A short time to market has always been an important weapon for consumer products, and in recent years, this has increasingly been the case for industrial products as well. The faster the design process moves, the faster the costs of development and production can be recouped. Not a bad prospect in times of shrinking margins. However, as a result of the increasing global competition, the pressure to further shorten the time to market is increasing. Added to that is the fact that the Product Life Cycle for consumer products is becoming steadily shorter. A new product barely reaches the market before a follow-up is already being announced. SolidWorks is anticipating that trend by adding powerful, specific functions that offer focussed support for structural engineers, but also marketing and sales departments, in accelerating the development of new products.

An important phase in the creation process for a product or machine is the processing of feedback on the initial designs from the customer and/or sales/marketing department. Being able to present the most true-to-life 3D images possible at an early stage plays a crucial role in this process. To help you achieve this, SolidWorks includes special functionality to create photorealistic images (artist’s impressions) from the 3D CAD environment.
SolidWorks offers options such as the ability to add depth-of-field to images to make components in the 3D less sharp or, indeed, to add optimum focus to components. This function is especially useful to accentuate certain parts of a product or machine. This creates the impression that the product already exists and that what they are looking at is a photograph taken of the product.

Photoview 260 offers you the option to automatically add realistic shadows based on the selected position of the “light source”. In this way, for example, you can create the perfect image of the position of the object in the location at which it will eventually be placed. With the render options of SolidWorks, “virtual product presentations” are made considerably “more true-to-life”.

Last week I had one of the monthly meetings of the participation council at my children’s school. To prepare I received seven documents in .doc format. While reading them I was disturbed by the fact that there was no consistency in the documents although most of them came from the same organization. Different fonts were used, different sizes and different styles. I asked the school’s IT responsible, who happened to be present, why they were not using standard templates and guidelines provided by someone from the central administration.

The answer he gave made me clear once more that not all functionality in Word is that intuitive and has to be trained and the usage has to be guided. Check for yourself: do you know how to set up a good document template with styles for paragraph, headings, lists, index, tables, etc. If you do, how many other people do in your surroundings?

Still the argument “our software is just as easy as Word(processing) or email” is used often to express how intuitive the software is. Apparently we consider the fact that we can write text on a computer the way we – or our parents – did on a typewriter is an argument that word processing software is easy to use. (For those younger than thirty: a typewriter is a kind of PC without display and spell checking but with a built-in printer). Out of curiosity I counted the number of available menu commands in Word 2010 and I came to a number roughly over 1600. That explained my experience a couple of years ago when I found only three sentences in a 248 page book about Word, looking for instructions on linking documents in documents.

What is the relation to our business with SolidWorks? I know that we also are guilty as well of using the “as-easy-as-word” cliché in demos, webinars and even in some brochures in the past. What we mean by that is that we can show how to create a simple part to a newbie and learn it in 10 minutes. In that sense it is very intuitive. Also, users can look in the menu for commands, find icons that promise a certain function and the context help function is available the same way as in Word.

On the complexity level we see some differences. SolidWorks has only a little over 750 menu commands, so it should be easier. So why are we training users several days while in the meantime most Word users work with Word without any proper training? The reason is that we want SolidWorks user to work with their system in an advanced way. A SolidWorks workstation will reach its maximum potential is someone is behind it that knows how to design a proper model, knows how to work with parametric variations, knows how to assemble large structures, all to reach a high productivity level.

Why don’t many Word users do the same? Actually I don’t know, but I guess it is due to a common misunderstand that Word skills is a commodity. At Cadmes we spent time setting up templates for Word and Powerpoint and wrote a guideline document how to use them for our corporate standard, just as we advise our customers to do with engineering software. Also we implemented Office templates into SolidWorks Enterprise PDM for our own use and linked it to SharePoint. To achieve this it requires also skills and training and then we see that as easy as Word is a matter of perspective.

I’m open for other views on this topic.

Bas Koomen

While the pc had his 30th birthday in August, an new era is already started in which we all be working on mobile devices. When I look around I see colleagues and friends who embrace this technology in a pace never seen before. The very effective and clean interfaces make it possible that even my 2 year old son can play angry birds flawless, and search for and startup his favorite music clips. This makes me curious how to use this technology in an engineering environment.

Last year, a few months after the release of the Ipad 1, I spoke to people from the R&D department of SolidWorks and shared some thoughts about these devices. Bottom-line was that these devices were a dream come true for the people on R&D who are responsible for the User Interface but a hell on earth for the programmers. WHY? do you probably think. The problem of these devices is that the internal memory (not the storage memory which is most of the times published) is very low compared with a workstation we now work on with SolidWorks. This lack of memory will throw programmers a decade back in time concerning memory effective programming. This is mainly the reason why there is for the moment not a serious 3D modeling application available. But this will change, probably faster than we expect. All of these devices are developed with working online as one of the most important features. That’s why we have to look for a solution to overcome the memory problem in cloud computing. For the device it won’t make any difference in workload when watching a movie on YouTube or you are assembling a massive assembly. This is because only the graphic is send to your mobile device and the entire bit crunching is done in a very powerful server network. During SolidWorksWorld a tech preview was showed in which the vision was very clear. Make it easier to work wherever whenever or with whoever. The video that was released for preview I find it still interesting to watch it and think about how it will be for me and all other engineers when this is our normal working gear.

