Open Design Alliance Conference - Day 2.5

During the break, CADMagazine editor Rob Sman and I were commenting on the lack of MCAD apps in the IntelliCAD-ODA orb. After the break, we were corrected by the next presentations.

Mr Sman told me that his magazine is able to survive in print form, because his advertisers prefer the longivity of ads in print publications -- unlike Web banners that appear and disappear. The magazine is distributed in Holland only.

Ledas

Wow! I just loved the presentation by Dmitry Ushakov of Ledas describing his company's variational direct modeler. You can read more about it from www.Ledas.com/group/white_papers

IMSI/design

We tend to think of IMSI selling TurboCAD for cheap, but they have being doing a lot of work behind the scenes to support many file formats and workflows. Maurtiz Botha showed us his company's constraint technology. For example, TurboCAD has an auto-constrain mode that works like this: you draw a rectangle; TurboCAD explodes it, and then adds constraints logically that keep it as a rectangle. (Keep snap off when drawing with constraints, he recommenced.) 

"This is the way AutoCAD will develop in the next several years," he predicted, as he showed how TurboCAD uses 2D parametrics to drive 3D models, and then generate sections for use as detail drawings. (AutoCAD has had some of this, but does it through the command-line -- much more painful than TurboCAD's drag'n drop of sectioned 2D views that are automatically scaled, complete with fragmented, differently-scaled, fully-associative details.)

The key for non-CAD users, he said, is to export TurboCAD drawings in SVG [scaleabgle vector graphics] format in Adobe Illustrator (on the Mac). Then the non-CAD user can pretty-up the drawing. Thus, he showed the workflow from rough sketch, parameterized made into 3D in TurboCAD, extracted as 2D views, and then exported to an Adobe product.

He showed another workflow of starting in SketchUp, imported into TurboCAD -- including layers, textures, SketchUp-generated views (imported as paper space), and SketchUp components (converted to blocks). He generated 2D and 3D sections of the imported model, and then exported as SVG.

Of interest: TurboCAD's ability to selectively expose parameters of blocks (symbols). For instance, you can toggle the bend feature of a sheet metal part. Or toggle exploded view of an office desk.

Additional Coverage

For more on the ODA conference, check out Deelip Menezes' blog at ODA World Conference - Day 1 - Development Status.

Comments

[stelt]

"Scalable Vector Graphics" is what SVG stands for. More SVG via http://svg.startpagina.nl