Spatial makes the ACIS kernel, used by a number of 3D MCAD systems. Features added to ACIS this year may well show up in your MCAD system next year. That's because ACIS enables functions useful for 3D modeling. I should ephasize that an MCAD vendor does not need to implement these new functions.
But if the vendor does, then these are some of the things you could expect...
Fuzzy Booleans - when you do Boolean operations (union, intersect, subtract), ACIS now handles cases where the 3D solids do not match exactly.
Fuzzy wire slice - you know, I didn't really get this one. I think it gets used in shipbilding.
Seeded feature recognition - specify a seed face and feature type, and ACIS returns all faces that are similar.
Celluar topology - identify subregions in solids, and then mark them up as vlumes
Meshing of sub regions
Multiprocessing enhancements -- thread-safe Linus binaries; max of 1024 threads, which today is pretty much unlimited.
There are other items that are meant more for programmers. In ACIS R24, the release to come next year, Spatial plans to add:
- Silhouette projection
- Large model performance, such as moving it
- Near tangency for Booleans
- More fuctions for multi-threading
- Model repair and optimization
- Robustness and performance for clash detection
- and more. They are looking for input from customers, because their deadline for new functions isn't for a few more weeks.
[Disclosure: Spatial provided me with hotel accomdation, meals, and some corporate gifts.]
It really sounds like DS is really gearing up to stomp on Autodesk in the AEC market. Look at all the enhancements to Spatial, the combination of 3DVIA and its interactivity, cloud computing, detabase tools and DS announcement that is coming out with an AEC product.
If you get those mechanisms positioned and working together you will have yourself one heck of AEC tool.
Posted by: Ryan | Oct 02, 2012 at 12:13 PM