DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

Designing and developing products is an expensive endeavour especially if you are a student or just starting out in the design world. So, the kind people at MetropolitanWorks, which is part of London Metropolitan University, are giving a few lucky people a helping hand through a new competition they have just launched.

The competition, called Metamorphosis, is looking to help six individuals take their innovative product ideas through the development process, from the drawing board to realisation. They will have access to MetropolitanWork’s wide range of facilities including rapid prototyping, 3D scanning, laser cutting, water-jet cutting, CNC routing and CAD (SolidWorks, Rhino and Pro/ENGINEER). Their finished projects will then be showcased at the London Design Festival in September on the MetropolitanWorks’ stand. The catch is that to be eligible you must be based in London and graduating this year or be alumni of one of six London universities (look at Metropolitan Works for more information).

Jodie Eastwood, project manager at MetropolitanWorks, had this to say to me about the competition: “The Metamorphosis competition is about helping designers - both our own graduates/alumni from London Metropolitan University alongside our friends from the Knowledge East community of institutions - to gain a thorough understanding of best practice in bringing new products to market. Six of the best will receive up to £10,000 in product development support at Metropolitan Works including specialist expertise and access to our fantastic digital manufacturing and rapid prototyping facilities.”

Read more…

This, I love, in all the right ways. I’ve always been of the opinion that perhaps the one missing piece in the 3D design toolkit is a set of decent materials selection tools that integrate with the workhorse design systems we use every day. After, aside from form, perhaps one of the biggest contributing factors in the performance of the part or a product, is materials and ensuring that you’re using the correct material for the job at hand. Often, it’s a known factor, but in these days of drive for cost efficiency or indeed, green design or the simple drive to do less for more, a change in materials can help push that forward.

So, it’s with great pleasure I read today’s news out of the Simulia Customer Conference over in Providence, that Granta Design (based in Cambridge - that’s UK, not Mass), has release the GRANTA MI:Materials Gateway which provides “integration of materials information technology with computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE).” Alongside the Simulia event, it’ll also be shown at the forthcoming PTC/User Event in Florida in June.

Read more…

Going to hospital isn’t an experience that many of us relish, even if it’s for a minor operation or just to visit a patient.  It seems that a change from the clinical white and impersonal feel that many of us experience as soon as we walk into a hospital as well as the inefficiencies and issues with cleanliness that are often the case with many healthcare systems, would be very much welcomed. In fact, there has been quite a bit of press recently about design in healthcare and how to rethink and improve the role of NHS hospitals and patient care in the UK. A number of organisations including the Design Council has been pushing this issue for quite some time. For instance, it has orchestrated a number of campaigns such as Design Bugs Out that is looking at redesigning hospital equipment and furniture and Design for Patient Dignity that recently commissioned six teams of designers and manufacturers to look at how innovative new designs can solve privacy and dignity issues (think of the standard hospital gown that often exposes the patient’s rear end to all who make walk behind them!).

Priestmangoode, a London-based design consultancy, has identified a compelling opportunity for using design to address some of the specific challenges thrown up by such cases for rethinking healthcare.  It believes that intelligent, efficient design has the potential to improve everyday life for millions of people each year. As a result, they have put together a paper - The Health Manifesto: A Smarter Role for Design in Healthcare – that provides a raft of principles, ideas and new thinking. Although not specifically a healthcare design consultancy, this area is something that managing director Paul Priestman feels very strongly about:  “I love new challenges and there seems to be a natural progression from the work we’ve done on micro environments such as airline seats and hotel rooms where we are maximising best use of space to healthcare. Hospitals, despite investment in the past decade or so, have still not moved on as much as consumer and leisure environments yet patient expectations have. Using the expertise we have developed from our work in product and environment design, we believe we can make healthcare more efficient, enjoyable to work in and use.”

Read more…

Back in November 2009 we reported that Adobe had allegedly laid off most of the employees in its Manufacturing Solutions Group . Since then, there has been no word on what Adobe was planning on doing with regard to the development of 3D in PDF or its focus on the engineering sector. This month, it emerged that a deal has been done between Adobe and CAD / graphics component supplier TechSoft 3D that will offer some clarity on what will happen with 3D in PDF.

Before we look at what this new deal might mean for the future of 3D PDF, it’s worth going over a little bit of history. In 2006 Adobe introduced Acrobat 3D, a new version heralding the inclusion of lightweight 3D, in the form of the U3D format. Adobe had realised that PDF was big in AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) and took the plunge to incorporate the ability to capture 3D geometry in an open format. Up until that point the various CAD firms had all been trying very hard to give away their ‘open’ 3D formats to try and dominate the collaboration slice of the 3D market but nobody had reached critical mass. It was hoped that Adobe could be the big gorilla to drive through a standard. Unfortunately U3D was not a brilliant format, could get quite large in terms of file size, and there were not many ways to create U3D. In addition, as most CAD vendors had their own formats they were already promoting, not many wanted to include U3D capabilities.

Adobe then made a significant acquisition, buying Trade and Technologies France (TTF), a developer of data translation and viewing tools. TTF was a respected provider of CAD file conversion tools, which now gave Adobe the ability to create 3D PDF from the majority of key CAD applications, as well as a new highly compressed b-rep file format called PRC (Product Representation Compact). PRC has the ability to save geometry in low-level tessellated or high-level b-rep formats, the latter of which is so accurate it has been said you could machine off it. With this technology included in PDF, Adobe produced Acrobat Pro Extended in 2008. This version of Acrobat could be used to import many native CAD formats and included assembly information, object hierarchies and PMI for embedding in PDF documents. Adobe also worked with TechSoft 3D (http://www.hoops3d.com) to sell development kits (SDKs) to CAD developers, providing all the translation tools plus native PDF creation for a pretty aggressive price. A year and a half later the majority of the team behind that product at Adobe was let go.

