. - John Callen
The editor replies: I vaguely remember something about a consortium, so thanks for reminding me of it. In my experience, I never found OLE to work well, including my tries with OLE for D&M. Maybe the problem is that CAD vendors seemed to implement OLE only half-heartedly.
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I would say that Solid Edge is playing catch-up with CAD Direct. Solidworks (3D Interconnect) and Autodesk Inventor (AnyCAD) have had the ability to reference other native CAD models without conversion for years. - Mike DeKoning
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Dan Staples spotted the Solid Edge article that went out on the upFront.eZine and the caption for the first slide with him pictured, where it reads, “Dan Staples announcing that CAM Pro (for 2.5-axis milling) and Simcenter Flomaster (for fluid and thermal analysis) is available to any Solid Edge 2022 customer with a subscription.”
Solid Edge 2022 does not actually include Flomaster; it is in fact an extra-charge product.
Convergent modeling is proprietary Siemens technology, tightly integrated into Parasolid. It is available to third parties to license at extra cost, above a standard Parasolid license. This is unlike Synchronous Technology, which Siemens has chosen not to license. - Alice Bonasio, global public relations Siemens Digital Industries Software
Notable Quotable
“It’s not creative destruction, like the car taking over the horse and buggy: Google and Facebook have not replaced news; they don't make news.” - Rod Sims
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
KCL (small company donation): “Keep up the good work!”
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Issue # 1,097 | Inside the Business of CAD | 24 May 2021
At 3dexperience World, we didn’t get to hear much about the next release of the star of the show, 3dexperience Solidworks. But then, we didn’t hear about what’s new in any other star of the 3dexperience constellation, except for DraftSight. So I visited the Web site at solidworks.com/product/whats-new to learn what’s in store for this year’s release of Solidworks. (See figure below.)
User interface of Solidworks 2022
For 2022, Solidworks gains touch-up functions, like measuring the lengths of chain patterns, resolving lightweight components, and exporting interference reports to Excel. You’ll be able to toggle between full and simplified views of assemblies, and save defeatured models as configurations. File properties now host equations. Weldments can be mitered and non-planar edges can get edge flanges. Sheet metal can be wrapped around assemblies (see figure below).
Sheet metal being wrapped around an assembly
When it comes to simulation, the new release offers improved meshing, mesh diagnostics, and improved convergence. More editing is permitted in detailing mode, with faster pans and zooms.
Solidworks 2022 will enter beta in June, and typically ships in late summer.
What’s New in DraftSight 2021
Dassault offers another desktop-bound CAD program that rarely gets mentioned, so imagine my surprise when it received several dedicated sessions at 3dexperience World. DraftSight is a DWG editor programmed by Germany’s Graebert and enhanced by Dassault programmers for mechanical design. Its purpose is to entice AutoCAD users away from Autodesk, to clean up DWG and PDF files coming in from clients, and do 2D mechanical designs. (See figure below.)
Premium version of DraftSight
For its first ten years, the largely 2D DraftSight was available at no cost, and during that time gained the reputation of being the most-used DWG editor in the world, second only to AutoCAD. Dassault last year canceled the free-to-use program, and this year renamed the software “3dexperience DraftSight.”
The emphasis in DraftSight 2021 is in making the move from AutoCAD easier, taking into account these dimensions:
People. DraftSight uses the same command names as AutoCAD.
Processes. Version 2021 now runs VisualLISP directly, in addition to other APIs supported earlier like LISP. Collaboration, and file and metadata search through a new connection to an online 3Ddashboard.
Data. Version 2021 now imports, converts, and recognizes vector elements in PDF files. It can create associative arrays (called “patterns”), and a sheet set manager
The first solid mention of Solidworks came with customer Ikea, who described their use of the solid modeler to design 3,000 3D models a year. The company’s communications department generates catalogs, Web pages, brochures, and the infamously inscrutable assembly instructions.
We got to see how the assembly-instruction process works. Staff first assemble the physical product, such as a bookcase, to see how it goes together. Then they obtain the 3D model from the design department, and use Solidworks Composer to drag parts away from one another (see figure below). Finally, monochrome vector drawings are made from the disassembled model for use in the assembly brochures. The communications department generates 3,500 such assembly instructions annually.
Dragging parts apart prior to generating monochrome drawings
All of the color images of Ikea products you see online and in catalogs are photorealistic renderings generated from high resolution photographs draped over 3D solid models (see figure below), output by banks of computers running 24 hours a day. Be green! The staff also produce video tutorials, and are experimenting with virtual and augmented reality to help customers with the assembling.
3D models draped with photographs
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
Dassault Systemes’ approach to software makes it fundamentally incompatible with Solidworks.
Dassault is upfront about the incompatibility of Catia between major releases. To take advantages of major advances in hardware, Dassault deliberately breaks compatibility from one version to the next. So V4 on Unix (released in 1995) is incompatible with V5 on Windows (1999; still available from Dassault), which is incompatible with V6 on cloud (2006), renamed 3dexperience. This disconnect allows Dassault to do complete rewrites to take advantage of new hardware, without offending existing customers, who are allowed to stay on old releases as long as their projects require them.
