DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

Simpoe is planning to deliver a basic injection mould filling simulation tool, called “e-Simpoe ” including melt front animation, for free, as a download. It can also be used as a viewer to interact with simulation results performed with any of the commercial Simpoe softwares, whether they are filling, packing, cooling and/or warpage simulation results.

No dates on delivery yet, but with SolidWorks pulling MoldFlowXpress out of SolidWork due to a lack of sales conversions a couple of releases ago, the Autodesk/MoldFlow acquisition at an early stage, there’s a gap in the market for a mould filling tool - while it may not be a fully fledged tool for moulders, facts are that having a simple tool to run designs through, to verify your ‘Design for Manufacture’ related work, makes a lot of sense.

Oh and we’re going to be looking at the SolidWorks integrated tool, SimpoeWorks, in the next issue of DEVELOP3D.

It seems that raising its bid by 17% (to around $60 million) got Mentor Graphics got Flomerics after all. In one of the most public attempts to sell an organisation for a while, the electronics engineering specialist finally got hold of all that lovely CFD code that it wanted so badly. This follows Flomerics trying to sell itself to Autodesk and them not really being interested.

Roopinder at tenlinks.com dug out an interesting article in the Boston Business Journal. Apparently, PTC has been through a “change-in-control policy” that stumps up serious cash to the executives running the company if it is ever sold. we’re talking a share of $1.9 million. what’s also interesting is that this is a 10 percent increase in the $18 million already promised to those executives.

In specifics, it seems that the payments would go to CEO C Richard “Dick” Harrrison, CFO Cornelius “Neil” Moses III, Chief Product Officer Jim Heppelman and two other EVPs. Harrison alone would net over $15 million.

But what really amazed me was that someone would have the name Cornelius and not use it.

Sextant Navigation Eye2It Media Console courtesy of Pixelmathematics

Bunkspeed has launched HyperShot V 1.5 with new key enhancements being interaction with all major 3D solid and surface modelling products, as well as even brighter, more realistic photographs rendered even faster from 3D models.

How are they doing that? Let’s break it down. Faster Performance is gained through improved real-time raytracing (done with quicker self shadow calcs), better real-time handling of materials on objects without texture coordinates and a cached material library, which will display all materials instantly. And end results are going to be improved with sharper shadows and texture maps in the final rendering and better turntable animation in HyperShot Pro (for the record, I think the turntable animation tools should be in all of the offerings. No pun intended). The translators have also been worked on support for Rhinoceros both on the Mac and Windows, better support for Pro/Engineer Wildfire 4 and better SolidWorks and IGES support.

Since I was 16, I’ve been fighting with creating realistic looking renders based on accurate CAD data. While many industry pundits love to talk up the amount of time they’ve spent looking at this software we called CAD, the only reason I say this is that I know exactly how long it takes to create the type of imagery you can see here, and its too dammed long - HyperShot solves many of those bottlenecks. There’s a full review of HyperShot 1.5 in this months DEVELOP3D - so reg up and get your copy. If you’ve already done so, then enter your email address and read at your leisure - there are five copies of HyperShot Web to be won as well, along with a whole host of other goodies.

Oh and its time to confess, we f&*ked up: the cost of the Pro version is not 10 grand, but a much more reasonable 3,495 USD - sorry Thomas.