Cadalyst - September 2007 - (Page 40)

mcadmodeling Where Is MCAD Going? A look at the current state of the MCAD industry. By Mike Hudspeth, IDSA L et me be clear: I’m going to be discussing the state of the MCAD industry. Some people might expect financial statements and information about corporate profits and which companies bought which. But I know you aren’t really interested in all that stuff. I know you, as users, want to know about things on a much simpler level. Let the CEOs fight it out over whose bottom line looks best. We designers have jobs to do, and the one thing we all appreciate is any tool that will help us do what we do better, faster, or cheaper — it’s not rocket science. In the good ol’ days, 3D modeling was the sole domain of the big IBM systems. They usually ran on UNIX and weren’t very quick. Rendering? Set it up for an overnighter because when you came in the next morning, it still wasn’t going to be done. Collaboration? Sending files to one another was necessary but usually a major headache. You had to have a tape drive and, wow! those tapes cost a lot! And speaking of cost — you needed a budget of tens of thousands of dollars. The really interesting thing was that all of that time and expense was needed just to get a static 2D drawing or image. Why? Because no one wanted — or for that matter needed — anything else. Today, we really do have it better. Figure 1. It’s hard to recognize that it’s Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat now lets you add 3D rotatable objects to your documents. You can even embed other support documents within the PDF file. Power for the Masses Everything is 3D today. It’s hard to avoid it. Even Adobe Acrobat, the industry de facto standard document-transfer format, is offering 3D In this article capability, and that’s about as handy as you can get Alibre (figure 1)! Imagine this: www.alibre.com Someone sends you a PDF CoCreate file and when you open it, www.cocreate.com you can freely rotate the Fab@Home image, measure it, and www.fabathome.com mark it up if you have the Google SketchUp www.sketchup.com proper permissions. Robert McNeel and Associates Another sign of nearwww.rhino3d.com pervasive 3D is that you UGS Solid Edge can visit vendor Web sites www.ugs.com for whatever part you 40 September 2007 | cadalyst | www.cadalyst.com want and look that part over by rotating it in real time (figure 2). You can also download a solid model of the part, often in your software’s native format. I can tell you from painful, personal experience that that saves you Figure 2. Being able to actually rotate a loads of time. It vendor model in real time is a great way to make sure that what you are about to used to be that download is the part you want. a very sketchy drawing of a part whose dimensions corresponded with a nearby table was the best you could get. I have found many models that only covered the basic dimensions. If you needed the part to appear in your assembly, you would have to model it. You would have to guesstimate any missing dimensions from an illustration that probably wasn’t to any reasonable scale, which means you couldn’t even measure things. Now you http://www.alibre.com http://www.cocreate.com http://www.fabathome.com http://www.sketchup.com http://www.rhino3d.com http://www.ugs.com http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - September 2007

Contents Editor's Window Techtrends: Resurrecting an Unforgettable Second Living Large UGS Solid Edge v20 Adobe Acrobat 3D v8 Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended CAD Manager: Managing 2D and 3D in the Same Office MCAD Modeling: Where is MCAD Going? AEC in Focus: Automated Estimating and Scheduling Using BIM CAD Cartoon Issue Indexes CADfidential

Cadalyst - September 2007

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