3DVIA Composer’s US offices are in the Boston area. The whole New England area — with the exception of some lost souls in Connecticut — is in the grips of a kind of mania about the New England Patriots football team, which so far is undefeated. (For our non-US readers, this is American football we are talking about here, not what we Americans call “soccer.”)
Anyway, the big news today is that a member of the opponents the Patriots played yesterday “guaranteed” that his team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, would beat the Patriots yesterday. While the game was close for a little while on Sunday, at the end the Patriots won big.
I mention this because I’ve been reading a white paper from PTC detailing a customer success in Austria with Arbortext IsoDraw.
(I would happily link to PTC’s collateral to make it easy for you to compare them to us, but apparently everything on their system is behind a sign-in and some of the stuff I was looking at I couldn’t find a second time. So, we have links to our stuff, but not theirs.)
It’s pretty clear that whoever wrote this has been watching 3DVIA Composer pretty carefully — carefully enough to feel confident in talking about PTC’s solution with as much bravado as that Steeler’s safety who misspoke so disastrously about his team’s chances.
For example, PTC makes a big deal in the white paper about using the “magnifier” in 10 seconds. Then then it lists 10 steps. Sure…..you could do each step in a second…right.
In 3DVIA Composer? One step: press the spacebar.
No matter how much PTC wants the magnifier to duplicate the amazing functionality of 3DVIA Composer’s Digger, it just can’t. Any more than the Steelers can guarantee victory against a football team many are calling the greatest in history.
Arbortext IsoDraw can’t ensure that it will revolutionize your product documentation processes because no matter how you slice the feature cake, Arbortext IsoDraw is saddled with its 2D heritage. 3DVIA Composer was conceived, designed and implemented as a 3D system.
This might seem subtle to some, but it’s very important. If you watch the PTC video demo of Arbortext IsoDraw, you’ll notice that animations are produced in the context of technical illustrations. They feel “tacked on.”
Now watch the 3DVIA Composer video. In 3DVIA Composer, technical illustrations are a module — among many modules, like BOM and high resolution images — that are integrated into the content creator’s experience. In 3DVIA Composer, these modules aren’t extending a technical illustration package, they are functionality built on top of an XML-based property editor.
Like the Patriots yesterday, on the actual field of play, the real talent is pretty clear to see.