SolidWorks Cloud: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWDDWu2_CQE

Despite the vision of SolidWorks and the lawsuit of Apple, Samsung etc. about who is the original owner of the overall look of a tablet, I find it very interesting to watch this movie created in 1994. In this movie they show a tablet like device which looks very much like the devices used today. Is the idea of working with a mobile devices and find your information every you are very new and refreshing? Probably not:

Tablet Newspaper (1994): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBEtPQDQNcI

Regards, Renso Kuster

I am always looking for ways to make my work and that of other SolidWorks users more easy and fun. For that I search for new and genius working methodologies but also for new gadgets. This sometimes means that my desk is filled with new “toys” to test and determine if it will make me more productive and even more important when it makes life more fun.

I recently found a Dell multi-touch monitor on my desk with the message to see if it makes sense to use it in combination with SolidWorks. This was a test I was really looking forward too because I’m a great fan of using touch enabled devices. And already since SolidWorks 2010 special functionality has been added to the software to support multi-touch with a set of multi-touch gestures.
The first thing I noticed was that the day the screen came in my office was crowded, everyone was curious how it worked and wanted to play with it. This gave me a good perception how popular touchscreen devices are. Also looking at my kids interacting with touch devices convinced me that this is the way to go in the near future.

The first impression of the screen is good, HD resolution and clear and vibrant colors. But what I also found out is that when you are used to touch native operating systems like IOS and Android that standard Windows 7 has some drawbacks in working with touchdevices. For instances the close, minimize and start buttons a smaller then your fingertip and placed in the corner which makes it difficult to reach because of the bezel of the screen. Installing the developer preview of Windows 8 and SolidWorks 2012 changed my opinion about the OS a lot. Inside SolidWorks the multi-touch commands work very good when you are used to the less responsive screen then for instance an Ipad. But the problem with the close button will stay the same. The other problem I found was while sketching, because you have your fingers on the screen it is difficult to make coincident relations with 2 sketch items. My quick conclusion was that working with a touchscreen and SolidWorks is nice for presenting some design but less for modeling.

With this conclusion in mind I started a search on the internet and found a promising solution called “Maide Control” this is a app for your iPad. I hear you think “yeah right but you have no SolidWorks app available”. That’s not necessary because using a wireless network it can connect to your workstation. With the connection established it turns in to a 3D motion controller for navigating your models and for modeling your fingers are not on the screens blocking your sketch endpoints. This tool I’m really enthusiastic about, the only small problem is that it will not work in combination with SolidWorks. The tool for the moment only has support for Sketchup and Rhino. I have contacted the developers and asked them about their plans for SolidWorks. They told me that SolidWorks compatibility is on their priority list. I will keep an eye on their website to see when it is released. The other fun thing about it is that you can connect numerous iPads to one workstation, so during a design review meeting everyone using an iPad can take control over the model to explain their part of the design.

In conclusion: Touch enabled devices and software is the near future for making applications more user friendly. This will work fine when hardware and software are optimized for touch input. For now there are a few drawbacks, but I’m convinced that within a year from now I will see more and more customers working with touch devices and SolidWorks.

Happy modeling,

Renso Kuster, Cadmes Europe

We have done many PDM implementations over the last decade and still one of the most intriguing dilemmas is the question about who should have access to product data.

On one hand everybody agrees that people need good information about how to build a product. PDM helps in providing this information in form of documents, information and references. People who design, manufacture and install the products use it to see how it should be detailed, made, assembled, etc.

On the other hand, we are afraid that somebody will run away with this information and starts building these products without us having the economical compensation for it (say: “money”). Within a single site company these discussions are still moderate, but as soon as affiliated production facilities in exotic countries or outsourced engineering workforce in regions with many, well-educated engineering professionals come into the picture, it becomes delicate.

I would like to bring this back to simple economical proportions like you would do for insurance situations. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Ask yourself the question: how much do I invest to prevent what kind of risk. In other words:  what is the risk if someone (internally or at a co-working partner) is running away with information and what energy in terms of overhead, extra access management, additional checks, etc. do you have to put to prevent them from running away with the information.

The challenge is to find the best balance and explain this to both sides: the people who are expressing their intuitive feelings about IP leakage and those who have to work harder to secure this data.

Good luck!

Bas Koomen

On June 22nd I attended the SolidWorks usergroup meeting where one of the subjects was “performance”. The host reviewed an interesting test performed in the US of A. (http://blog.cati.com/2011/03/maximizing-solidworks-performance-results.html).

After the review an interesting discussion went on about the significance of these results. What struck me the most is that roughly half of the most significant impact is not related to more memory, multiple cores, solid state drives or any other state-of-the art hardware. No, still half of the influence comes from the way we USE the software. A lot can be gained in setting the right options, keep your guidelines in assembly structure and work along smart procedures. This only confirms our experience in the field where sometimes we can prove a 5-fold or more speed improvement (loading, saving and rebuild) if we can restructure assemblies according to our best practices.

Let me be clear: Hardware is important. 2 or 4 cores make a difference in some tasks, 12 GB is better than 4GB RAM, the graphics board should be of a minimum specification etc., but… it’s good to know that half the performance still comes from our most important hardware, our brain.

Bas Koomen

Hi all,

Welcome to the new Cadmes Blog!

On this blog we will share our ideas and thoughts about CAD, CAM, Simulation, Data Management…well, various subjects related to engineering and the industry.

Best regards, The Cadmes Team