Image courtesy of the Lego Group.

Granularity. There’s a word I love. It just sounds nice and rolls off the tongue nicely, even with my dodgy mid-british accent - unlike ‘caramel machiato’  which sounds horrendous and causes American baristas to look at me in the same manner people look at dogs when they’re trying to tell them something - a look that says “Ummm… What?”. Now, where was i? Oh yes.

Granularity.

According to the source of all mildly accurate information, Wikipedia, Granularity is defined as:

...the extent to which a system is broken down into small parts, either the system itself or its description or observation. It is the extent to which a larger entity is subdivided.

Now. Why am I talking about this? The reason is that this is something I believe it’s going to become increasingly important to designer users as we progress through this century. Let me explain.

At present, when you look at the vast majority of tools we use to define a product, the data we store and the information we manage is quite basic. Most 3D CAD systems, while being granular in terms of feature-based descriptions, sketch entities and such, when it comes to management, we store parts, assemblies, sub-assemblies (and of course, subsequent to that, drawings). More advanced systems allow you to store and manage user defined feature sets and other such sub-part level information, but a collection of features is about as small as it gets.

This, I believe, will change. Why? Ok. Let’s do that.

There are two things that might influence this and push us into further levels of explicit detail and granularity. The first is the ‘cloud’ (yes, I broke my own rules). When you’re working on a system that’s remotely located on a server, whether that’s over your internal network or across the wider web, you’ll need to manage and exchange finite packets of information, features, sketch entities and such. the rise of collaborative working systems, such as Catia V6, will mean that users are working on the same data, in parallel, at the same time. If not at the same time, there will be times when design changes, down to feature and maybe sub-feature level, will need to be managed and rationalised. To do that, you need to manage and keep track of those individual parcels of data and oackets of change. That’s going to require a level of granularity that’s way beyond what most data management systems are currently capable of. I’m aware that some executives of their competition might disagree, but this is why Dassault acquired MatrixOne on a technical level. It has the ability to manage and control very large amounts of data, much more than Dassault’s existing data management products.

The other area is when you start to look at how the shift towards green is starting to effect how we design products and the technology that’s under development to allow us to gauge the environmental and legal impact of design choices as we work. Today, there are numerous vendors working in this field and its split into two camps. One is compliance led. The other is sustainability. The two fields are related, but quite often independent.

Sustainability often refers to the impact on the environment of not only the manufacture of a product, but the lifecycle surrounding it, from raw material extraction, material processing, production, logistics etc. It’s the warm fuzzy end of the green spectrum, but with real world impact potential. It’s a very early stage field with huge potential and we’ll be looking at what’s out there shortly.

Compliance on the other hand, is the cold hard end of the spectrum. Compliance relates to legal requirements, whether through regional, national or international, of what materials are in your products. This is about ensure that you can take your products in specific regions and areas and not have the wrath of the authorities (or indeed, Greenpeace) breathing down your neck, getting you fined and your product removed from the market. This is perhaps the area that granularity might effect the most. To carry out compliance auditing, you need the most granular level of information about your product - down to the CAS registry number level. Yes. We’re talking chemical element level. That, my friends is granularity of the highest order (or is that lowest order?).

Take these two figures as an example.

This shows a basic multi-level assembly. There’s three subassemblies, those sub-assemblies are then comprised of either parts or further sub-assemblies - down to five levels. There are three major sub-systems and in total, seven parts and 13 data records. Not a very complex part - whatsoever.

Now, this shows a new version of the same assembly. Remember, just a five level product structure, seven parts, but when you start to drive the requirement to discover compliance data, the order of magnitude of the data you’re looking at expands rapidly. Again, this is a very simplistic example, but you can see that that 17 data records very quickly becomes nearly 40 records, purely by tracking material within those data records, but also to the CAS Number level.

Now. Consider what would happen when you start to work on today’s products, in a highly collaborative environment, where data is being passed globally, between teams, between languages, between professional disciplines. And you still need to track data down to this type of level. And when you’re working on a product that looks like this:

X-Ray image courtesy of Samsung.

There you go. Granularity. It’s here to stay. Mark my words. And we’re going to need a new breed of data management system to handle this if all these processes and tasks are to be rationalised as part of the product development process.

In a slightly misleadingly entitled release, Luxion, developers of KeyShot (one of the replacements for HyperShot) has just sent out a press release about how “Ford relies on KeyShot Technology for Press Images.” While the statement is a wee bit accurate, the truth of the matter is that this is about how critically acclaimed car photographer David Burgess has been using KeyShot as a key part of his workflow for sometime and has just delivered press images for the 2012 Ford Focus - which made its worldwide debut at the 2010 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit.

Since 2006, critically acclaimed car photographer David Burgess has repeatedly used Luxion’s technology to deliver photographic masterpieces of many vehicles - right from his studio, hotel room, or wherever else he may be. Previously, David would photograph cars on location and depend on weather conditions and several staff members to assist with setting up the actual car model. Luxion’s technology gives full control over the lighting and the corresponding reflections in the car model, which in the end, delivers the ultimate artistic control.