By contrast, Solidworks maintains continuity, running on the same Windows class of hardware today as when it was first released in 1995. With the 1.5 million users of Solidworks, however, Dassault found it too difficult to make the break to the cloud. (Another 4.5 million are education users -- or “early engagers,” as Dassault likes to call them.)
The break-it-to-move-forward mentality explains why Dassault had no qualms in introducing the Web-based Solidworks “V6” a decade ago. That it failed (with Dassault executives at one time blaming the failure on misinformation from we in the CAD media) is explained by the different class of customer each company addresses.
Dassault targets Catia at executives of very large corporations who recognize the need to keep ahead of competition by regularly spending vast sums of money on making more efficient designs of new products.
Solidworks sells to SMEs [small and medium size enterprises], of which one- and two-man shops may well see the purchase of design software as a one-time event. These customers upgrade by taking more training, not by buying a different kind of software.
As a result, the lackluster reaction of Solidworks users to V6 was predictable but literally inexplicable to the experience of Dassault executives, who for decades have known how to run a big-iron sales shop, trained as they were by the IBM sales force.
This is an important year for Solidworks: it becomes a billion-dollar brand. This means that all by itself it contributes $1 billion a year towards Dassault’s $5.4 billion in revenues. It is this financial success that keeps Dassault executives from entirely shutting down the aging program.
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.
But “so much more” is not what Solidworks users want, because it is already filled to the brim with capabilities that most users are not taking advantage of. They see no point to adding functions through cloud services that definitely cost more and might be less reliable.
For Dassault, however, Solidworks is a memory from the past serving as an aspiration for tomorrow. The 3dexperience replacement software from Dassault embodies “the Solidworks promise of excellence, value, and ease of use,” Solidworks ceo Gian Paolo Bassi enthuses. In the meantime, he can only hope Solidworks users finally awaken to the enlightenment beaming in from France.
[This article appeared first in Design Engineering magazine, and is reprinted with permission.]
And in Other News
Here’s a blast from the past for me: Canada’s Matrox used to be one of the big three graphics boards providers to the CAD industry, but they, like ATi (now part of AMD), got clobbered by nVidia.
Now Matrox makes speciality graphics boards, like frame grabbers and encoders, the lastest being a better smart camera. “Paired with flowchart-based Matrox Design Assistant X software, engineers and technicians can quickly configure and deploy machine vision applications to the Matrox Iris GTX smart cameras, which are designed for challenging environments.” matrox.com/en
Letters to the Editor
I know it is picky, but it was “Lockheed Aircraft,” not “Lougheed Aircraft” that created CADAM. Lougheed Aircraft was founded in 1912 by brothers Allan Lougheed (who legally changed his name in 1934 to reflect the way it was pronounced, “Lockheed”) and Malcolm Lougheed.
It went belly up in 1921. In 1926 Allan Lockheed and Jack Northrop founded Lockheed Aircraft and it is that company that survives as part of Lockheed Martin.
CADAM was developed by Lockheed but was sold to IBM in 1989. - Scott Taylor, president Tailor Made Software
The editor replies: I saw both versions of the name, and was pretty sure that Lougheed was correct, but that could be because here in Canada we have a Lougheed Highway (pronounced low-heed). Thanks for the clarification!
I was frustrated with the Logitech Bluetooth MX Master 25 mouse not responding well at all with the desktop. It works fine with the laptop but not with the desktop.
Putting the nano receiver on the end of a USB extender lead has worked mostly, but not completely. I have turned off or removed all other Bluetooth devices in the vicinity, so I am concluding that it is the Unifying receiver that could be at fault.
Got to admit, I am a bit cheesed at this. The reason is that one is paying extra cost just to ensure that this sort of thing does not happen. An expensive mouse that does not work as well as an inexpensive one? - Terry Bits (via WorldCAD Access)
Notable Quotable
“The proper goal of education is not to give people a degree but to create the environment for lifelong learning and self-improvement. True achievement is peer-rated, not conferred by education bureaucrats.” - Spencer Fernandez
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Melanie Perry
Dave Edwards Consulting: “Keep it up!”
To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:
Last year, 3dexperience World was a first, and a last. It was the first time the former Solidworks World conference operated under its new name; it was the last in-person CAD conference before the coronavirus shut ’em all down.
Not just the conference was renamed by Dassault Systemes. The French company added the “3dexperience” prefix to Solidworks, the world’s top-selling mid-range MCAD program.
This year is the 40th anniversary of Dassault Systemes becoming an independent firm. It and its Catia design software were spun out of aircraft manufacturer Dassault Aviation in 1981. Catia was from the very start a 3D CAD program, initially generating lofts for aircraft wings and bodies. It was written to assist Cadam (made by Lougheed Aircraft), which at the time did only 2D drawings. Later Catia, also gained 2D functions.
Today, Dassault is the largest independent CAD software firm in the world, and continues to sell Catia to large manufacturers. It acquired Solidworks for the smaller manufacturing market in 1977 and then attempted (and failed) to turn it into a cloud-based program in 2010.
From ‘Product’ to ‘Platform’
The latest version Catia is V6. A new version number means for Dassault a new hardware platform, and so Catia V6 and its support programs run in the cloud. Collectively, they are called “3dexperience.” Dassault spent a decade trying to do the same with Solidworks, and then arrived at a compromise: it would continue to update the desktop-bound Solidworks while pressing home the message that running 3dexperience is the better future for users.
