IronCAD Releases The 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite

IronCAD Releases The 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite

Latest Update To The IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite Brings Powerful

Enhancements And New 3rd Party Integrations To Customers.

ATLANTA, GA. November 19th, 2013 – IronCAD, LLC, the leading provider of design productivity solutions, today announced the release of the 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite (DCS). This new release delivers new productivity and collaboration capabilities that reduce the overall time in the design process and enhance data sharing among the thousands of companies and engineers worldwide using IronCAD's Design Solutions.

The new 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite of products brings not only customer driven improvements in the design capabilities, but enhances the way customers can collaborate within design groups and with their customers. Users can share data between the IronCAD suite of products that can be leveraged at any level within an organization as well as online with the GrabCAD community and online customer projects. Using the integration with KeyShot, customers can quickly and clearly communicate designs in bid proposals and technical documentation shortening the collaboration cycle while delivering to customers' expectations.

Key highlights provided in the IronCAD DCS 2014 include:

Delivering Productivity

• Intelligent Editing of Multiple Part Features: It's common in design to make changes where multiple features that are on the same part or across different parts must adjust by the same amount. With the new capabilities added, users can simply select all the features to be changed and pull a single handle to perform the modification, reducing the need to build complex parametric relations.
• Simple Replication of Parts/Assemblies: Patterns and related features (i.e. links) are used throughout the design to create multiple features in various locations. Typically other parts will be generated to align to these feature locations. In the 2014 IronCAD DCS release, users will be presented with on drop options to replicate the parts/assemblies along these feature locations making it simple to rapidly place these objects in the proper location.
• Behavior Driven Activation of Features: Often users wish to define specific ways in which an object is modified when first applied as a feature or new object in a design. Now users can set specific handles on drop to be active allowing users the ability to directly input driving values. This reduces the time involved to edit features and provides a simpler way to set the desired default editing behaviors on objects.
• Automatic Constraint Connections on Drop: In some designs, it is required to define the way in which objects move in relation to other objects. New intelligent options have been added to automatically define these relationships at the time an object is dropped onto an existing object. A simple example would be an automatic coaxial constraint being applied to a fastener dropped into an existing hole location.
• Intelligent Sizing Handles: When sizing geometry, users may find it difficult to precisely modify the geometry to locations on other objects (such locations may be hard to reach by cursor location in the 3D environment) or they may not understand the rules that define how an object can resize to these locations. New behaviors have been added to allow intelligence to be defined on handles so that they can be quickly resized to these exact locations in other objects by a simple right-click command. Users can simply hit any point near the desired location and they are confident that geometry is precisely sized correctly.
• Re-engineer with Ease from Existing Geometry Data Including Point Cloud Data: Facet based objects and scanned point cloud data is becoming a common utility in the re-engineering process. IronCAD Solutions support the import of these often extremely large data sets in an optimized working environment while providing quick creation tools to recreate geometry referring to this data.

Enhanced Collaboration and Sharing

• Fast, Easy, Accurate Visuals with KeyShot: Users can now quickly transfer and update designs directly into Keyshot to use their award winning rendering capabilities to quickly produce realistic visuals for communication in bidding, final presentation, and technical documentation of products.
• Online Collaboration and Sharing with GrabCAD: The IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite today provides real collaboration by enabling users to communicate design data seamlessly throughout their design process within their organization. The GrabCAD Integration is a natural extension for our solutions that offers customers the ability to directly share files and projects within their online design groups and with the GrabCAD community at a simple touch of a button.
• Direct Access to Components on TraceParts: Users typically require standard or purchased parts to be used in their designs. With the TraceParts integration, customers have access to hundreds of supplier catalogs and over 100 million CAD models and product datasheets suitable for the design, purchasing, manufacturing and maintenance processes.
• Live Design Modifications between Rhino and IRONCAD: IronCAD has had a long standing connection with Rhino to provide the ability to make use of Rhinos strong surfacing capabilities. User can edit design features from IRONCAD in Rhino that may require more complex surface alterations. These edits will be automatically update in IRONCAD while maintaining existing relations to these modified features. This capability has been extended to support the latest versions of both IRONCAD and Rhino giving user the most recent advances to create and edit their designs.
• Enhanced Process Between Design and Collaboration: IRONCAD COMPOSE is a free product that allows users to deliver their standard components in a lightweight and IP protected way that can be easily dragged and dropped together to automatically configure products. Often it may be necessary to make additional design changes to these configurations to meet customers' requirements. Now users can load designs originally created by customers in COMPOSE into IRONCAD to automatically convert these to editable precise design geometry. This allows users the ability to make the desired design modifications easily on the customer configured files and quickly send the results back to the customer for validation.

