CAD reuse tagged posts

Have you been watching the Let’s Go Design web series? 3DVIA Composer and 3DVIA Scenes were featured in the episode 5… Check it out!

http://www.solidworks.com/pages/programs/letsgodesign/

Our very first German post and podcast!

Diese Woche begrüße ich herzlich Markus Koechl von SolidWorks Deutschland, der uns mit seinem podcast nicht nur einen großartigen Beitrag, sondern auch den ersten Beitrag in deutscher Sprache zur Verfügung stellt!

Markus wird uns heute zeigen, wie man mit 3DVIA Composer CAD Sub-Assemblies importiert und sie automatisch und an der richtigen Stelle im Verhältnis zu anderen Unterbaugruppen positioniert. Damit können große Baugruppen, zusammen mit Multi CAD Assemblies, sehr leicht aufgeteilt und in 3DVIA Composer importiert werden...

Have you ever spent hours to create a complicated exploded view, with thrust lines and callouts, only to have to re-do it when engineering makes a change on you?

This week, Tod Cruikshank shows us how to quickly create exploded views for technical illustrations. While in animation mode, he uses an innovative set of 3DVIA Composer functions to complete his demonstration. In particular he:

• uses “associative paths” to create jagged thrust lines in one easy step;
• uses a combination of assembly motion and part motion to create those thrust lines;
• moves one part in an assembly, and then quickly applies that placement to other selected parts;
• creates convenient hot keys to further increase the pace of his work.

When I first saw this technique, I was blown away at how fast these illustrations c...

Newsflash: 3DVIA Composer has been added to the breakout session grid at COE!

Chris Williams, the General Manager of 3DVIA Enterprise, will host an in-depth session titled Revolutionizing Design Communication: Creating Product Information with 3DVIA Composer. This presentation and discussion will begin on Tuesday, April 29 at 4:30 pm, as part of the “COE Briefing Center #1” track, in the Australia 3 room. This news is so late-breaking that the COE website has not yet been updated with this information.

You may recall the Dewoitine D520 example that Laurent BEAUVAIS had created in 3DVIA Composer. Mr. BEAUVAIS had done a fantastic job of creating all of the views needed to show how to assemble the model plane — and this podcast episode will show you how easy it is to reuse those views and build an animation from them.

3DVIA Composer is all about giving you many ways to reuse and leverage your content, so that you can get your job done more quickly than ever before.

Watch this podcast to see how, in 6 minutes, you can use the capabilities of Intelligent Views and Events to create an extremely interactive 3D document. It is yet another example of the elegant power inherent with 3DVIA Composer.

Many people are familiar with this illusion of the “old lady, young lady” image. This old/new paradigm seems to be all the rage lately. On American television, we witness countless new reality shows featuring celebrities from the 80s and 90s, desperately trying to find new fame. While sometimes entertaining, there is also an embarrassing undertone to the shows, like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

It’s very similar to how PTC is reviving old Itedo Isodraw references and massaging them into wonderfully new Abortext Isodraw references. These retreads from the past, pure 2D technical illustration references, are being re-framed and re-branded as great new references that are fully leveraging 3D in new and innovative ways...

This week I am pleased to bring to you a podcast from solidworksheard.com, a site dedicated to providing tips, tricks, tutorials, or tech news on all things SolidWorks. 

In this episode, Lou Gallo offers his expert opinions and insights after taking a 3DVIA Composer training class. He discusses what the product does and how it fits into the SolidWorks family of products. He explains why 3DVIA Composer is not a “replacement” to existing tools, but is a wonderful compliment to help bridge the gap between CAD tools and documentation layout and publishing tools.

Lou also talks about the other modules of 3DVIA Composer, and highlights some examples and use cases as to when you would need to use them and what value they will bring.

And my favorite part comes at the end of the podcast —...

We have said this many times: visualization is not enough; viewing 3D geometry does not add any value to anybody, whatsoever!

That may sound like a provocative statement, but this humorous anecdote from clientcopia.com is a great example that not only is visualization not enough, it can be downright confusing.

Humor aside, it is not enough to simply look at a model on the screen, you need to learn something about that model. That model needs to tell you a story. So what matters most is context. When you can add additional product information to support the geometry, and can convey what should be done with that part and the ones around it, then you can tell a story and you can provide real value...

With apologies to our bilingual friends who have already seen this in a previous post, I am pleased to present to you a sample 3DVIA Composer file created by Laurent BEAUVAIS, a PLM Dassault Systèmes Consultant and also a big fan of fighter planes.

