#2: Looks like a screwed up a little on the previous post, so after a brief chat with Brian Shephard, Executive Vice President, Product Development at PTC, let’s get a few things straight – and they relate to direct modelling vs real time recaulation of a parametric, history-based model. What the video below shows (despite my initial thoughts; blame jetlag and my old friend Gordon) is the real-time calculation technology that’s being delivered in the Pro/Engineer Wildfire 5.0 release.
This will allow you to grab, drag and drop geometry features within your model, make dynamic edits and such, without the recalculation overhead traditionally associated with a history-based modelling system. According to Shephard, the system respects any constraints applied to the model, allowing you to preserve design intent and intelligence that parametric modelling has always allowed – but gives you a much more dynamic and efficient working environment to work. It doesn’t destroy the feature tree – in fact, it’s very similar to how systems like SolidWorks operate with its Instant3D technology.
What PTC has also demonstrated today is the explicit modelling tools which are planned to be introduced into the Wildfire 6.0 release. This is much more akin to the modelling methodology found in CoCreate and it’ll be introduced into Pro/Engineer in the next release cycle (which working on the basis of the last few releases, will be demonstrated sometime next year and shipped at the very end). This works differently to that described above. Yes, it won’t respect your feature-tree/history, allowing you complete freedom (within the usual topological limitations inherent with all these tools) to edit your geometry as you see fit, in a dynamic manner. What’s interesting to note is that the system doesn’t destroy the history tree either, but rather adds an additional feature for each ‘explicit’ operation at the end of the tree, affording you some control and editability.
