C3D Labs has announced the release of C3D Toolkit 2022, with improved tools for 3D surfaces, solids and polygonal modelling, 3D sheet metal design, 3D Web visualisation, and parametrisation.
This update to C3D’s software development kit (SDK) should offer enhancements in every one of the modules of the toolkit, namely C3D’s modeller geometry kernel, solver 2D and 3D constraint manager, Fair Curve Modeller smooth curve constructor, B-Shaper polygon to the b-rep converter, Converter data exchange and Vision and Web Vision Visualisation engines.
C3D Labs said the new capabilities to the C3D Toolkit 2022 are useful in classic CAD, CAM, and CAE systems, as well as with software in newer fields such as virtual reality, 3D scanning, and digital manufacturing.
As it was working towards launching the new C3D Modeller geometric kernel, C3D decided to focus on the area of complex surface modelling, which, the company said, is considered the high-end of CAD functionality.
Such functionality should pave the way for users in the aerospace and shipbuilding industries will be able to solve design tasks.
One of the new functions in the C3D Toolkit 2022 Modeller geometric kernel is related to median shelling: whereas previously, users could model such surfaces only for pairs of faces equidistant from each other, in the new version, C3D Labs implemented the ability to construct shells from non-equidistant pairs of flat faces.
Functions related to the surfaces of conic sections should also have gone under significant improvements in the new version of the C3D geometric kernel.
Users should now have the ability to construct surfaces that are minimally stressed and tangent to two sets of faces, which should expand the scope of surfaces of conic sections, helpful in modelling complex contours of structures.
Another new feature of the 2022 update regards the C3D Fair Curve Modeller module, to construct smooth curves, which should now offer a method that approximates an array of noisy points, which typically takes as input parameters the array of noisy points and some Nurbs curves.
Also in the C3D Modeller, the company said it worked towards improving existing methods and adding two new ones: flattening spatial curves from cylinders to planes, and chamfering the joints of three-dimensional contours.
Functions for editing solid bodies with the geometric kernel should also have been modernised. In particular, C3D mentioned improvements to operations including replacing faces with equidistant faces, moving and deleting faces and removing rounding from faces.
C3D said it added a new function to the sheet metal modelling of C3D Modeller which should improve the operation of cuts in sheet bodies, allowing users to normalise cuts in oblique body elements.
C3D Modeller should also add a completely new type of modelling – polygonal bodies – which was developed after receiving a large number of requests from users.
Other new features should include improvements to the C3D Solver. users should now be able to use equidistant curves thanks to a newly implemented method in the solver’s API that allows them to add such curves, fix their offsets, and change offset values.
In the updated 3D parametric solver, C3D Labs said it added the linear increment dimension function, which should impose a control dimension between two bodies or parts of the same body, whose distance value changes at specific increments.
The C3D toolkit 2022 should also feature improvements to the C3D Converter data exchange module, Web visualisation tools, and product manufacturing information (PMI ).