Changing the names of Solidworks World and Solidworks was part of the Dassault messaging campaign, “From product to platform”: Solidworks is the product, 3dexperience is the platform.
Dassault company says there are big benefits to switching over to 3dexperience:
Solidworks users benefit from built-in communications between software programs, designers, and clients
Solidworks accesses Dassault’s big iron software, like Enovia database and Simula simulation software
3dexperience World 2021
Last year’s new ‘3dexperience World’ name gave Dassault executives a reason to concentrate on 3dexperience software and, for the most part, ignore Solidworks. This year’s event proved even more disconnected from the needs of Solidworks users, as CEO Bernard Charles began his opening keynote by boasting of spending six billion dollars on medical software — not CAD.
The reason was coronavirus and running medical trials in Medidata, whose cloud-based software analyzes pharmaceutical trials for drugmakers with names we now recognize, like Pfizer and AstraZeneca. Two years ago, Dassault acquired the New York firm for $5.8 billion and now, together with its Biovia medical software, Charles stated Dassault helped reduce the time to create new vaccines from 15 years to 15 months.
Getting closer to CAD, Charles took time to rebuke customers who still used apps like Dropbox and WhatsApp for file sharing and communication, instead of equivalent services built into 3dexperience. As Dropbox and WhatsApp are universal, I would argue that the two work better for the kinds of smaller shops that are representative of Solidworks users.
For Education and Startups
Instead of hearing on the main stage about what is new in Solidworks 2021, the big announcements this year were for new educational and maker versions of Dassault software collections. Solidworks for Students is US$60 per year and shipped in May, once school is over. The Makers version is US$99/year but not available until the second half of 2021. Both combine Solidworks with two 3dexperience add-ons.
The 3dexperience Lab is a newish program that hosts startups as they try to create products using 3dexperience software in a generic range of categories: city, life, lifestyle, ideation, and fabrication. Some 35 projects are underway, such as a 3D-printed violin (see figure below) and a robot communicator for autistic children.
Violin constructed from 3D printing
Startups get mentoring and an opportunity for an international product launch. Labs are located in Pune India, Boston USA, and at Dassault’s head office in Velizy France. 3dexperiencelab.com
3dexperience Works
When Solidworks ceo Gian Paolo Bassi came on the virtual stage (see figure below), he also ignored Solidworks for the most part. Instead, he began with the results of a study from McKinsey Consultants. In 2020, companies either did already, are thinking of, or haven’t yet embraced digital transformation due to the impact of coronavirus. The necessity of digital transformation “is what we have been saying all along, isn’t it?” he asked his invisible audience.
Solidworks ceo Gian Paolo Bassi on the virtual stage
Mr Bassi described a demonstration project involving six hundred people working from home on eleven thousand parts -- the biggest demo Dassault ever attempted. See figure below. The result was a design of a space station measuring two kilometers long. A model smaller than 2km long was still being printed and so was not ready for the conference.
Space station made of 11,000 parts
Dassault promised to deliver a full series of products, Mr Bassi said, natively built “on our collaboration platform.” If you thought Solidworks is the platform, you’d be wrong; the collection is named “3dexperience Works.” It consists of 3dexperience-based programs for Solidworks users. Of them, 3D Creator and 3D Sculpture shipped last year, and in the last few months Dassault delivered five more:
3D Sheet Metal Creator
3D Structural Creator
3D Mold Creator
Product Document Creator with model-based definitions
Product Communicator for marketing materials
The enthusiastic Mr Bassi described them as a “complete set of tools,” but I think we can easily see gaps in the collection. The related Web site at solidworks.com/3dexperience-works lists additional modules, such as Collaborative Industry Innovator and Social Media Analyst. (One of the earliest 3dexperience-based add-ons for Solidworks, XDesign, is no longer mentioned.)
Most of these programs are designed specifically for Solidworks users, but employ technology from Catia-based 3dexperience. They run in Web browsers (including on smartphones), communicate with 3dexperience servers, require hefty annual subscription fees, and are not particularly compatible with Solidworks — due to the different 3D modeling kernels involved. 3ds.com
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Next week in part ii:
What’s new in Solidworks 2021 and DraftSight 2021
What Dassault needs to do with Solidworks.
[This article appeared first in Design Engineering magazine and is reprinted with permission.]
And in Other News
In Japan, Autodesk drops the price of full AutoCAD to the equivalent of US$650/year, and kills off LT. AutoCAD with Toolsets (verticals) remains at the previous price equivalent to US$2,100/yr.
Dassault Systèmes’ Spatial updates its 3D InterOp data translator to 2021 1.0.1 by adding filtering of IFC classes. This means that software using 3D InterOp can import specific data from BIM models, such as just architectural elements and electrical components. blog.spatial.com/news/2021-1-0-1
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Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
I am getting up to 96% retired but still like reading some of your stuff, especially the less CAD-technical articles. I like this reality-based guy. As with most narratives, it's hard to straddle the middle. - Leo Schlosberg
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From the editor: I misspelled the name of the ceo of Aras. It is Peter Schroer, not Schroder. Thank you to reader S. P. for alerting me.
