Your Guide to Mid-Range CAD 9-21-98

September 21, 1998 Design News

Your Guide to Mid-Range CAD

Shopping for a new CAD package can be confusing. Here, gathered in one forum, software companies explain what sets their products apart.

Edited by Paul Teague, Chief Editor, and Laurie Peach, Associate Editor

There's been an explosion of so-called mid-range CAD products in the last few years, as software developers have responded to engineers' yearning for affordable design tools. But with so many products to choose from, how can engineers discern the important differences?

Design News invited mid-range-CAD suppliers (those with products in the $3,000 to $5,000 range) to tell you how they differ from the competition. We asked them to submit a narrative that answered three questions: What one feature do engineers most need in a CAD system? How does their software address that need? And, how is their product different from the competition? Their answers are on the following pages.

Additionally, we invited two well-known CAD research firms to give you their thoughts on what to look for in CAD. Their reports follow, too.

Finally, we asked readers their own thoughts on the most important attributes of a CAD system. You'll find a special table on their responses.

If you are looking for a mid-range CAD system, read this section of Design News carefully. Have the vendors really differentiated their products? You be the judge.

Click here for a .pdf file comparing the software (need Adobe Acrobat to view).

ASHLAR:

Vellum Solids integrates hybrid modeling techniques

Jesse Luis, Product Marketing Manager, Ashlar, Inc.

Q: What one feature do design engineers most need in a CAD system?

A: Hybrid modeling.

Q: How does Vellum Solids from Ashlar address this need?

A: Vellum Solids brings high-end surface and solid modeling to the desktop. This allows the designer to choose between stitching, feature-based, and face-based operations, depending on the existing relationships. This modeler combines the power of wireframe, surface, and solids through three integrated hybrid modeling techniques:

1. The first allows designers to create a solid by stitching a collection of surfaces. Designers use Vellum Solids' extensive curve and surface modeling tools to define complex free-form shapes. Then using a variety of surface trimming functions, they may relimit surfaces to form closed shapes. Designers choose from over 18 surface types that include skins, covers, nets, blends, extrusions, sweeps, and tangent surfaces, as well as a variety of trimming operations that relimit surfaces to imprinted curves, surfaces, or solids. In addition, Ashlar recognizes that designers work with multiple software applications. Vellum Solid translators can stitch collections of surfaces into solids, then automatically recognize features and recreate history-based relationships.

2. The second technique exploits feature-based technology for quickly adding and removing material with predefined features. This allows a design engineer to rapidly create shapes by adding and removing material from a base solid. Vellum Solids provides a variety of methods to create base solids (primitives, extrusions, sweeps, lathed profiles, and stitched solids). Solid operations include tools for shelling, holes, bosses, chamfers, constant and variable radius blends, cutouts, and protrusions. Features are parametrically editable to allow rapid design changes. Most desktop solid modelers restrict designers to only this feature-based approach.

3. Finally, hybrid modeling includes local face operations that allow the designer to work independently of how the part was constructed. The designer can locally modify a face by moving, offsetting, and applying draft angles. In addition, the designer can remove faces in a model and automatically heal the neighboring surfaces over the removed face. The remove-face tool is great for removing holes, slots, and fillets from models brought in from other systems.

Q: How does Vellum Solids differ from other mid-range CAD packages?

A: Our hybrid modeling allows Vellum Solids to model parts our competition cannot, such as those for airplanes and automobiles, and free-form shapes common in the industrial design communities. With Vellum Solids, you no longer have to change your design process to "feature based only" to take advantage of high-end 3D modeling. Design engineers can choose the method or combination of methods best suited for modeling complex parts.

Vellum Solids brings the high-end CAD functionality of hybrid modeling to designers and engineers at a fraction of the cost, and incorporates the usability for which Ashlar is famous.

AUTODESK:

Mechanical Desktop offers flexibility

Dominic Gallello, Vice President, MCAD Market Group, Autodesk, Inc.

