DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

#4: The next rev of Pro/Engineer Wildfire is due sometime later this year, with current plans being to officially launch it at the PTC/User event in June. What Brian Shephard, Divisional Vice President of Product Management showed was a taster of what’s most likely to get into the next release, but as ever, things can change between now and June. That said, let’s take a look.

Real Time Regeneration: Fascinating. they’ve managed to remove the need to regenerate a model when you’re editing it. The short video showed a reasonably complex plastic part (shown here*) and ribs being dragged and dropped. No need to rollback the model history or regenerate it. There are obviously a huge number of questions about this, how does it handle underlying parameters, what features can be edited in this manner. Time will tell. It’ll also worth noting that this takes advantage of multi-threaded hardware. While multi-cpu and multi-core machines are increasingly common, its the case that today, much of 3D CAD work doesn’t particularly lend itself to multi-threading, so this is an interesting step. Was it based on CoCreate’s technology? Nope. Are they sharing technology between Pro/E and CoCreate now? Nope too.

The flip-side of this is when model regeneration fails. Most of us are more than familiar with the pain associated with seeing a history tree explode in your face and you’re staring down the barrel of a day’s worth of rework for a seemingly innocuous design change. Wildfire 5 looks like it’ll give you a much improved set of feedback about what’s happening, what’s causing the failure and help you work through it with better diagnostics.

Elsewhere on the modelling front, there’s a new Rib tool that’ll draft and fillets (ok, rounds if you’re a Pro/E user), will extend to part walls automatically and you’ve got a lot more freedom in how you define the core geometry (so you can include multiple loops and intersecting paths). What else? Curvature continuous fillets/round. Sketch Points can be used for feature placement in a pattern.

Brian didn’t talk about this, but the slides show an approximate offset feature is being added. when you’re shelling or offsetting geometry, you can often have the feature fail because of small faces, of too tight fillets or complex surfaces, so being able to ‘fudge it’ makes a lot of sense, to let you get the work done, particularly if they’re not external or critical surfaces in terms of appearance or aesthetic quality. There’s also been some work done on the definition of welded forms, with new Weld features (such as spot, slot/plug, fillet and groove), as well as your ability to document those features.

There’s better mechanism models on their way with support coming for slot motors, dynamic gears, belts and 3D contact. The last one I’ll talk up is how Pro/E works with other systems. Wildfire 5 will see new import tools for Inventor and SolidWorks data, better support for exchanging 3D notes and annotations and other non-geometric metadata.

Detailing: Here’s a strange one. The Pro/E Detailing environment is getting a complete overhaul. Using the Ribbon UI framework. This looks interesting, but you do have to wonder why just one single part of Pro/E is getting the Ribbon, while others aren’t, some are built into the Dashboard, and even the Menu Mapper still pops up in others. Isn’t that going to make life a little more complex than it should? Whatever you’re thought on that, the ability to organise command access into task-based work-flow makes a lot of sense for drawing production. Over and above UI, there’s been work done on the drawing tree to give you more information about the documents you’re working on.

* My apologies for the quality of the images that came with this. For some bizarre reason, PTC just love taking a powerpoint, stuffing it inside a PDF and not giving you the raw image files.