With his digital mockup of the Dewoitine D520 plane, Laurent created this assembly sequence during the weekend right after his first introduction to the product. (I especially like the part about how our users enjoy using 3DVIA Composer so much, that they like to use it in their spare time!)

That’s enough talking… click on the link below to download and explore this self executable file...

In a previous podcast, you watched Jonathan use 3DVIA Sync to automatically update his product deliverables. It is a very powerful demonstration, and I encourage you to watch it again.

This week, you will see a similar demonstration, but with a very key difference: all of the CAD conversion and publishing to 2D formats is done using 3DVIA Sync Integration. Using scripting and XML job file definitions, 3DVIA Sync Integration offers a powerful way to equip your PLM systems with the ability to automatically trigger the creation of 3DVIA Composer files and publish them into several deliverable formats.

Most importantly, with 3DVIA Sync Integration your PLM system can take engineering modifications and perform incremental updates to the 3DVIA Composer content, re-publish your deliverables, and...

On Tuesday, March 11, Technia, a 3DVIA Composer partner with several offices in Sweden, Finland, and Norway, will present a 3DVIA Composer webinar. They will also be holding a series of breakfast seminars in February and March. Details (in Swedesh) can be found in the PDF at the bottom of this post.

Technia breakfast meeting dates: 

February 26 in Göteborg
February 27 in Jönköping
February 28 in Karlskrona
February 29 in Örebro
March 4 in Stockholm
March 5 in Karlstad
March 7 in Sundsvall

For more infomation, please visit: http://www.technia.com/composer.

 

You’ve heard us rant about the exceptional qualities of 3DVIA Composer, and how we make better reuse of CAD data than other competitive products such as Isodraw. I’ve shown 3DVIA Composer to people hundreds of times, and I never grow tired of the look of amazement on peoples’ faces when they see what we can do. But what really amazes me is how quickly our customers can go from purchasing our product to being productive and generating positive returns: it’s a tribute to our architecture and ease of use.

It’s why we win benchmark after benchmark, why customers continually choose 3DVIA Composer over other products, and why customers actually turn off those products in favor of 3DVIA Composer.

But don’t take it from me… take it directly from one of our newest customers, Miller Formless...

In Episode #54, Jonathan introduced 3DVIA Safe, and demonstrated how Secure 3D can be used to protect your intellectual property from reverse engineering. This week’s podcast shows another capability of 3DVIA Safe: “Right Manager”. Right Manager enables 3DVIA Composer authors to enable or disable certain functions in the 3DVIA Player.

Imagine if you had the flexibility to allow one 3DVIA Player user the ability to create cross-sections but not labels, or another user the ability to take measurements but not save them, or another user to only open the file for the next 10 days. With the Right Manager options of 3DVIA Safe, this flexibility becomes a reality. And not only can you set these options from within 3DVIA Composer, if you watch the previous podcast again, you will see Jon...

In any video program — podcast or network television — there’s occasionally a “can’t miss” episode. Number 57 — this episode — is one of those must see episodes.

In just about five minutes, this episode really puts it all together for you. Watch it over and over again to see the subtleties of what is going on and you’ll get the full understanding of what we mean by product information everyware.

In just a few minutes, Jonathan Riondet shows content creation, creating several deliverables so easily that it looks like one smooth motion. Then he shows how those deliverables can be automatically updated when the underlying product definition changes, such as when the CAD information changes. Of course, this data can be managed by a PLM system. And remember, we mean any 3D...

If it’s January, the entire SolidWorks community — both here in Concord and around the world — is gearing up for SolidWorks World in mid-January.

We’re very excited to participate in SWW again this year, this time as part of the SolidWorks family. So, be sure to look for 3DVIA Composer in the SolidWorks booth at the exhibit.

I also want to make sure you know about the in-depth session we are going to be delivering this year. It’s on Monday, January 21 at 4:30pm. The session title is Revolutionizing Design Communication: Creating Product Information with 3DVIA Composer.

In the session, we will have user of 3DVIA Composer will explain his implementation and how it has revolutionized their use of SolidWorks as a source for product publishing...

It is a real pleasure to begin yet another year with a new amazing demonstration of the power of product information everyware, as implemented by 3DVIA Composer.

One of the questions I hear almost every time we talk to CATIA users is, “what about metadata?” How does 3DVIA Composer re-use this critical CAD data when I want to create compelling product documentation directly from my CATIA V5 3D CAD data?”