In addition to these key improvements the 2014 DCS focused heavily on additional customer driven improvements and the quality and stability of the product. The 2014 DCS also includes the latest versions of ACIS™ & Parasolids™ modeling kernels, Techsoft 3D HOOPS™ Visualize Platform, and Spatial's 3D Interop translators to provide seamless data translation with standard and native industry CAD formats.

The 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite is available for immediate download for via the IronCAD website at www.ironcad.com/download.

"IronCAD is committed to delivering true productivity through performance, flexibility, and collaboration and this release confirms our commitment." commented Cary O'Connor, IronCAD's VP of Marketing, "Customer's now have more power in the design making it faster to create, modify, and finish the design tasks. In addition, they can extend their collaboration with the many new enhancements and integrations to improve the communication process among their customers leading to higher customer satisfaction and shortened time to market." he continued.

About IronCAD
Based in Atlanta, GA, IronCAD is a leading provider of 3D Design Productivity Solutions that deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction and productivity. Solutions that can be used either standalone or as complementary collaboration solutions which can be used throughout the enterprise. Its flagship product IRONCAD has won many industry awards for its innovative technology and leads the industry in its ease of use and design productivity. IronCAD products are being used successfully by thousands of customers worldwide. For more information on IronCAD, call 1-800-339-7304 or visit www.ironcad.com.

KeyShot, IronCAD Integrated for 3D Visuals 

IRVINE, CA & ATLANTA, GA, Nov 22, 2013 - Luxion, makers ofKeyShot and a leading developer of advanced rendering and lighting technology, with IronCAD, LLC, a leading provider of design productivity solutions, today announced the integration between KeyShot and IronCAD, bringing the single-click transfer of IronCAD data into KeyShot along with the ability to keep model geometry updated to streamline the 3D visual creation process. 

This tight integration between KeyShot and IronCAD, featuring Luxion's LiveLinking technology, allows IronCAD users to develop their design within IronCAD, export the data to KeyShot, maintaining assembly structure and all appearances, while continuing to work on the design inside IronCAD. As the design development proceeds, users can select to update the model inside KeyShot from the IronCAD interface with the click of a button without disrupting previous applied materials, views or animations set up within KeyShot.  New integration between KeyShot and IronCAD provides users faster creation of 3D visuals.   

 

This new integration both compliments and bridges the modeling flexibility available within IronCAD and the rendering flexibility within KeyShot to deliver an efficient workflow to design engineers. With the installation of the 2014 or later versions of the IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite of products, users can launch KeyShot directly from the IronCAD interface without the need to export to another file format. Options include the ability to Export the IronCAD model directly into KeyShot, update the model within KeyShot and export a KeyShot .bip file without KeyShot installed. Color assignments at the part and assembly level are maintained while assembly structure and camera views are transferred accurately into KeyShot.    

"The KeyShot integration is a valuable extension for the IronCAD community, extending the capability to quickly develop high quality visual representations of their products," commented Cary O’Connor, VP marketing at IronCAD. "KeyShot is providing a simple to use, high quality product that ties perfectly to IronCAD’s commitment to deliver increased productivity to our users and we are excited to bring this integration to our customers," he continued.   

"IronCAD is an incredibly flexible 3D modeling application combining both parametric and explicit modeling in the same interface." says Thomas Teger, vice president of products and strategy at Luxion. "With the new KeyShot integration with IronCAD, users can extend that flexibility with the ability to quickly create stunning visuals from their IronCAD data while continuing to refine their design."   

Pricing & Availability 

The KeyShot Integration for IronCAD will be available free of charge and is included in the IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite release 2014 and newer.