This is a growing trend for many within the professional photography space, particularly those working with the automotive field. Automotive photoshoots are hugely costly in terms of time, the resources (camera crew, ground crew, staff from the auto-company etc etc) and shear bloody hassle of shipping five of the next hot car to the gobi desert, Icelandic glacier or indeed, getting permits to shut off a street in Chicago for morning, There’s also the issue of security and those cursed spy shots ruining the expensive launch at a tradeshow. Taking things digital makes huge sense. But what counts is getting the right photographer, with the right team behind them (in some cases) doing the render work and making it look jaw droppingly realistic.

I’ve just been briefed on Dell’s Precision M4500, a brand new 15-inch mobile workstation, which will join its bigger brother, the 17-inch Precision M6500. On paper it looks rather good.

With a weight of 6lbs, a thickness of 1.1 inches and a claimed maximum battery life of 7 hours 40 mins, the Precision M4500 will now be Dell’s only truly mobile workstation. The Precision M6500 is too heavy and battery life too short to be used as an everyday laptop and Dell confirmed that it will not be producing a 14-inch mobile workstation to follow on from the Precision M2400, which was a little underpowered in the graphics department.

Underpowered is not a word you’d use to describe the Precision M4500 and it comes laden with six processor options. This includes three dual core chips (Core i5 520M, Core i5 540M, and Core i7 620M) and three quad core chips (Core i7 720QM, Core i7 820QM and Core i7 920XM). This choice is great for CAD users, who don’t always want, or need, more expensive quad core chips. Dell also confirmed that it will now be offering dual core processors as options in its top end Precision M6500.

For professional graphics there’s a choice of two 1GB Nvidia cards, the Quadro FX 880M and Quadro FX 1800M, which should be adequate for most CAD applications. And for memory, the M4500 only has two slots, up to a maximum of 8GB, so use them wisely.

The M4500 provides support for a solid State mini card drive up to 256GB in size, which means the system can have two drives without having to swap out the optical drive. In a typical setup Dell said the solid state drive could be used for OS and applications, while data could be stored on the standard mechanical hard drive (up to 500GB).

Compared to previous models, the M4500’s display has lost a few pixels, with Dell opting for a shallower aspect ratio of 16:9. This means resolutions up to 1,920 x 1,080 and not 1,920 x 1,200, but Dell said this is an industry trend.

A neat feature of the M4500 is the ability to access to e-mail, calendar, and contacts within 5 secs of booting up the machine using a technology borrowed from its Latitude line up called Dell Precision ON. I’m not entirely sure of the ins and outs of this, but instead of Windows it boots up to a Linux OS. Other features include a 3mp camera, high security FIPS encryption and fingerprint scanner, and Gobi 2.0 mobile broadband support.

We hope to get our hands on one of these real soon.

Dassault Systemes has announced that BMW has signed a strategic 5-year global agreement to “pave the way to meet the automotive market’s new challenges.” According to the press release, “Through this agreement, the companies will establish a close link between their research & development centers that will not only improve the DS automotive product offering but also the BMW development and production process. Dassault Systemes software solutions support BMW in core areas for design and manufacturing process planning with Catia as the backbone for product development.”

The necessity to reduce C02 emission levels has forced automotive manufacturers to reshape their business processes to deliver greener cars. Fully embracing the cause of leaving a minimum carbon footprint on the planet, the implementation of the DS solutions will help automakers conceive, analyze and simulate eco-friendly low-emission vehicles like the Project I, a new Megacity vehicle, optimized for better performance and low energy consumption.

The BMW Concept ActiveE is powered by a new synchronous electric motor specially developed for this vehicle. Its maximum output is 125 kW/170 bhp, the maximum torque of 250 Nm / 184 lb-ft is available from standing as is typical for electric motors and remains available over an unusually broad load range.

The release also gave details of what BMW would be using:

By consolidating design in a single PLM software platform BMW can tap into “proven design” concepts and re-use them across all product lines achieving time savings in the design and manufacturing of new cars. The single platform also enables all designers, including development partners in the supply chain, to collaborate, which is another factor in streamlining the design process. Simulia realistic simulation solutions combined with Catia further allow BMW to virtually test their vehicle’s real-world performance early in the development cycle which helps improve product quality, while reducing time and cost of physical testing.

What’s also a small note in the press release is that:

“The agreement also defines a set of strategic projects where BMW will evaluate possible migration paths that ensure a smooth transition to Dassault Systèmes V6 PLM solutions for all its vehicle development programs.”

BMW already use Catia V5 and have been a flagship user for many years. This Thermoelectric Generator (TEG) that’s integrated in exhaust gas recirculation systems is typical.

There are many rumours and tales of unhappiness amongst many Dassault customers with the introduction of V6 - in both the small and very large account, with some major customers allegedly looking at a shift in platform for their product development. This shows that for some, and BMW have been a key account for DS for decades, the decision has already been made and the transition is a part of their long term strategy. Interesting that there’s no mention of Enovia.