DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

#1 The Economy: It sucked. Let’s leave it at that and hope 2010 brings brighter times.

#2 Press Vs. Bloggers: Much debated this year. The press (all of whom write blog) are worried about Bloggers taking over their exhalted position as keepers of the truth. Bloggers think the press don’t know what they’re talking about. I couldn’t care less.

#3 WolfeGate and the definition of ‘relatively unimportant’: Stephen Wolfe wrote an article (crotchety), it kicked off quickly than a Red shirt at a Manchester City game here.

#4 Being French for a week in Chicago: Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to do the Daily Express “we hate the french” nonsense, but wearing this badge both amused (and I mean hot tea through the nose kind of amused) and disappointed me. Whether it was the French name, the heavy accent or the beret I’m not too sure. BUt for one glorious week, I felt tres continental.

#5 Closing Magazines: I love print media. Yes. Web and mobile devices are the future, but there’s something glorious about a well executed print magazine. Too many have disappeared due to unsound business models, lazy publishers and a harsh economic environment.

It’s the end of the year and people love lists. One for Santa, one for the Elves, one for the pagan gods of . And journalists the world over are compiling top ten lists for the festive season. Why? because it’s easy, there’s christmas parties to go to and it’s a quick way to file copy and get the hell out of the office. So, rather than a Top 10, in true Nick Hornby style, here’s our Top Five list of Top Five list of all tim.. ok. of 2009.

#1 Twitter - The Marmite of Social Media: Some of the team hate it (Martyn), some of us love it (Al and Dr. Mings), some of us remain ambivalent about it (Greg), some of us couldn’t give two shits (Stephen). But while the world is going social networking mental, it seems that 2009 is the year of twitter, the year that it jumped the shark, the year that you overheard it discussed at length in supermarket check out queues.

Some 3D vendors are using it in clever and engaging ways (Siemens - particularly with Dora Smith - @dorasmith - and Mark Burhop - @burhop - helming efforts), some are using it in an uncoordinated way that looks kind of scrappy (a quick look at the #AU2009 hashtag stream). From my own personal perspective, I find it fascinating. You can engage with people in a completely open manner, find out what makes them tick, find areas of common interest and truly discover new and exciting things. Yes, it’s a small percentage of the world at large (though it’s moved on from its alpha geek territory) but its a growing community of people with common interests, particularly around the 3D design industry. But what I find most interesting is how it enables people to interact and the effect that has on those moments when they meet in person. Things click more easily, people know who each other are and it just works on a social level much more fluidly. To me, who’s job is to pretty much talk to and listen to people, that’s a fascinating advance.

#2 Direct Modelling, the 20 year Overnight Success: SpaceClaim reinvigorated it. Siemens made a brave move to bring this technology to its 3D design products. CoCreate got sold on the back of it. Then Autodesk released the Inventor Fusion tech preview. While many of these things broke in 2007 or 2008, this year was the year that direct modelling, synchronous technology, dynamic editing, call it what you will, started to pan out in terms of a clearer vision of where things are heading. Siemens’ Sync Tech has matured with two releases under the belt and while many feared a cut-off from history-based modelling tools, it’s clear that things are never going to be that cut and dried. These types of tools are going to become part of the designer and engineers’ toolkit. they’ll be integrated into the existing tools.

Some will be explicitly separated, some will be much more tightly integrated. Look at the work Autodesk is doing with Fusion and Change Manager, at what PTC has done with Pro/E Wildfire 5.0 and which will continue with Wildfire 6.0, at what Siemens is doing with NX. The History vs Non-history based argument will seem petty in a year or two’s time. Why? Because it’ll just be a set of tools.

#3 Live Events: This year’s been crazy for the D3D team’s travel schedules. We’ve been to the US for nearly three months of the year visiting some of the most interesting events. We’ve met users from across the planet, seen more demos of software than you can shake a very big stick at and we’ve made some friends along the way. In these days of digital-everything, the live event shows that people still get the most from meeting face to face, from discussing things over a coffee, or more than likely, at 2am in the morning in a bar, somewhere on the planet. Aeroplanes are our third office (the second is the Oxford services on the M40) and we love it. And you know what, we’re heading back out on the road to do it all again. I talked about the benefits of face to face in a post around the time of COFES and the same still stands. People like people, people buy from people and that’s how it works.