About Luxion

Luxion is a leading developer of advanced 3D rendering and lighting technology. KeyShot is the first real-time ray tracing and global illumination program for 3D rendering and animation that uses a physically correct rendering engine certified by the CIE (International Commission on Illumination). Addressing the visualization needs of designers, engineers, marketing professionals, photographers and CG specialists, KeyShot breaks down the complexity of creating photographic images and animations from 3D digital data. Luxion’s customer list includes many of the Fortune 1000 product manufacturers and major industrial design companies including Chrysler, Fossil, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Procter & Gamble, IDEO and SMART Design.

Visit http://keyshot.com for more information.

About ABISSE

ABISSE, a subsidiary of SGA Group, is a Cegid Business Partner and first French reseller of  SIEMENS PLM Software. ABISSE ’s knowledge allows manufacturers to successfully integrate mechanical design software such as Solid Edge 2D/3D CAD, NX for advanced design, CAM software such as NXCAM, 3 and 5-axis milling, turning 2 and 4 axis turning / milling, wire EDM and calculation software such as Solid Edge Simulation and FEMAP. The ABISSE mission is to enable the French industrial enterprises and large organizations to stand permanently on their markets by improving their products and increase productivity.

Visit http://abisse.com for more information.  

How IronCAD's Hybrid Modeling Compares With Synchronous Technology In Solid Edge

By Scott Wertel, July 15, 2013

From the blue gradient of the background to the uniformity of the ribbon bar, there is something eerily familiar to every MCAD software. I have said that learning new CAD software is like learning a new language: the vocabulary and grammar may be different, but the concepts are the same. The second language seems different, but similarities become evident with the third and fourth languages.

SpaceClaim was probably the last software vendor to make the CAD world rethink the possibility of direct modeling. The concept was hardly new. Several vendors have been working at adding direct editing functions to their history-only modelers. PTC's CoCreate had employed the technology since the 1990s. Siemens PLM has had their Synchronous Technology, Autodesk their Fusion, and Dassault Systemes their V6 - along with lesser players.

While some vendors busily wrote distinct applications, others merged technology through a hybrid approach. Of the hybrids, the most notable ones are Solid Edge and NX from Siemens PLM that use a combination of synchronous and ordered environments within the same part file. Lesser known is IRONCAD, the makers of the IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite, who began developing hybrid software in 1998, years earlier than any other vendor.

In this article, I'm going to dissect some of the main features of Solid Edge's Synchronous Technology and compare them with IronCAD. I think you'll find the similarities remarkable.

Two Modes, a Single File
When Siemens PLM added Synchronous Technology to Solid Edge, the first two releases required users to decide right at the beginning of a new design whether to model the part with traditional techniques (ordered) or to use synchronous techniques; a part could not have both ordered and synchronous features. Subsequent releases fixed the limitation, and now both techniques can be used at the same time.

IronCAD is similar to the later releases of Solid Edge. It allows parts to be started in structured mode (equivalent to "ordered" in Solid Edge) or innovative mode (somewhat similar to "synchronous") - we don't have to decide.

• IronCAD's structured parts allow the traditional feature history to be created, along with direct edit modifications, which appear in the history order.
• On the other side, IronCAD's innovative parts have the unique capability of allowing both features and direct edit modifications to mix together, regardless of the feature history order or dependencies.

Both modes use the same modeling tools in creating geometry. Because IronCAD's scenes allow for multiple parts to exist in the same file, it is possible to have mix of structured and innovative parts within the same scene.

I have yet to come across a practical application that requires one mode rather than the other, and so I am able to add as much or as little intelligence to the design as needed - regardless of the mode active at the time of geometry creation. It really gets down to the speed and number of steps to complete specific operations for a given design, where some need to be parametric while others are probably better off allowing interactive changes (see figure 1).

Let me summarize again IronCAD's two modes:

Innovative design allows us to directly manipulate the parts independent of history and constraints, while maintaining unaffected or intact feature history. It is essential for conceptual modeling or when unanticipated design changes occur late in the detail design stage.

Structured design allows us to build rigid, feature-dependent parts with embedded design intent. This proves more control over future changes using a predictable structure in the design. Direct edits can be performed at this level, but they will appear as features in the history tree.