Q: What one feature do design engineers most need in a CAD system?

A: Flexibility--the ability to use both 2D and 3D tools.

Q: How does Mechanical Desktop from Autodesk address this?

A: Autodesk built a system whose biggest feature is its "hybrid flexibility"--tools you need, when you need them. This is a system with powerful 3D solids and surface modeling integrated together, as well as a complete 2D environment that can be used to start or end the project. It gives Desktop its broad industry appeal for machinery, electromechanical, mold and die, jigs and fixtures, and consumer products design such as medical.

The benefits of this hybrid approach have been dramatic for our customers. Examples include Hirotech, a maker of automated assembly lines for the car industry in Japan. They reduced surface profile generation to design-handling machines from 14 days to one. Scivac, a Silicon Valley maker of machines to manufacture disks for the computer hard drive industry, cut their engineering cycle time in half.

Depending on the task at hand and the preferences of the individual, they may choose to use a combination of 2D and 3D. Much of engineering is not completely new design, but in fact "tweaking" designs based upon legacy or supplier data that has to be used to accomplish the task. At Mueller Weingarten in Germany, the largest manufacturer of hydraulic presses for the car industry, designers do most of their designs in 2D but utilize 3D when interference detection is required. HMS in Detroit designs their assembly machinery for stamping dies in 3D solids to get the benefits of parametrics, interference, and automatic assembly generation. Still, 2D is required to rapidly create 2D layouts of machinery wiring and hydraulic lines, a process that would be too slow and costly to do in solids.

Q: How does Mechanical Desktop differ from other mid-range CAD packages?

A: Most companies are selling a "solids only" system. We offer our customer the next natural step in cycle time reduction, hybrid flexibility. For the companies mentioned above and many others, the hybrid approach works while "solids only" does not.

BAYSTATE:

CADKEY 98 gives users freedom to use the tools they need

Robert Bean, President and CEO, Baystate Technologies

Q: What one feature do design engineers most need in a CAD system?

A: Freedom of choice and user control.

Q: How does CADKEY from Baystate Technologies address this?

A: For more than a decade, CADKEY's 3D modeling environment has enabled complex industry applications, such as advanced surface modeling, reverse engineering, and intricate mold design. While parametric solid modelers only reference data from other CAD systems, CADKEY can edit and verify imported 3D models or 2D drawings, giving it the home-court advantage in "design for manufacturing" applications.

Baystate Technologies has also introduced the CADKEY DESIGN SUITE, an all-inclusive implementation of industrial-strength CAD functionality which combines CADKEY 98 with FastSOLID advanced solid modeling, the complex freeform surface modeling of FastSURF, and the mechanical productivity power of DRAFT-PAK, a live parts library.

CADKEY 98 and CADKEY DESIGN SUITE provide a full range of data translators that allow engineers to easily communicate with their customers and suppliers. Both products incorporate a new STEP^TM Translator and AutoCADr R14 File Format support with their existing industrial strength data translators. These include IGES, DXF, STL, CADL, VRML, and the SAT file format for importing or exporting 2D/3D data to other ACIS-enabled CAD/CAE/CAM applications. Baystate's IGES bi-directional translator supports all IGES surface types.

CADKEY was the first 3D CAD system for the PC. It has focused on helping design and manufacturing companies leave "flatland," otherwise known as the world of 2D. The powerful usability of CADKEY's task-oriented menu system lets you concentrate on the job at hand, not the mechanics of the CAD system. Dedicated solely to the mechanical CAD marketplace, CADKEY software development efforts focus on incorporating market- and customer-driven product enhancements to address diverse applications from consumer products to medical equipment.

Q: How does CADKEY differ from other mid-range CAD packages?

A: Unlike other PC-CAD products, CADKEY's high-end, hybrid modeling environment empowers the CAD automation process with a big picture approach. From 2D design and drafting to 3D modeling techniques--solids, wireframe, and surfacing--the CADK