DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

I’m excited as there is a new version of my favourite folding bike on sale. The Strida is the brain-child of UK industrial designer, Mark Sanders. I regularly shove it my Strida into the passenger seat of my car and take it away with me. Yes, it looks odd and nobody ever seems to have ever seen one before but I wholeheartedly endorse one of these bikes if you are looking for a foldable bike. This clip is an interview with Mark, where he explains his design concepts and process. About half-way through you see that now Mark uses SolidWorks to design and reduce the number of prototypes, but sketching and ‘feel’ are bedrocks for his process.

www.strida.com

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.

The image above shows simulation results from a Quick Natural Convection on LED light design shown with CFdesign v10 new user interface - nifty looking eh?

Blue Ridge Numerics (at 1pm, UK time today to be exact), released details of the latest release of its CFD application, CFDesign. The big ticket items for this rev seem to be a new user interface, greater CAD integration, better design review features and interactive void filling and external volume creation.

Interesting, UI changes aside (which look pretty good as you can see), the CAD associativity interested me. There are two schools of thought here. To built the app directly within the CAD interface, or to build it standalone and provide tight links. The two are not always as clear-cut as they seem. In all fairness, CFDesign has always been in the Standalone/integrated camp and this release sees that worked on with the ability to extract much more from the CAD data, such as model orientation, part and background, part names and material properties. Blue Ridge also talks about mapping of mouse functions. I guess that this means the user will load CAD data from their workhorse tool and the system can be set to mimic the user interaction methods of that CAD system. Also of interest is the new multi-view mode, which allows you to work with different analysis results sets and have the system synchronise the panning, zooming and rotation of the views. Other updates include interactive void filling and external volume creation meaning you don’t have to do it your CAD system.

Lastly, Blue Ridge has also introduce CFD-tv which provides users with “on-demand, task-specific training in a Web 2.0 format that will appeal to multi-tasking engineers who want to add CFD to their armory.” Apparently, each CFD-tv episode is a short video segment led by a CFdesign power user intended to answer commonly asked questions.

There will of course be a full, indepth review of CFDesign 10 in the next issue of DEVELOP3D - so make sure you sign up for a subscription.