You have to love it when a 3D company gets all comfortable and happy. Silly things start to happen. Last time I posted about SpaceClaim was to talk about its somewhat foolish crediting and usage of imagery on its web-site, which was at best misleading to say the least. I was pointed back at the web-site with the words “what’s going on?” What’s all the fuss about? well, simply, the company is claiming to be the “first 3D Direct Modeling system.”

Now, I get that marketing is often about stretching things a touch, but do the powers honestly believe that people are going to buy it? Yes, SpaceClaim is a Direct Modelling system, but claiming to be the first? Seriously? The new CEO (Chris Randles) sold MathCAD to PTC. PTC also own CoCreate, one of the handful of Direct Modelling applications out there. There’s also IronCAD and CADkey.

SpaceClaim is an impressive system, but the complete and utter lack of clarity, and to be honest and more increasingly, lack of truth surrounding the product, is doing it NO favours whatsoever.

Just thought I’d add Blake’s (one of the founders of SpaceClaim) comment to the front page:

As I mentioned on SpaceClaiming, “this mistake was caused by an overaggressive search and replace on a recent web site update and has been corrected. Thanks for keeping us honest, Al! We are well aware that SpaceClaim is not the first direct modeler, but we are confident that we are the fastest and most capable.”

Thanks again,
-Blake

Motorola RAZR - probably not designed in SpaceClaim

Looks like SpaceClaim has been spending some more of that VC cash with the web-designers again and there’s a brand new SpaceClaim web-site on the block. I like it, its shiny and has lots of nice things in there.

There are a couple of bits and bobs that aren’t quite right. I love it when people tag that annoying little TM trademark thing after something that really doesn’t need it. Particularly when the company in question, according to a USPTO search, doesn’t even own the trademark (I’d love to stand corrected) or its been owned and abandoned by someone else.

I’m specifically thinking about “Natural 3D design” which was previously owned by Metatools and “Design the way you think” which was owned and abandoned by Ceira Technologies in 2005.

What’s also often interesting is the models that CAD vendors choose to illustrate their web-site, brouchures and such. Perfect example of this are two of the images featured there.

A Motorola RAZR and an Aston Martin. The RAZR is pretty fair game, model something up and use it as a demo. What’s really… Ummm.. what’s the word? Irritating, is the Aston Martin image.

Aston Martin: Not designed by Pininfarina and not designed with SpaceClaim - allegedly

It reads Credit: Bunkspeed/Pininfarina. Unless I’m very much mistaken, Pininfarina had nothing to do with the design of any Aston Martin and certainly not the model shown - and I’d bet the house on the fact that SpaceClaim wasn’t involved. Could it be that this the 3D model that appears in this Youtube video?

A model that was created in SolidWorks, at the turn of the century. And modelling by the talented Mark Biasotti, who was working at IDEO at the time I seem to recall. Guess where he works now? Yes, he works for a company based on Baker Avenue, Concorde, Mass - but it ain’t SpaceClaim.