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3D CAD Enthusiasts rejoice as IMSi has brought their impressive TurboViewer app back to the iPad in a Pro version offering newfound levels of interactivity and flexibility.

TurboViewer Pro is a professional drawing viewer with powerful capabilities. In addition to the TurboViewer product line being the first and only native DWG™ viewer that supports both 2D and 3D CAD DWG files for the iOS platform, TurboViewer Pro extends the capability by providing hidden line, x-ray, shaded, layer management and more… all while maintaining its lightning fast 2D and 3D performance.

Enjoy smooth multi-touch navigation as you pan, zoom, and 3D orbit effortlessly around your DWG and DXF™ files. To view drawing files, send an email with DWG or DXF attachment to your iPad/iPhone email client. Drawing files can also be viewed through Web downloads, FTP, Dropbox and WebDav systems.

For a limited time, it’s available for only $9.99 in the App Store, making it a great tool to wow your customers or your boss by interactively pulling up the designs on your iPad to manipulate before their eyes.

via App Store – TurboViewer Pro.

Graphics cad, imsi, ipad, turboviewer

Over at CADSpeed, Tony DeYoung has begun a series of articles about the use of AMD’s Eyefinity technology for multi-display CAD systems.  Of course, when you start talking about these “professional” Grade systems you pretty much have to start working with DisplayPort, so the first article is a brief on the current state of DVI and DisplayPort.

But while the graphics card manufacturers embraced DisplayPort early on, the display manufacturers (Apple aside) have only recently made the switch. Beginning in 2010, Asus, Dell, HP LaCie, Lenovo, and NEC released more than 80 displays supporting DisplayPort. But there are still a lot more displays released with only the less expensive DVI or VGA input connectors.

The Advantages of Eyefinity for CAD, Part 1: DVI Monitors and DisplayPort Graphics Cards « CADspeed.

Hardware cad, displayport, eyefinity

Popular CAD suite “Pro/ENGINEER” is no more, now known as “Creo Elements/Pro”, thanks to a global product rename by parent company PTC.  CoCreate and ProductView have been renamed as well.

“We believe Creo could be significant and a positive advance in PTC’s product offerings.” said Mike Galbraith, Global Engineering Systems & Services, Tyco Electronics. Creo could allow the teams involved in designing new products and bringing them to market…across different functions, different locations, etc… to productively use the same toolset throughout the product life-cycle process. We’re looking forward to working with PTC and their other partners in shaping these new capabilities.”

At at the naming event, they announced launch partner Luxion who have revamped their KeyShot rendering plugin for the new software.

“Selecting Luxion as a launch partner enables us to demonstrate that Creo in combination with Luxion’s KeyShot rendering technology allows other members of the community such as sales and marketing to be involved early in the design process and utilize the digital data directly for the creation of product imagery” said Michael M. Campbell PTC’s Divisional Vice President of Design and Visualization Products.

I have to admit, I’m not a big fan of the name.  The previous name was more than just a product name, it was a job description (Professional Engineers use “Pro/E”, etc).  The new name reminds me too much of the Pleo or the Treo.

Nonetheless, I’m glad to see a company like Luxion brought it at the ground floor.  High-end rendering has traditionally been forgotten in CAD packages, and I’m glad to see it available at-launch for a new product (even if it is just a rename of an old product).

via Press Releases: PTC Introduces Creo Design Software – PTC.com.

Graphics cad, luxion, pro/e, software

The new Bentley, the 200,000 £  Mulsanne, will be Bentley’s first foray into fully digital modeling and design as the car was entirely modeled in Dassault Systemes PLM software before a single bolt was ordered.  It was done as part of an initiative to reduce physical revisions which take a lot of time and money to fabricate, only to find minor glitches requiring extensive rework.  Working in the digital space had other advantages such as working better with a distributed team (it’s alot easier to email model files than ship physical parts), as well as providing extensive product lifecycle management functions.

Ian Swann, who was in charge of the virtual build, said it changed the way people worked, not least because it prompted Bentley to spend €27m on new kit and to revise its factory layout so that there was less physical distance between the different teams. This physical proximity has improved communication between the teams.

“We had a lot of review meetings,” he said. “At first the production guys were sceptical, but when they saw that it was going to make their lives easier, they jumped in.”

Watch the video below showing the Dassault model of one of the headlight assemblies.

via Bentley unveils first fully 3D car – 05/07/2010 – Computer Weekly.

Science automotive, cad, dassault

Damon Miller has a clever idea, rather than designing objects in CAD-space from geometric primitives, why not build them digitally just like you would in the real world.  Using digital lathes, drills, and chisels to warp and mold the basic solids given you in a digital space, then have it produce instructions to replicate the process.

