Core77

Conveniently located near to Core's Portland office, Autodesk's Manufacturing Solutions Headquarters in Lake Oswego, OR opened its doors yesterday to a dozen or so CAD nerds and bloggers (including Core77's), for a preview day slightly reminiscent of high school. Dubbed "Manufacturing Tech Day," the schedule had us herding from room to room for a series of seven hour-long sessions in which the product leads for Alias, Inventor, AutoCAD Mechanical, and a few other packages sprinted us through the newest bits of each program for 2010. Here's what we gleaned for the Industrial Design community.


ALIAS


Yes, it really runs on a Mac. We told you that already, but here it is in picture form. That's the Mac. And that's Alias. And it only crashed once.

Improved interoperability between Alias and Inventor. Also something we mentioned before, but it was nice to see another live demo. With the compressed timeline, we only got a few minutes of Alias + Inventor interchange, but it's reasonably impressive stuff. The demo consisted of free-form modification of the vent shapes on the helmet model above, as a set of Alias surfaces, then switching over to Inventor and watching the thoroughly detailed solid model update with the new shapes, including fillets and draft. This is similar to the passing of information down the stack in solid modelers with surface functionality, such as Pro/E and SolidWorks, but with Alias' surfacing capability. There are always limitations to how much you can stress a system like this, but it looks at first glance to be about as robust as a single parametric modeler approach.


Better integration of polygon surfaces. Scanned 3D data can now be imported as polygon mesh and used directly in model creation. The demo above shows a polygon surface at left, a native Alias NURBS surface at right, and a loft between them. Neat for exploring alternate takes on existing products, or reverse enginee...er...I mean "investigative analysis."

more goodies after the jump...

INVENTOR


Aggressive incorporation of simulation technologies. Having acquired Moldflow in May of last year, Autodesk has started integrating certain moldflow analysis tools to Inventor, along with a pretty good entry-level set of FEM tools. The goal, they will enthusiastically tell you, is to provide as much information as possible about the real-life behavior of a molded part, before any tooling gets created. This constitutes the foundation of Autodesk's "digital prototyping" message, in which they're selling Inventor as not just a modeling tool, but a decent design validation one as well.

Keen readers with some experience in plastic part design may have some misgivings about putting tool-design capabilities (stock mold bases, gate location wizards, plastic characteristics databases, etc.) in the hands of Industrial Designers , but the product managers suggest this will reduce the amount of back-and-forth between the designer and the tooler, since a suggested tool design can now be provided along with the part design. Sounds reasonable, we're just a touch worried that some small consultancies may decide to do the whole thing themselves, and fuck it up royally. Or not -- for simple parts like those depicted above, it may just be that easy.

One cool feature of the plastics database is that every one of the 8000+ polymers comes with recyclability and energy-usage characteristics displayed prominently in the dialog box. "Green CAD" has been a weird term to wrap our brains around since we first heard it, but if it manifests like this, we want to see more.

Some useful, crowd-sourced super-features specifically for plastic part design. A lot of the tedium of plastic part design comes from the repetitive modeling of standard feature types -- screw bosses, grills, tongue-and-grooves, etc. -- and the latest Inventor release offers some robust, customizable "super-features" that turn these into single step operations. The functions were a response to feedback from clients and beta testers in Asia and South America, and have the added bonus of replacing five or six or seven undifferentiable Cuts and Extrudes with a single more descriptively named "Grill" or "Boss" feature, which should make the inevitable feature fixes considerably less headachey.


IN DEVELOPMENT


Hints of some amazing digital sketching tools. This one's so new they don't even have a name for it yet; not one they'd tell us, anyway. The screenshot above is not a scanned paper sketch, it's a digital sketching package currently in development that includes a pile of features aimed at making digitizer-based sketching as close to the paper version as possible. The selection of brushes we saw was impressively broad and customizable, and as you can see, mimic the mark-making qualities of their physical counterparts pretty closely. The "paper" has a bit of "tooth" to it (adjustable of course), and wet media brushes behave realistically, giving partial coverage with the first stroke, and getting believably opaque as it is worked further.

Sketched lines are moderately editable, meaning they can be drawn and then adjusted in length and shape. Autodesk reps assured us they were nearing their goal of granting the ability to endlessly modify every stroke after laying it down, with an interface more powerful and flexible than current vector-based programs like Illustrator.