Following in the footsteps of its CAD brethren, Autodesk Inc. is beefing up its story around visualization capabilities—the idea being to drive mass adoption of 3D as a means to share key product and prototype information.
Autodesk completed the acquisition of Opticore, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Design Communication, based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Opticore offers high-end, real-time visualization software that leaders in the automotive industry, including BMW and Ford, others many others, have been using to illustrate their design intent without having to build costly prototypes. Opticore rounds out Autodesk’s visualization offering with a higher end focus, accompanying its existing Showcase tool, which helps industrial designers easily create a representation of their works-in-progress that can be used for presentations and design reviews with non-engineers and CAD specialists.
Autodesk officials said they will continue to invest in the development and support of the Opticore technology.
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Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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