The tool is at an early stage, but don’t let the low-fidelity distract you—the possibilities of this concept are endless. See a demo in the video above. How many times have you wished you could just chisel a chunk out of a meticulously built volume, only to be thwarted by clouds of control points?

via Damon Millar envisions the future br> of CAD – Core77.

Graphics, Science cad

Adobe has just announced that they have outsourced all of their 3D technologies from the Acrobat 9 Pro Extended to ‘Tech Soft 3D’.  They’ve finished an in-depth internal evaluation of their products and decided that working with 3D CAD products is hard and best left to experts, so future work in integration with CATIA, Pro/E, Solidworks, and others will be left to TechSoft.  But Adobe’s not just walking away:

As I’ve talked with customers throughout this process, the number one question on their minds is, “Will Adobe continue to support 3D in the free Adobe Reader long-term?” The answer is — and I can’t stress this enough — that Adobe is fully committed to supporting 3D viewing and interaction capabilities within Adobe Reader and Acrobat. We recognize our responsibility to customers worldwide who depend on 3D PDF to collaborate, control, and store their product development data for long-term archival and retrieval. That commitment hasn’t diminished, and, I think, has actually strengthened through this partnership.

The 3D PDF support is a nice tool, great for sending low-resolution models to folks without fancy viewer tools.  It’s not used very often, however, but it’s nice in a pinch.

The whole announcement can be read at their site.

via 3D Solutions Update (Adobe Featured Blogs).

Science adobe, cad, software

A new player is in the CAD space, fighting against the heavyweights of AutoCAD and SolidWorks, coming from Berline.  The new product ‘ARES” has been in development for 5 years and is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, with new versions for Windows Mobile, Apple iPad, and Google Android on the way.  And more than just vaporware, the product has been out in testing by some big names, with good things to say:

“Several Fortune® 500 companies have been using ARES as part of our intensive beta test – to them, ARES really does represent the next-generation of CAD solution,” said Wilfried Graebert, Founder and CEO of Graebert, GmbH.

“Using ARES, they have been able to create designs in far less time than with competitive solutions – the feedback has been identical – ARES is an impressive product that lived up to their demanding expectations.”

Key features include:

• DWG native format – Graebert is a founding member of the Open Design Alliance and sits on the Board of Directors.  ARES supports DWG Import (2.x -> 2009), Export (12->2009) and DWG 2009 Native format (DWG 2010 support coming in 2nd Quarter, 2010)
• AutoCAD-compatible command line and scripts
• More than 400 new commands
• Drawing recovery
• Latest ACIS 3D modeling support
• I/O Support for DWG 2.5 -> 2009, DWF, SAT, WMF, SLD, ESRI & SHP
• Exceptional print capabilities, including PDF, Raster & SVG
• UI optimized for each native operating system as well as an XML-based, fully customizable UI with a built-in designer
• Widest range of programming I/O support, including Lisp, C, Delphi, COM, .net (C#, VB.net), C++ and VSTA

via Gräbert – Welcome.

Science ares, cad, gmbh, software

A new CAD modeling tool is now available for all of the programmer-oriented people out there, the new GPL2 licensed OpenSCAD.  Unlike traditional modeling solutions like Blender, AutoCAD, or SolidWorks, it takes simply 2D scripts and builds geometry using 2D Extrusion techniques of Constructive Solid Geometry.

OpenSCAD is not an interactive modeller. Instead it is something like a 3D-compiler that reads in a script file that describes the object and renders the 3D model from this script file (see examples below). This gives you (the designer) full control over the modelling process and enables you to easily change any step in the modelling process or make designes that are defined by configurable parameters.

OpenSCAD provides two main modelling techniques: First there is constructive solid geometry (aka CSG) and second there is extrusion of 2D outlines. As data exchange format format for this 2D outlines Autocad DXF files are used. In addition to 2D paths for extrusion it is also possible to read design parametes from DXF files. Besides DXF files OpenSCAD can read and create 3D models in the STL and OFF file formats.

Binaries for Windows, OSX, and linux are available for download, with Source for the true die-hards.

via OpenSCAD – The Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller.

Science cad, csg, openscad, software

A new tutorial from Vincent Rice shows the capabilities of modo401 for reformatting badly-tesellated CAD models.

modo 401 is an excellent tool for ‘re-toplogising’ 3D CAD data. That is, the re-purposing of hi-density mesh created on export from NURBS-based engineering programs into a form (subdivision surfaces) useful for high-quality stills and animation rendering. Here’s a simple tutorial to show how I usually approach this task.

via tutorials.

Graphics cad, models, modo, modo401, tutorial