         

Figure 1: Innovate (at left) vs structured (at right) feature trees for the U-shaped block (at top)

Before I go to the next section, it may be worthwhile to mention how we can create features in IronCAD. One way is to drag and drop them from the Catalog browser, which contains many starting elements, both positive (extrusions) and negative (holes). Because each starting element is defined by a sketch, it can be edited to a different shape. The other way is to start with a sketch and then apply modeling actions on it, as with traditional MCAD software.

Implied Use of Sketches
Look closely at the feature trees in figure 1: in both modes, the fourth feature in each list is an extrude, yet the feature was created in IronCAD without a sketch. To do this, I selected the face loop of the U-shaped block as the profile, and then extruded it upwards to create the thicker block. This is a use of an implied sketch in IronCAD.

Solid Edge ST would call these areas "regions." IronCAD does not have a specific name for the sketch-less profiles, but has no difficulty finding enclosed areas to extrude as watertight volumes. If necessary, I could edit the cross-section of the feature in a 2D sketch plane, as if the features were originally formed with a sketch.

Parameterization on Demand
Like Solid Edge ST, IronCAD doesn't require you to apply parameters, dimensions, or constraints until they become a necessary part of the design. Up until when parameters are added, the geometry can be modified by pulling and pushing on three types of control handles:

• Size box edits shapes based on their bounding boxes
• Profile handles modify sketches outside of sketch mode
• B-rep handles edits imported models and combined features

Tip: For direct modifications, press F10 when selecting faces to toggle the TriBall. This UI device lets us push and pull directly on geometry faces of native and imported data, allowing more positional control in direct modifications of geometry. (Solid Edge allows pushing and pulling of faces through the use of its Steering Wheel.)

When pushing and pulling IronCAD handles, user-defined distances can be entered, similar to Solid Edge (see figures 2 and 3). Unlike Solid Edge, however, the default is that the distance entered is not the distance to move the control handle; rather is the final thickness of the geometry. This is known as the "size box" of the geometry. I can, however, right-click to specify the overall distance (see figure 4). For custom shapes, driving dimensions can be placed on cross-sections.

 

Figure 2: Feature selected, and control handles shown

 

Figure 3: Control handle selected, and inputting dimensions

 

Figure 4: Dragging the control handle to move the surface

Live Rules Not Needed
The powerful abilities of Synchronous Technology are based on logic defined by "Live Rules" in Solid Edge. IronCAD has rules for direct edits that can be turned on; I'll discuss them later. The best way I can explain from where IronCAD gets its intelligence is like this: although geometry is attached as a feature to a part, IronCAD's multi-part environment means that it can treat features independently.

In the Innovative Part environment there are no restrictions from its history and every feature is an independent element, which can be edited independently at any time in the design process. IronCAD is very forgiving when it comes to non-manifold solids and overlapping protrusions. It can do this, because it uses two kernels; in this case, Parasolid is not good at non-manifolds and so IronCAD instead uses ACIS. For instance, a feature that appears early in the tree can be edited so as to create unwanted gaps in the solid or to protrude past other solid geometry. (Other CAD programs would try to resolve the overlap into a single face or solid.)

IronCAD not only does this, but then keeps the definition of the feature independent. I verified the accuracy of overlapping geometry by using IronCAD's Center of Gravity tool: even when features overlapped, the mass did not increase. (The mass is calculated from the envelope of the entire solid, not the summation of the masses.) This capability allows IronCAD to have features that can refer to, and depend on, other features before and after the history order.

 

Figure 5: Editing the size box of a feature has no effect on other features in the Innovative Environment

Figure 5 shows what happens when editing features built in the Innovative Part environment. Without history constraining other features, only the feature being edited is changed. On the other hand, when the same edit is performed in the Structured Part environment, the entire part is shorted by amount of the gap shown, and no gap is created.

Editing Imported Geometry
Up to this point, I've discussed only the creation and editing of geometry native to IronCAD, geometry created either with Intellishapes from the built-in catalog or from sketch-based extrusions. Either way, intelligence is built into the geometry making it easy for IronCAD to place control handles and parameters.

(Just before I go on to describe this, let me detour to talk how direct editing occurs on native files. The general practice is to start with a feature-based model and then directly select a face on which to perform a direct edit)

So, what about modifying imported geometry? This is a function for which Solid Edge ST is well suited, as it lets us modify imported geometry just like native geometry. Well, this can be done in IronCAD, too.

