WorldCAD Access

New HP Workstations and Monitor

HP Z8, Z6 and Z4 It used to be that workstation makers made their own CPUs. I suppose Oracle-owned Sun is the only one still doing so, called the SPARC. Integraph was the most interesting, as in the 1980s they designed their own CPUs to power their own workstations on which to run their own CAD software. An Apple before its time. (Intergraph benefited financially later in its post-hardware era when courts in USA and Germany found Intel stole intellectual property from Intergraph for use in the wildly-popular Pentium CPUs.) By relying on Intel and AMD, workstation makers limit the... Read more →

ODA Teigha Conference, Day 2

Vendor Presentations Day 2 of the Teigha conference traditionally has been for 1-on-1 meetings, where members can meet with ODA programmers. This year, we have a spillover, however. Several vendors are holding side conferences to talk technically about their software: C3D Labs, LEDAS, and Visual Solutions. C3D Labs C3D Labs offers a 3D modeling kernel to ODA members at a reduced price. This is, in fact, the third solid modeling kernel available to ODA members. The ODA has one it developed on its own, a free stop-gap that is good enough for simple 3D modeling, but not good enough for... Read more →

Teigha Cloud SDK

(For coverage of Teigha Publish SDK for 3D PDF output, see my twitter stream at @upfrontezine .) Switching over to the Teigha Cloud presentation, this is for viewing and editing drawings in a Web browser, where the code is stored on a remote server computer. It uses Web Assembly format, which reduces the size of files needed: Library size is half the size, initializes 10x faster, and parses data, such as a 5MB drawing, 30% faster. The Update Manager opens large drawings on any client device, meaning PC, tablet, or phone. As the user zooms and pan, the Update Manager... Read more →

Teigha Revision control for DWG

Sergy Stepantso, cloud team The Open Design Alliance has been leading Autodesk. The CAD vendor initially refused to release a DWG read/write API, saying DXF was sufficient; but when it saw that ODA was doing well, it countered with its RealDWG API. There is no stand-alone API for dealing with Revit data, until the ODA began developing it; Autodesk has not (yet) responded to it. Now the ODA is extending DWG's capabilities with revision control. This is essentially an unlimited undo-redo system but with a few more functions -- such as check-out, submit, merge, and update to revision. The idea... Read more →

New features for Teigha drawings

Sergy Slezkin, Core team lead The core of Teigha DWG has been split into Kernel and Drawings. Kernal is the file-format independent part. On the Drawings side, it now supports DWG 2018, digital signatures, and large objects that are bigger than 256MB, associative center marks and center lines, new kinds of associative dimensions, associative surfaces, and .rcp file format for point cloud data. RCP is the point cloud format used by ODA. It consists of a preview image and data in XML format. DGN now supports read-write and render of terrain model elements, as well as tables (r/w, create, render,... Read more →

Exporting custom geometry to Revit's RVT format

Ivan Serbinovsky, team lead Prague castle, world's largest, overlooking the Vltava River We're back from the break and now getting a look at how to bring custom geometry into the ODA's new Teigha BIM API. TIP: Remember to read our Twitter stream at @upfrontezine to learn about other new functions from ODA. And pictures! Teigha BIM is a stand-alone SDK. It has nothing to do with DWG, despite the similarity of name. It consists of high-level classes that access all BIM entities, all file data, and can filter database objects. It converts 2D and 3D geometric BIM representations to Teigha's... Read more →

Teigha Visualize general purpose graphics engine

Alexander Federov, senior software engineer Prague art for sale in Prague So now we get into the nitty-gritty details of new APIs from ODA. The first is the new Visualize API. It is a file-independent module meant for handling display duties. It is not tied to DWG or any other file format. It handles the following tasks: overlays, such as cursors, traciers, snap points partial graphics cache regeneration (for faster display of large drawings) metafiles for hatches, text, and block references spatial filters to cull entities not on the screen multi-threaded metafile preprocessing The Visualize API is implemented in object-oriented... Read more →

Teigha Platform at ODA Prague

Sergy Vishnevstsky, Development Director John Lennon wall in Prague Sergy Vishnevstsky's question to us is, What is necessary to add new functions to software? For instance, engineering workflow improvements involve data exchange, data representation, onsite field inspection, and collaborative work. Interoperability is the key aspect of ODA, which has proven its ability to support five formats: DWG, DGN (Microstation), RVT (Revit), RCS (point clouds), and PRC (3D PDF). In addition, ODA supports a number of export formats, and extensions for architectural, civil, and mechanical. In addition, ODA supports five Web browsers and three operation systems. The result is 300GB of... Read more →

Live blog: Open Design Alliance's 2017 Conference

Day 1 Keynote: The Evolving Mandate ODA began in 1998 with a crystal-clear mission to work with .dwg files, to keep pace with new releases of .dwg, and set up as a non-profit. "We take care of member needs, and respond to their needs," says ODA ceo Neil Peterson. The first release was R2000 .dwg in 1999 based on Marcomp code, but the quickly began a rewrite. By 2003 it was no longer just .dwg but now had complimentary functions like importing other file formats and displaying drawings. TIP: ODA uses the word "rendering" to refer to displaying drawings in... Read more →

Preview: Teigha Developer Conference 2017

Back in Prague Alright, here we are in Prague, just waiting for the annual Open Design Alliance conference to begin. This is my fourth time in the city, and I am starting to feel like a local. Even the occasional tourist mistakes me for a local, asking for directions to such and such. TIP: When visiting Prague, the best thing to do is wander down side alleys to avoid the hordes of tourist groups that now plug up the pedestrian-only streets of the old city. Admire the beautiful buildings and scenes on the nearly-empty back streets, get yourself lost by... Read more →

We ask ANSYS about their new GPU-based FEA software

Q&A ANSYS yesterday released details of its new GPU-based simulation software, Discovery Live, which, the company says, runs faster on a desktop computer than in the cloud. It is an application of HPC [high-performance computing] that uses parallel processing to simulation programs very quickly. Special computer hardware is not needed, just any reasonably recent NVIDIA graphics board that supports CUDA [compute unified device architecture], and most do. HPC on GPUs has long been a dream of the CAx industry, and now it appears to have become reality. Following the demo they gave me (see XXXXXXXXXXX), I had some questions for... Read more →

ANSYS Discovery Live Changes Everything

Massively-parallel computing on the the desktop In the minds of engineers, simulation is an afterthought. We concern ourselves primarily with solving designs geometrically, and many of our designs don't need to be tested against failure, anyhow. For those that do, we let someone else worry about it after it fails. And so companies that sell simulation software (and those that want to expand into the realm) are frustrated by our insufficient use of their software. The idea expressed by companies like ANSYS (which sells simulation primarily) and Autodesk (which sells it on the side) is this: if we can make... Read more →