Notable Quotable
“Yes, design automation will put architects out of work. But have you considered how well-designed our homeless encampments will be when that happens?” - Nihilist Autodesk (@AuNihilist on Twitter)
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Frank Murray Design
Arnold van der Weide
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Aras ceo Peter Schroer gave the keynote to this year’s Aras Community Event (ACE) 2021 user conference. Here is my transcript of his talk, which I edited for clarity and brevity. For the full presentation, see events.aras.com/ace2021/agenda.
Aras ceo Peter Schroer at Aras Community Event 2021 online conference.
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For many of us, digital transformation projects in 2020 got derailed. It could have been through politics, the pandemic, the recession, or the semiconductor supply chain problem. We had a lot of black swan events, those rare-occurring, significant, one-in-a-lifetime things — we had them all last year. There is no readiness planning for black swans, as we can’t prepare for these things.
Let’s call 2020 the “Year of Lessons Learned.” But I gotta tell you, there was no single impact; it was like a flock of swans.
I have this saying that I have been using for years, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Did your project have such a rigid plan that it was easily derailed?
To be clear, not all of the impact in 2020 was negative. If you happen to be a cloud provider, a medical company, or if you work for a software company named “Zoom,” those black swan events created a huge opportunity for you — if you were ready. There was also the negative impact: the automotive industry had a tough time.
We have to ask ourselves, “Did we respond well?” How we respond to a crisis — or the opportunity, depending on which side of the coin we’re looking at — how we respond really matters. We respond with speed, resilience, and agility. Agility eats black swans for breakfast.
We’ve sometimes talked about resilience as “being sustainable.” A sustainable digital transformation project has to be able to withstand the hiccoughs, the failures, and the bumps in the road that are absolutely normal.
My lesson from 2020 is that we add empowerment to the mix. Organizations not only need their workforce to have the right tools, but they also need to have the attitude and aptitude to adapt quickly.
Chess Master Project Planning
From McKinsey we learn that 80% of digital transformation projects fail — probably nobody is surprised by the number. Of those that don’t completely fail, about 16% deliver some kind of improved performance. Digital transformation is very expensive, very risky, serious initiative.
In company after company, it is done through top-down management approach. Let’s call it the “chess master” as an analogy. There is someone at the top (CEO, CIO, CDO, the smart guy who’s in charge) who has been dictating, driving digital transformation projects. There are grand ambitions involving AI, big data, machine learning— we want to do all this stuff. But it’s not working. Frankly, it is divorced from reality. The top-down isn’t working quite right.
By the way, none of this stuff is cheap. We are investing millions of dollars in data lakes [sp?], in moving to the cloud, in hiring data scientists, we have Chief Data Officers now — all to run our digital transformation projects, and still 80% are failing. Not just failing, but failing spectacularly.
What is it about this chess master top-down approach that’s not working well? This is just my opinion, but external things are changing just too fast. Information technology is moving very quickly; AI’s evolving; your competitors are moving faster; supply chains are breaking faster.
When we do big top-down projects…
We underestimate the cost and impact of change, particularly organizational change
We underestimate the lack of consensus across the organization when we dictate something top-down
We seriously underestimate the readiness of our data
In our context, let’s consider engineering and operations data, specifically. We severely underestimate how ready that data is to support an AI project in our digital transformation.
Why is this data problem so difficult? We are underestimating the difficulty of adapting or upgrading all the PLM [product lifecycle management] legacy, ERP [engineering resource planning], MES [manufacturing execution system], and so on.
Surfacing the Data
I’ll give you a prediction: no digital transformation project is going to succeed, It’s just not possible if engineering and operations systems are standing between you and real-time data accessibility. If we can’t surface this data and enable it throughout the rest of the organization, and if it’s not part of your digital transformation, then you are really stuck.
We think about typical PLM users. They are on an old version of Teamcenter, 3dexperience, Windchill, or SAP. It’s a very difficult upgrade path to get to modern technology. If we can’t get to the latest versions, we’re not getting to the openness and we’re not getting the technology that has the connectivity. How are we going to work with data that’s in a proprietary, closed system?
In general, what’s going on here is that we underestimate the amount of technical debt we have. It’s the technical debt of three or four decades of very silo-oriented modernization. Your PDM [product data management] systems, the ERPs, the CRMs [customer relationship management], the MESes.
I am hearing that there are an average of 500 legacy systems at any one of the large manufacturing companies. There was a lot of investment in creating silos that we now have to break to get to some kind of digital transformation. How much of your IT budget is for the constant maintenance required to keep those old systems running?
There is no Big Bang approach to turn it all off on a weekend and then turn on something new.
Going to the cloud is not going to fix this either. The cloud, in fact, is not ready today for your processes. I know that SaaS [software as a service] is considered the silver bullet for a lot of this digital transformation, but it only makes sense if you’re prepared to give up your unique competitive processes and run your business the way that a cloud provider has decided it should work. It makes no sense to do that.
Cloud is part of the solution; SaaS is part of the solution. But we need to rethink how SaaS is implemented to actually make that work. If you are on someone else’s hard-coded platform, there is zero ability for you to navigate the next black swan. You gotta have control.