#4 Simulation spreads: Simulation, Digital Prototyping, Analysis, call it what you will, holds many benefits and this year we saw a huge growth of interest in the tools, the technology and the best practices across a huge range of industry sectors. This is going to be a key focus for us for 2010, so stay tuned. Exciting times and one we’ll be revelling on with glee.

#5 The Rise of the Mac Platform: If you read the magazine or the blog, you probably knew this was coming. While word is still out on AutoCAD for the Mac, the release of both Alias and NX (and the public beta of Rhino OS X) saw serious design and engineering tools released freshly on the OS X platform alongside those tools that have been there for some time, such as solidThinking and Ashlar’s Cobalt tools. The introduction of bootcamp has seen massive adoption and you see that glowing Apple logo much more regularly than you ever have before. We set-up mac.develop3d.com to cover things as they break.

The original StormTrooper helmet. Image courtesy of Curventa

Found this fascinating, it’s a story about well known UK-based industrial design firm Curventa and how they helped a client, RuRoc, take its ‘Storm Trooper’ snowboarding helmet from the slopes to the autosport world. The helmet helped launch RuRoc back in 2007, with it’s integrated google, facemask and of course, head protection. What’s interesting is that RuRoc have now been asked to provide the product to the Formula One racing world as safety gear for pit crew.

Image courtesy of RuRoc Racing.

As Director at Curventa, Ian Murison said, “Crews usually wore motorcycle helmets, but a lot of the mechanics found them too hot and heavy to wear during races. In 2008, the Red Bull team contacted RuRoc and said they wanted to use the snowboarding helmets for their crews. We made some modifications and added flame retardant materials to the helmets, and they broke on the Formula One scene last season. Pretty soon, the McLaren team ordered chromed helmets for their pit crew. Now RuRoc has distributors in North American, Canada, and Europe selling to other motorsport teams.”

The original StormTrooper helmet. Image courtesy of Curventa

Curventa did the design work for RuRoc founder, Rob Gavin, when he came to the London firm with a rough physical model of a snowboarding helmet that protected faces from extreme cold while venting enough to prevent goggles from fogging over. Curventa laser scanned the helmet design then entered the data into SolidWorks following physical mock-ups. “We created the early designs in blue foam, and once approved by the client we laser scanned them into SolidWorks. From then on, we were designing and detailing on the fly within SolidWorks,” Murison said. “We did a lot of adjusting inside SolidWorks, tweaking the helmet design to adjust how it fit in the back, for example, or how it moved when the wearer turned their head. SolidWorks really held up well during that process.” There’s also another little nugget of info in the press release, in that the design team made heavy use of the Freeform feature in SolidWorks during the design process.

Image courtesy of RuRoc Racing.

If you fancy an F1 spec helmet for your own purposal use, they’re 400 quid a pop and available over the web - you can even get your company logo laquered into the back of them.Or you can buy Brawn F1, McLaren or Force India (shown above) replica helmets if that’s your bag.

This popped up into my inbox this morning and gave me a bit of a giggle, but its a serious story for those with an interest in rapid prototyping (or indeed, direct manufacturing). For those that don’t know Materialise, it’s one of the biggest rapid prototyping bureaux out there - and having visited their facilities a few years ago, the breadth of services they offer and the capability they have (this was before the new facilities opened), it was truly mind boggling. Anyway, what the team has done is build a set of Ping Pong equipment using its new Xtreme stereolithography material (Materialise develop both new materials and new prototyping hardware) - they played a game or two. And rather handily video’ed it for your viewing pleasure.

According to the company, toughness and durability are the key aspects of the Xtreme material with a very good impact strength (0.45 J/cm) which, combined with an elongation at break of up to 22 percent, makes it “suited for a wide range of prototyping and manufacturing applications including tough enclosures, snap fit assemblies, consumer electronic components and alternatives for CNC machined parts.”