Read more…

Today is the launch of the latest release in Siemens PLM Software’s NX product line and I’m sure the online world will be aflutter with all manner of content and thoughts on what the company is up to with its flagship product. I wanted to do things slightly different and take a look at a different areas of the release over the course of a couple of posts and spend some time focussing on the details of what’s changed and what looks exciting. And today’s subject is, Synchronous Technology.

While the launch saw a huge amount of noise made around how this breakthrough technology was impacting Solid Edge, many missed the really joucy stuff, the place where Synchronous Technology made much more sense in terms of supporting and adding to existing workflows and capabilities - and that was within NX. The problem was that NX has, for many years, allowed the user much more freedom from the traditional Feature/History way of working found in Solid Edge and its mainstream competition. The removal of a reliance on history was something that didn’t make huge deadlines purely because that’s how NX has always worked to a greater or lesser extent. Also, the manner in which it was integrated into NX was much less prescriptive than Edge and allows the user to much greater choice. History (of each modelling operation executed) could be stored if needs be, or you could simply work in the way you wanted without storing that trail of operations. But which ever way the user chose to work (and experience tells me that users use the most appropriate method based on the task at hand), the one thing that Syncronous Technology couldn’t do was work with non-prismatic geometry. Basically, while the drag and drop, auto-inferred, relationship driven way of working that Sync Tech brings, didn’t give you much advantage once you stepped outside of extrudes, revolves, shells, fillets and chamfers.

For NX 7.5, this changes. And changes big style. The concepts of Sync Tech have now been integrated into NX’s pre-existing tools for working with typically surface-based complex geometry in the form of iForm operation. Like the xForm tools that have been around since the system was called Unigraphics, it allows you to manipulate surfaces on a very fundamental level. You can dive in and manipulate the geometry using a range of methods which it would take quite sometime to explain with words. So, instead, we’ve got a little time lapsed video to show how it works. Have a watch of this, then pop back for some thoughts.

Cue the VT

Read more…

When we started DEVELOP3D, we took some decisions early on that have guided the course of the publications’ development and progress over the last two years. From the feedback, readers like it and like it a lot. But as ever, you can’t always please everyone and we’re used to occasionally getting a message or a letter from readers unhappy with the things we’ve done, the way we’ve covered a subject and the content we produce - that’s all fair and a core part of what makes this job interesting. If enough people get in touch and espouse a view on a subject that’s contrary to what we’ve written or covered, then it means that we can steer future content in a more satisfactory direction. We’re always not afraid to say what we think. I did so recently when I asked about Autodesk’s use of specific imagery on the splash screen on their SketchBook Pro for the iPad (You can read all about it here). it seems that my views, from the feedback we got both publically and privately mean that I was in the minority and perhaps making a big deal over very little - I’m comfortable with my thoughts and more than happy to discuss them anytime.

Today we got a letter from a reader that’s clearly unhappy with some that appeared in the magazine. Specifically, a advertisement appearing on the fourth page of the May issue of the magazine. 

The email read:

——-Original Message——-
From: ********
Sent: 19 May 2010 12:14
To: Alan Cleveland
Subject: THE MAY 2010 ISSUE

Hi, I’ve just opened the May 2010 issue, and became concerned as the rear
end of a woman was exposed to me via an advertisement, some would say art,
but surely the magazine is not an art museum. Very inappropriate, what if I
had children, or my young brother saw, what I saw. You should keep in mind
moral standards, the world is falling apart because of the love of money
over the happiness of others, correct me if I’m wrong. Surely people would
have known that any age group could be able to see the magazine, as it’s
not got any indication of parental advisory, or that the content is not
suitable for children. If I’m a big problem, and what I’ve stated is
rubbish, then can you blame yourself(the magazine), or people for aiding in
the moral decay in the UK?

***** ******

Read more…

Z Corporation has just launched the latest product in its range. While the traditional products include 3D scanning devices as well as its now legendary Z Printer products, this sees a departure from that historical product line with the ZBuilder Ultra.

Based on technology licensed from Envisiontec (in fact, it’s pretty much the Envisiontec Ultra... with a badge), the new printer doesn’t rely on the same powder+binder formula that exitsing Z Corp products centre on, but instead uses a mix of photo curable polymer, a technology called Digital Light Processing (DLP) - again wrapped up in a layer-based process. Essentially for those unfamiliar with Envisiontec’s machines, these use UV light to cure layers of photopolymer (as do many rapid prototyping techniques). The difference here is that the system uses DLP to “project” the UV light onto each layer - DLP is a Texas Instruments technology predominately used in standard projector products.

The resolution possible with this combination, added into a machine that can be build with incredibly thin layers (between 0.05mm and 0.2mm), gives models that are not only robust, but also require very little in the way of finishing - as the step-stepping effect evident with many RP techniques, is to all intents and purposes, removed.
If you want the tech specs, the machine is capable of building features as small as 0.2mm at layer thicknesses upwards of 0.05mm in a build envelope of around the 260 x 160 x 190 mm mark. What’s also interesting is that because (as this and several other technologies, such as 3D Systems’ V Flash do) this system “exposes” a single layer in a single flash of the UV light, rather than tracing contours then filling in (such as is evident with laser-based systems such as SLA and laser sintering), then the parts are built in a much quicker time - with Z Corp quoting around the 1/2 inch per hour.

Read more…