The next series of figures show the steps that take a fully featured solid into a single B-rep solid and back again. (B-rep is short for "boundary representation," also known as a dumb solid.) The combine option is normally used to reduce the feature history from which direct edits can be made.

 

Figure 6: Example IronCAD part with full features

 

Figure 7: Features combined into a single B-rep feature

Figure 6 shows the model as created natively in IronCAD. Several features are selected from the feature tree and the Tools menu to combine shapes. The resulting combination of shapes is shown as a B-rep feature, yet can be anywhere in the feature tree, as shown in figure 7. Depending on the location of the shapes to be combined, the B-rep appears in the history at a location determined by the system; regeneration of the part geometry results in geometry that's identical to the directly modified result.

If multiple B-rep shapes are generated (due to multiple direct modeling operations), then the shapes may be mixed with other native features in the history tree. It is important to understand that they don't need be at the beginning of the history, nor consecutive with each other, as in some other MCAD programs.

 

Figure 8: All features combined into a single B-rep

Figure 8 shows the model as imported geometry. For our example, we took the original feature based model and combined all the features into a single b-rep to illustrate an imported model representation. As mentioned earlier, this is not a normal practice and direct edits are normally applied to individually selected faces where the system will determine which features to combine automatically for you.

 

Figure 9: Editing dumb geometry (B-rep) using direct modification

Figure 9 shows the model converted to (or imported as) a B-rep feature. The solid can be modified using direct manipulation, as IronCAD attaches control handles to individual faces. Adjacent and tangent surfaces adjust to maintain the solid as watertight, based on the selected set of surfaces being edited.

I found initially that multi-selecting surfaces and editing them as a group results in different solutions. However, by opening the Property Browser tab, I found the AutoSelection option, such as coplanar, to control what I want in my selection set.

 

Figure 10: Converting B-rep geometry into Intellishapes

Figure 11: An extrude cut feature added back to the solid

Figure 10 shows feature recognition being done on an as-needed basis by selecting a group of faces and then converting them to an Intellishape through the in-context menu, as shown in figure 11. With IronCAD, there is little reason to have a feature recognizer run on import; for example, the slot on the right was converted into an extrude cut. The cross-section of was recreated and the feature can be edited as if it was a native IronCAD feature.

 

Figure 12: Hole defined as an extrude, with similar holes defined as a pattern

Figure 12 shows converting a large hole (selected on the left) to an extrude cut feature. When converting holes to features, IronCAD is smart enough to search for similar geometry and create patterns from the features.

At the same time, a pattern feature is created to define the large hole on the right in figure 12. If one of the smaller holes is selected and converted to a feature, then IronCAD would include the remaining five holes as a pattern, which is created at the same time as the hole feature.

Conclusion
IronCAD automatically determines which features are necessary to perform operations, as well as the resulting B-rep, while inserting them into the history order. As it can be difficult for users new to direct editing to determine which 3D elements are going to be edited, IronCAD highlights the features affected by direct editing prior to the modification; this lets them see whether they want to proceed or not.

Because the process is automatic, users don't need to make a determination between direct and history, as the system does this for them. (In the upcoming 2014 release, if direct edits can modify a feature or sketch, then IronCAD will do that instead of the direct edit).

Now that several CAD vendors have joined the direct-editing parade, and with Siemens PLM with its Synchronous Technology at the front of it with the power in Live Rules and the ability to create hybrid synchronous-ordered models), it is a good time to remember IronCAD software has been around much longer than Synchronous Technology. IronCAD had developed its own hybrid modeling approach - pretty much under the radar.

If you are a mechanical designer building custom equipment or dealing with imported geometry, know that IronCAD is a mature option among MCAD offerings. 

About the Author

Scott Wertel is a Configuration Manager in the defense and aerospace industry and provides freelance design services to a variety of interests. Scott has spent decades following the engineering software industry due to his "unnatural affinity" for CAD and uses that insight to best position his employer and clients for change. Scott graduated from the Milwaukee School of Engineering and is a licensed professional mechanical engineer in the state of Arizona.

Article reprinted by permission from 

 Source: http://www.ironcad.com/index.php/products/industry-articles/26-press-articles/202-ironcad-s-hybrid-modeling-vs-synchronous-technology

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