From St Petersburg
Most of us are familiar with ACIS (from Dassault Systemes) and Parasolid (from Siemens PLM Software), the two solid modeling kernels that battle it out for market supremacy. But there are a lot of others, such as SOLIDS++ from IntegrityWare, CGM (from Dassault), Granite (from PTC), the open source Open CASCADE, and so on.
C3D from ASCON Group is less familiar, and so I thought I'd parrot their press release on the latest updates. The kernel has three parts, a modeler of geometry, a solver of constraints, and a converter formats.
Montage of functions new to C3D V16
New to the Modeler
In kinematic operations, the elements of solids are cloned for a variety of positions relative to the guide path. Threads can be adjusted according to the initial position and length of the hole in which it is rendered.
Building shell rings by individual sketches with irregular faces is performed using a constant bend radius. Building conical polygons through sheet metal bends is performed through segmentation of the support arches. When building sheet metal bodies, the closure of angles is rendered through the rotary processing of the target area. Users can set different lengths to the left and to the right of the bending extension.
Edge fillets are created more efficiently, with dramatically fewer inaccuracies and with no building limitations. The thickness of surfaces can be based on singular (polar) points. The tangent line junctions of surfaces built from a web of curves are rendered more smoothly.
New to the 2D and 3D Solver
Clusters are a new type of solid body with their own constraint system, and so arranges geometric models against a hierarchy of nested sub-assemblies. This allows designers to employ the same solver instance for an entire assembly.
Reflection symmetry is the new geometric constraint for 3D shapes, and is applied to any geometric object, such as curves on pairs of bodies or external facets.
All API calls for the 2D solver are implemented. All details regarding interactions of the C3D Solver are recorded automatically to file, which allows remote debugging.
Also new: a dragging function; interpolated spline function with any type of constraint; function for recognizing the types of conic sections defined as NURBS curves; and constraint for defining spline configurations through its points with fixed coordinates, through vectors of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd derivatives.
New to the Converter
C3D converter adjusts the accuracy of exported STL models by three triangulation parameters: maximum deflection, maximum pivot angle of a normal curve (or surface), and maximum length of a triangle side.
Polygon models are imported in STL and VRML formats.
Attributes are now imported, such as name, designation, and owner.
Improved multi-threading converts data faster, such as 1.7x faster for Parasolid files (x_t, x_b) and 2.2x faster for STEP files.
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To request a C3D V16 evaluation version, register at c3dlabs.com/en/evaluation.
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