And it’s an important question because that metadata — data about the 3D CAD data — is critical to producing accurate assembly instructions, technical illustrations and more. If you can’t easily get the data about the data from the digital product definition into your deliverables, then a significant piece of effectively automating the documentation process would be missing.

As you can ...

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 t...

This week’s podcast episode is courtesy of super-AE Tod Cruikshank who demonstrates some nifty options and techniques for making superior animations in 3DIVA Composer.

I was especially impressed with how Tod demonstrates the ability to have the rings appear in the animation, then “settle in” to the proper slots on the piston.

As always, we hope you enjoy this video episode. I also want to invite people to our new discussion forums, where increasing numbers of people are participating. Please go there (or post a comment here) to thank Tod for this episode (and to ask him to create more!).

 

I was reading, and frankly, not completely understanding, this very interesting story in the MIT Technology Review about the creation of 3D particles in a new chemical process and it got me to thinking about the “end state” of ubiquitous 3D.

I wondered what the cultural and business meaning is of particles with “precisely structured internal parts”, a sort of 3D chemistry that expands 3DVIA Composer’s “product information everyware” vision in ways we’ve never thought about before.

What if the vision isn’t just about 3D for everyone, but becomes instead 3D chemistry in everyone? 

When microfluidics can efficiently make “particles with exquisite internal structure” don’t we have a classic assembly? Would there be a product tree for these particles?

It’s fun to speculate about what a ...

I am very pleased to be able to bring yet another video episode to you today. You may notice that while the name of the podcast has changed to reflect our new branding, the actual video was recorded by Jonathan using the product formerly known as Seemage. (Prince fans, please forgive me.) That’s because we prepare these episodes in advance of their publication. With our hectic schedules,  the podcast contributors record episodes when they can, and I select the order in which we present them. The content is so good and has been so popular that I think it’s better to share episodes recorded before we shipped 3DVIA Composer than to waste these fascinating looks at the capabilities 3DVIA Composer offers.

So, with that offered as an explanation for what you see in the menus, concen...

In high tech circles, Geoffrey Moore’s 1991 book, Crossing the Chasm, is considered gospel. In it, Moore talks about the stages of technology adoption and groups users into stages based on their relative enthusiasm for new technologies. The last (and largest) group of people to receive the benefits of any new technology are the “late adopters”.

I been thinking about what I heard Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks say at DS’s industry analyst event last week. Jeff said that the opportunity to convert users from 2D is orders of magnitude larger than winning customers from competitors. (On that point, the competition is seriously left in the dust based on what I’ve seen of SolidWorks 2008).

Then, last week, I came across this very interesting article by Luke Davis from Cadalyst which is clearly tar...

It’s been a very fulfilling and exciting 24 hours for everyone in Seemage since our acquisition by Dassault was announced.

First, I want to give a shout-out and thank-you to some of the more authentic bloggers in the community, people like Robin Capper (post here), Chris Kelley (here) and Josh Mings (here), for noting our big news and for encouraging us to continue the blog. We will.

We wouldn’t be true-to-form, however, if we didn’t have a response to the “traditional” CAD press, as expressed in their blog posts on the acquisition (Ralph Grabowski’s comment here and Randall Newton’s here).

Trust me, we don’t give a whit for Autodesk’s “tags” (whatever that’s supposed to be)...

A recent Boston Globe Magazine article (here; registration may be required) talks about a new generation of entrepreneurs who have the stamina to persist in building new businesses because they are, essentially, narcissists. The article asserts that this is necessary to overcome the challenges in building a business.

It’s bull.

Clearly, entrepreneurs need a great idea…but they also need the ability to get others to believe it and participate in the building of it. It’s about creating an ever-expanding community of interest in the idea: developers, marketers, salespeople, customers, and on and on.

That’s been the real success of Seemage. Eric and James had a searingly clear vision: product information everyware...

 

This week’s episode is, as they say in the movies, a blockbuster.

Jonathan Riondet’s topic this week is deceptively simple: applying styles to Seemage content. You will be impressed with the ease and flexibility Seemage styles offer.

But then, about 2 minutes into this episode, things get very interesting: You witness the power of the XML-based architecture of Seemage as Jonathan changes the display language of the graphical image via modification of the external XML style information.

Consider the importance of this: automatic display of content in local language based, for example, on the language in use on the desktop. Being able to programmatically add languages whenever necessary. Elimination of reams of printed versions of product documentation.

This episode is an extraordina...