Cadalyst - November 2007 - (Page 19)

cadlabsreview Cadalyst sent invitations to vendors of software options for publishing 3D CAD models. Seven vendors responded and sent products for review, including Adobe Acrobat 3D v8, which makes its first appearance in a 3D publishing roundup review. The scope of the 3D publishing products that Cadalyst received range from the relatively simple to the remarkably capable and sophisticated. Users have a broad range of flexible applications at their fingertips to get their design data working for them in ways that go well beyond the original design intent. Testing For testing, I chose a couple of design files created with major 3D applications to evaluate the conversion capabilities of the 3D publishing applications. On the surface, selecting these files might seem to be a relatively simple task, but choosing files that were representative of the production work that Cadalyst readers might regularly produce wasn’t quite as simple as it might appear. For example, recent versions of a given 3D design application might not be supported yet, so I needed to choose slightly older files. The chosen files needed to be moderately complex, but not so much so as to tax the capabilities of the even the most powerful of the current generation of workstations available. Add to the equation the fact that some of the 3D publishing applications use libraries from the originating design application, thus requiring that the application be installed on the test workstation. What’s more, some new versions of the publishing applications weren’t quite ready for testing, although they are expected to be available by the time this article appears in print. The choices were not easy, but I chose the SeaScooter assembly from SolidWorks 2005 and an older version of Engine.dwg from Autodesk AutoCAD, which I’ve used previously when testing 3D publishing applications. This might seem an easy combination, but one 3D publishing application supports only Autodesk MCAD applications — including Inventor and Mechanical Desktop — so I was unable to test Autodesk products with that particular application. As a result, the testing for this particular roundup isn’t as complete as I would have liked, but publishing data, published file sizes, and test times are included for the applications I tested. QuadriSpace is about to launch the 2008 version of its applications, and the new versions were unavailable for testing at the time of this article’s publication. Lattice doesn’t support simple AutoCAD, but it does support the Autodesk MCAD applications, so testing with that software was, of necessity, limited. All tests were completed on an average workstation that was based on an AMD Opteron 246 microprocessor with 2 GB of RAM and dual 120 GB hard drives in a RAID configuration. It used an NVIDIA Quadro FX4000 graphics card with 256 MB of onboard RAM. I used the latest drivers for the Quadro graphics card that were available from NVIDIA at the time I began testing, which were WHQL-certified version 6.14.11. 6002. The test system had Microsoft Windows Professional with Service Pack 2 installed, including the most current patches available. Autodesk no longer makes the specifications for its drawing file format available to third-party vendors, so conversion problems with entities found in newer versions of AutoCAD are becoming more prevalent, and they make the repurposing of such design data more difficult. For the SolidWorks models, I selected a mod- erately complex SolidWorks 2005 Assemblies file, a Sea Scooter design, that totaled approximately 64.9 MB and included a large subassembly. Autodesk provided the file for testing purposes. I also used a 1.02 MB DWG file named AutoCAD Engine.dwg to test the publishing of AutoCAD design data. My intent was to provide test drawings that could be readily converted while still representing typical work, converting them to whatever the base format of the individual applications happened to be and then comparing both speed of conversion and level of compression as compared with the original files. This article is a survey, rather than a head-to-head comparison of applications. Given the broad range of applications with varying approaches and intent, to attempt such an evaluation would certainly be comparing the proverbial apples to oranges. Because most of these 3D publishing applications are available in trial versions, the best way to determine their suitability is to test them yourself on the systems you’ll be using with the type of 3D design files you expect to be publishing. The test results in this article are intended as guidelines. For more information about each product’s features, see the online feature table at www. cadalyst.com/11073D-table. SpinFire Professional 8.2 Actify 415.227.3800 offers a www.actify.com suite of Price: $499 products that are designed to facilitate the secure access and distribution of multiple 2D and 3D CAD files and related design documents without requiring access to the originating CAD system. 19 Actify www.cadalyst.com | cadalyst | November 2007 http://www.cadalyst.com/11073D-table http://www.cadalyst.com/11073D-table http://www.actify.com http://www.cadalyst.com

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

Cadalyst - November 2007 Contents Editor's window Cad Central Conceptual Inspiration for Less Than $200 From Any Angle - Publish and Share Your 3D Designs NX 5, Part 1 - CAD/CAM/CAE Software Newforma Project Center Fourth Edition - Software for Project Information Management CAD Manager's Survey 2007 Sharing and Collaborating with Your Team To BIMfinity and Beyond! Solutions for Sending Large Digital Files Cad Cartoon Issue Indexes Cad Fidential

Cadalyst - November 2007

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