DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

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

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