How many of you still have your bills of material, your suppliers, your quality data sitting in Excel, or it’s in a mainframe, or it’s in emails? Or you have the same data duplicated across multiple single sources of the truth? (That’s my first oxymoron for this presentation; I’m planning on having two.)
Empowerment From the Trenches Up
CIOs are three times more likely than workers to see their companies as pioneers in information technology. Heads in the cloud. (That’s my SaaS joke for this talk.) The employees, on the other hand, are four times more likely to rate their company as a follower.
My point: If we can figure out empowerment, how to harness the intelligence, the knowledge, and the energy of those people down there in the trenches who really do know how the business is running, and let them drive the digital transformation. I think that is where we will see a higher success rate.
Black swans are more common; we’re seeing lots of them. (That’s my second oxymoron.) How do you drive a digital transformation project in that context? There no longer is any CIO chess-master who can drive this successfully as a top-down initiative. We need to distribute the decision-making right down to the trenches where the operational knowledge is.
At Aras, we switched our entire development to SAFe several years ago — the scaled agile framework for enterprise. (See figure below.) SAFe is a very structured way to distributing decision making. In this SAFe methodology, you are driving down the authority and tools for decisions to get made at all levels, but most importantly in the trenches. This has worked extraordinarily for us. We changed pawns to multi-dimensional queens.
Elements of the scaled agile framework for enterprise
If you are going to empower your players, you have to understand your goals and priorities. You have to have a continuous improvement culture in place before that next black swan event occurs.
We have seen our customers start with Aras PLM installed next to TeamCenter, over time incrementally moving the workflow from one system to the other. It’s a great way to get things done efficiently and successfully. It’s iterative: we’re talking evolution, not revolution.
In any major project like this, there are going to be setbacks. We want to be able to handle setbacks. There’s a direction we are going which doesn’t play out well, so we need to back up. You need to create a culture that allows for some disappointments, setbacks, and failures, to continue making progress but that doesn’t actually stop you. We have to enable low-risk failure.
We do need executive sponsorship. The C-level on down needs to allow us to make some mistakes, to allow us to work incrementally, and to keep us on the right path.
I am not creating new theory here: it is well known that incremental small wins create their own momentum. The momentum from winning can overcome the setbacks, the setbacks that will be there for sure.
== Converting 3D CAD & DCC to Virtual/ Augmented Reality ==
With the explosive growth of VR/AR, the ultra-massive 3D datasets produced by CAD and DCC programs need efficient conversion to the popular Unity and Unreal development platforms. Okino of Toronto is the long-time provider of the PolyTrans|CAD translator, which easily handles the interactive datasets required by VR and AR for Microsoft HoloLens, HTC VIVE, Oculus Rift, Meta, and other VR headsets.
PolyTrans provides you with
Massive dataset handling
Node compression
Adaptive CAD tessellation
Intelligent polygon reduction
Popular CAD data sources include SolidWorks, ProE/Creo, Inventor, AutoCAD, Revit, Navisworks, DGN, IGES, STEP, Parasolid, and JT. DCC data sources are Cinema-4D, 3ds Max, Maya, FBX/Collada, and many more.
Perfected over three decades, we know 3D data translation intimately, providing you with highly personalized solutions, education, and communication. Contact CTO Robert Lansdale at[email protected].
Dassault Systemes, the #1 CAD vendor, reports Q1 revenues of (approx.) US$1.4 billion, up 3% over a year ago.
In a switch from previous reporting to shareholders, Dassault revealed just percentage-increases for Solidworks, no absolute numbers; Solidworks revenues rose 18% and seats rose 22% over last year.
The big new thing in CAD is moving simulation from the end of the design process to earlier stages. A new release of Siemens’ Simcenter FLOEFD fluid simulation software now runs inside NX, Solid Edge, Catia V, and Creo to frontload CFD [computational fluid dynamics] simulations. It also does more in the areas of thermal and lighting simulation. Learn more from plm.automation.siemens.com/global/en/products/simcenter/floefd.html.
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The Nemetschek Group reported Q1 revenues of (approx.) US$191 million, up 11.7% over a year ago. The Design (CAD) segment “whose business activities are focused on Europe” increased revenues by 8.7%.
The same day, PTC announced the release of Creo 8.0, which features GDX generative design running on Atlas as an optional extra-cost add-on. Learn what else is new at ptc.com/en/products/creo/whats-new.
PTC also released a roadmap with the company’s plans “to SaaSify PTC’s entire portfolio onto the Atlas platform over time” with a target date of 2025. The company promises to “offer on-premise versions of core products indefinitely.”
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Here are posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
In the Q&A you mention Cassini. Is this referring to the company and product CassiniPLM or something else? Could use a little more context. Thanks. - Stan Przybylinski
In the meantime, Noah Technologies is offering a free beta of their Solidworks to Onshape translator at cadtocloud.com. CEO Rami Noah tells me:
“Our product overcomes some of Onshape’s limitations, such as properties (attribute) mapping, correct positioning (no Y-direction issues), missing components, model duplication, and no need for a Zip file, as CAD to Cloud runs inside Solidworks as an add-on.”
Notable Quotable
“The effort to silence critics is an admission that the silencers’ programs can’t withstand criticism.” - Glenn Reynolds
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Julian Miranda, Spain
Thomas Enzmann, Switzerland (small business donation)
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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.
