Comments on: Can Internet Change CAD?

By: olegshilovitsky

olegshilovitsky — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:12:01 +0000

…and yes… solution like spaceclaim have certain option to help. this is big plus. but there is disadvantages to have mediator (like Spaceclaime). Will be better to have natively in all CAD systems. -Oleg

By: olegshilovitsky

olegshilovitsky — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:10:19 +0000

Cris,Thanks for comment. I don’t think CAD format is a big deal, but nobody is interested to have it. But I think, that model transparency IS a big deal. Combined with data management transparency it can improve significantly capability to manage discussions you are talking about. My point was -increased data and model transparency combined with availability to improve CAD in the future, allows to engineers to focus more on design and less on translation and mails around CAD. -Oleg

By: chris

chris — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:11:35 +0000

Are CAD formats really that big a deal? If they were then Profecency (how ever it is spelled) would not have failed… I’m not saying that it would be nice to have a universal CAD format. I’m just being practical and saying that it will never happen, as the CAD companies have no interest in it happening. Besides haven’t people just figured out how to deal with this issue? Let’s say you are an Inventor user and I am a Pro/ENGINEER user and we are working on a design of a machine together. We have defined clear interfaces and we have defined a way to manage space allocation, so why do we need to common format? We also must likely email back and forth some sort of simple images marked up… so again why do we need a common CAD format?

What if the internet could allow us to capture our discussions within each of our CAD systems no matter what we used as a format? What if we were discussing say a mounting hole and you could see this discussion in Inventor and I could see this discussion in Pro/ENGINEER? Now we can both filter based on what we care about, the mounting hole. If people really care about a nuetral CAD format then wouldn’t it be cool if linked to this discussion was a SpaceClaim model of the combined assembly and linked to each reply of the discussion we were having was a 3D mockup of what we both wanted (geometry modified in SpaceClaim to define what was desired). This way each person could quickly define what they need, just push pull… Then the other person could respond and implement in the their design tool.