Dassault Systemes may well be the only CAD vendor having to deal with three modeling kernels: SolidWorks uses Parasolid from competitor Siemens PLM Systems; Catia uses its own kernel, CGM; and Spatial makes ACIS, unused by Dassault.
A couple of years ago, Dassault asked Spatial to turn CGM into a licenseable component. And so I am now sitting in a session at the 3D Insiders' Summit.
"This is like a clean sheet for us. what have we learned from the last 20 years that we can make a better customer experience," says Ray Bagley about CGM. CGM is very old, but as a component it is very new. Release 1 shipped in 2011, and focussed on CAM and CMM, coordinate measurement machines.
For release 2, Spatial is addng...
- more modeling operators
- using more formats from InterOp, adding 3DXML
- point clouds and operators
- 2D/3D CDM constraint design manager;does not have to be used with CGM
- and a pre-release C3D toolkit that lets customers work with all these components
This release will ship shortly.
For release 3 next year, Spatial plans...
- complete work on C3D toolkit
- make lots of live sample code for documentation
- expose more CGM functions, such as power fill, sweep with untwist, and silhouette operator
- PHL hidden line rendering for 2D drawings
Mr Bagley concludes that "3D is more than just b-rep"
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