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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.
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.
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Nemetschek ALLPLAN 2021 automates recurring processes, such as converting cutouts to voids, applying rules to rebars, and placing PythonParts from Allplan Bridge accurately.
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.
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Vectorworksrevealed 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.
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.
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Here is one of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
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:
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.
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
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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.
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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.
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Here is one of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
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
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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
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Issue # 1,091 | The Business of CAD | 12 April 2021
by Ralph Grabowski
Onshape’s first annual user conference began with a keynote from the CEO of owner PTC, Jim Heppelmann. Here are some of the notes I took.
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Talks by PTC to acquire Onshape began in August 2019 and were completed in November 2019.
CEO Jim Heppelmann said he watched, at a distance, Onshape’s development right from the beginning. Each year, he checked with his staff to learn if Onshape was making progress in bringing CAD to SaaS [software as a service]. In 2019, his staff reported to him, “We think it’s going to work.” He decided he needed to convince Onshape to join PTC.
(SaaS is a computer term adopted by PTC to describe what we call CloudCAD: CAD software that runs on servers and is paid for repeatedly through subscriptions. Mr Heppelmann considers SaaS the future of CAD.)
Mr Heppelmann readily admits that his own company could not develop SaaS as cheaply or quickly as Onshape did (estimated at $100 million in three or more years). Even so, in paying $470 million net cash, it became PTC’s most expensive acquisition “of a rather small company.” Net means that PTC paid off Onshape’s debt (such as $169 million in funding by outsiders), which means the full price tag might be around $640 million.
“We were fortunate in the timing, too, because we didn’t know that a world-changing pandemic was about to hit. Cloud and SaaS have become more appreciated than ever.”
Update on Onshape
Onshape just crossed one million education users — teachers and students who use the software free, plus those who pay for additional support. Onshape commercial sales have grown “over 70%, recently.”
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.
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Coming up in part ii: Onshape for Solidworks Users; The Future of Onshape
What BIM could use is more practical advice and less marketing and fewer Yet-Another-Applet applets. Dave Edwards offers a newsletter with practical tips and opinions on the topic. You can read back issues of his PargArcDesignTech newsletter and sign up for it at pragarchdesigntech.substack.com.
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C3D Labs adds flanges swept along paths to its set of sheet metal methods, a part of their C3D Modeler geometric kernel. Paths can include circles, arcs, ellipses, elliptical arcs, conic sections, and splines. See figure below.
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
Siemens has said that CAD belongs firmly on the desktop, but the tug of infinite revenues from SaaS is strong, and so we see new software emerging from the cloud, such as PCBflow for electronics designers on the one side and manufacturers on the other based on Xcelerator, analyzing a range of DFMs [designs for manufacturing] of each manufacturer’s capabilities. www.pcbflow.com
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Here is one of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
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.
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One of the things which has confused me about most BIM applications is that they have a separate command (and code base) for each object category. This may make sense at first, limiting the commands to most common 3D forms.
But one of the major issues with all BIM applications is they try to create ease-of-use by confining each object category to a set form. A Wall is a long extruded rectangle; a Slab is a flat extruded surface.
These kinds of assumptions causes the most failures when a designer wants to create an object whose shape is out of the norm. For example, a slanted Wall or a doubly-curved Wall or an undulating Bezier-based Slab. What, geometrically, is the difference between a Wall, a Rail or a Fence? What about a Slab, a Roof, a Pad or a Ceiling? What about a Roof Hatch or a Door? BIM applications developers get into trouble because they develop commands for the most common object forms.
I think a better approach would be have a set of 3D object creation commands which could be used for all object categories. This way users wouldn’t have to wait for developers to add new creation commands to individual category commands to create exceptions. If a new creation command is added, it should be available for all objects. This would prevent application development Whack-a-Mole and allow users more freedom for object creation which seems to be always on their Wish Lists. - Dave Edwards
The editor replies: I am no expert in BIM, I just know about it theoretically. I think commands are object-specific so that the software can tag the object automatically. You select the Wall command, the software goes, “I’ll tag this as a wall and look really smart.”
BricsCAD has a Bimify command that reads 3D objects and then categorizes them in to BIM elements. This is done by looking at their relative sizes and positions: a broad but thin solid is most likely a slab; a tall one a wall; an opening starting at floor level probably a door; and so on.
ArchiCAD is one BIM program does the special kinds of walls you are asking for.
Notable Quotable
“Nobody knows who or what is in charge right now: is it humanity’s deep technological prowess, or is it Mother Nature herself?” - Chris Martenson
Thank You, Readers
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.”
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Issue #1083 | The Business of CAD | 15 February 2021
Commentary by Ralph Grabowski
Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost is adamant. “I think there is something we need to acknowledge right now: that a file is a dead thing working,” he said in an interview last fall with Archintosh magazine.
Autodesk’s Achilles heel is its cornucopia of file formats that proliferated when it invented or acquired its 80 software programs. Revit has a hard time talking to Inventor has a hard time talking to Alias. The company tried its hand several times at universal translators and file systems, such as Navisworks, A360, Project Quantum, and Project Plasma, but the efforts fell short or else never shipped.
At its online Autodesk University 2020 last November, Autodesk presented the latest solution to rid its file woes: get rid of the files. Passing files through translators is to be replaced by code using APIs [application programming interfaces] written with Forge.
Forge is Autodesk’s all-encompassing programming system that it is encouraging customers to adopt. Forge is a proprietary programming system that handles automated workflows through projects, among other tasks. As Mr Anagnost explained, “APIs can enable tools to talk to each other, passing data around without the need for files.” See figure below.
Forge API data flows (images credit Autodesk)
For Autodesk, the future is made of apps and thick clients:
Apps are small, task-specific programs that usually run on phones, like BIM Layout.
Thick clients is a name for desktop programs that run with assistance from the Internet, such as doing generative design, of which Fusion is the best example.
The plan is for each program in the Autodesk stable to have an API that allows Autodesk, third-party developers, and programming-savvy customers access to data of just the type and format needed at that instance. Between 3D models and APIs sits the product information model; it contains the data that define models. Forge’s own Model Derivative API already extracts geometry and properties from sixty file formats.
It’s a big job to define APIs that access data from each Autodesk’s 80 apps and thick clients, and Autodesk so far has not released any hard details. This is why CAD writer Anthony Frausto-Robledo mused that “The death of the file is not going to be a quick death, and it may not happen in any of our lifetimes.”
Mr Frausto-Robledo describes an API-based data-exchange scenario of the future: “It is possible to imagine bespoke workflows where colleagues and teammates use a variety of different workflows customized to their exact needs. One can image Slack, for example, advancing its snooze feature so tasks automatically happen during certain hours of the day.”
Autodesk is not the only one working on the problem. The problem is most acute on the architectural side of design, and so a competitor to Autodesk’s vision is the AEC Delta Mobility project. It proposes exchanging small changes (deltas) between design programs at the object level, regardless of data format.
Other CAD vendors, such as Graphisoft, are also looking at exchanging data in just the chunks needed by ancillary software.
News from Autodesk University 2020
As Autodesk University was online for 2020, a remarkable 100,000 attendees took in 550 sessions. Here are some highlights that I picked out.
Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost at last November’s online Autodesk University
After Navisworks failed to become the all-encompassing file format, and after Project Quantum died, Autodesk in early 2019 promised that Project Plasma would be the next step in collaborative BIM [building information modeling]. We expected to hear details about it at AU 2020, but sources tell me that Autodesk gave confidential updates to just a few of its important customers.
Speaking of coordination, Autodesk and other software vendors are supporting the new Omniverse coordination software from nVidia. Omniverse merges 3D models from Revit, ArchiCAD, Photoshop, and a few other design programs in Pixar’s USD [universal scene description] format, and then does photo-realistic simulations in real-time. It requires computers with RTX-level graphics boards.
AutoCAD. In its very early years, Autodesk boasted that AutoCAD could run on any viable engineering platform, and back then we saw it on hardware ranging from low-cost CP/M-based Zilog Z80s to uber-expensive Unix-based Silicon Graphics workstations; even on Macs. Then, following a big rewrite, Release 14 in 1997 went Microsoft Windows-only.
At the time, it made sense. Windows had made final its domination. But that also was right about the time that the Internet burst into the consumer space, and the Web browser was anointed the new platform, followed a decade or so later by the explosion of apps running on always-connected phones.
Autodesk was caught off-guard, and so its Web and mobile apps were lacking compared to smaller competitors. It spent the last decade rewriting AutoCAD core code to again make it multi-platform. This is one reason why AutoCAD suffered over the last few years from an impoverishment of new functions, as well as why the DWG file format stayed frozen longer than usual.
The new AutoCAD Core Engine (ACE) means that the Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, and Web browser versions of AutoCAD will have a common graphics core. (Linux and Chrome OS are not on the list.) This will, I presume, allow Autodesk to unify functions between platforms, something that has been badly lacking.
Inventor. The CEO of Autodesk comes from the mechanical side of design, and so it was no surprise that many new functions mentioned at AU were in MCAD. Some years ago, Autodesk had to reassure Inventor users that Fusion would not soon be displacing their favorite MCAD program. The best proof of support is to show new functions, and here Inventor got pride of place during the AU keynote.
Autodesk is working on storing every manufacturing stage in Inventor models, which sounds like a precursor to digital twinning. To make documentation easier, users will be able to pick a template to generate drawings in Inventor automatically. Lightweight versions of Inventor models can be placed in Revit models, and then the mechanical parts scheduled in Revit. No delivery date for these features was given.
Fusion. Fusion represents Autodesk’s future in MCAD, and so it boasted the largest number of announcements. Concurrent design will allow multiple users to work on the same project at the same time, such as on designs involving sheet metal and electrical. SPICE analysis has been integrated for auto-routing of PCBs [printed circuit boards] and other electrical tasks.
Autodesk says that Fusion now runs on Chrome OS as a Web app in a Web browser, so not natively. While the official FAQ says fusion.online.autodesk.com works only on Chrome OS, I was able to launch it on Windows 7. See figure below.
Fusion for Chrome OS running in Windows 7
A new management extension for Fusion starts up in three seconds, as compared to “weeks” for similar software in Solidworks, according to Autodesk. Moldflow solver is being included in Fusion 360 for testing the best way to manufacture plastic mold designs. ANSYS Workbench analysis software now works with Fusion 360, and is round-trip.
Other new extensions, such as Fabrication, Nesting, and Machining, can be turned on for just the durations needed. Among them, a new feature-based machining system applies strategies automatically for different areas of parts being made. Cooling analysis is being added through a new fluid solver.
Digital Twins. The hot marketing word in CAD these days is “digital twins,” which are 3D models that accurately mimic physical products, even after manufacturing. (To me, it sounds like what PLM already is.) At AU, Autodesk announced it had joined the Digital Twins Consortium and was beta-testing Tandem digital twin software for architecture. It made no mention of digital twins for MCAD, thereby lagging competitors in this area.
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
Autodesk used AU to announce bold steps for its future with Forge’s API data exchange and multi-platform ACE, none of which have delivery dates. Many other new features, likewise had no availability dates, but I expect to see them in the March time-frame when Autodesk usually sends out new releases.
The single-database is a dream for CAD vendors, as it allows them to more tightly lock in customers. Microsoft wanted to rid Windows of files with its Cairo experiment. The single database never worked out and Microsoft gave up on the project in 1996 — except in the Registry and we all know the mess that has turned into. Dassault in 2012 launched a single database system using Envoia in Catia V6 (aka 3dExperience), but it has not been wildly popular with customers.
Single databases make sense for cloud-based software, but as we know, CAD software is no longer moving whole hog to the cloud. It remains firmly situated on the desktop, with just the occasional tentacle reaching out to a few very specific cloud services, like file sharing and database access. See figure below.
Autodesk’s visualization of data flowing between desktop and cloud
Techno-optimists are fond of declaring the death of this or that, but typically are misguided in their prognostication. I am optimistic that the prediction of the death of the file system is wildly wrong, for one simple reason: file systems allow customers to retain power over vendors.
[This article first appeared in Design Engineering magazine and is reproduced with permission. Some text has been edited and updated.]
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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].
C3D Labs had a rip-roaring year, with 2020 revenues up 41% over 2019. The company credits increased demand for digitization created by the virus.
Its C3D Toolkit is an SDK containing modules for geometric modeling, 2D/3D constraint solving, data exchange, 3D polygonal mesh to B-rep conversion (see figure above), and 3D visualization. c3dlabs.com/en/products/c3d-toolkit/
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Siemens reports Q1 revenues of €14 billion (about US$17 billion) with 3% growth. This is for all of Siemens, a heavy manufacturer. Its Digital Industries division earned €3.8 billion (US$4.5 billion) on 0% growth -- this is the division that houses Digital Industries Software, within which are NX and Solid Edge.
Siemens does not break out individual numbers for its software division, giving only percentages:
All software +5%
CAD ?%
Cloud and integration -1.2%
Siemens predicts total revenues for fiscal 2021 will be up by 8% to 12%.
In other Siemens news, ceo Joe Kaiser retired, placing deputy ceo Roland Busch in charge. The company moved responsibility for its 14% investment in Bentley Systems from Digital Industries Software to its pension fund.
This publication hit close to our home -- Model-Based Definitions and LiDAR scans. Creating digital twins have become the mainstream of our business.
Your example of MDx is correct. Although, unless you are a massive firm like Ford, Boeing, or Lockheed, few people understand that, let alone need that. It all comes back to a cost vs. reward. How much does it cost to create all of the MDx data? But said the other way, if you are a Ford, how much could you lose if you miss something? Creating PLM can be incredibly expensive.
And then with Lidar on our Apple phones. Yipes! That scares me to death. I cannot wait until we start receiving scanned data from them and we are expected to create valid CAD data from it. Everybody will think a cell phone is as good as a Faro or Creaform scanner. I know it is coming. - Scott Shuppert CAD/CAM Services
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I had to laugh at “The Meaning of ‘M’”. It’s disgusting to me how they continue to peddle their globalist agendas, acting like it’s of benefit to all of us!
This ‘M’ reads like it’s something new. But it isn’t. What it amounts to is an attempt by arrogant dreamers to remove humans from the equation of working for a living. Didn’t we see that in “The Terminator”? At least they made their point in that show!
The fact is, back ‘in the olden days’, 2D drawings had more info on them than PLM systems do today, because they were concise and descriptive in a way that nothing can rise above today. The intel was fully embedded into the human consciousness of the persons who created those ‘things’.
The reason we don’t see that in 2D drawings today is because most of that intel has been omitted from drawings for the sake of speed to market. To achieve the same level of creative result in ‘new and improved’ automated electronic systems, you first have to account for all the data that goes into that result.
To digitize it (into electrons, whether graphic or verbal), you have to break it apart into its constituent parts and pieces. But by the time you do that, the expansive amount of data (that you must manage properly to even know the job, let alone get the job done) is beyond human management in electronic systems. It all becomes way too complex and unmanageable. It’s the opposite of KISS [keep it simple, stupid]! - Chris Cadman
Notable Quotable
“Whenever you think your life and work is meaningless, just remember that a whole team of people dedicated years of their life to Autodesk Quantum.” - Nihilist Autodesk (@AuNihilist on Twitter)
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