Cadalyst - November 2007 - (Page 44)

mcadmodeling The Tools Companies are coming out of the woodwork to help you share your data with others. You can find all sorts of products that claim to make your professional life easier. Some do; others try. Not all are as good as they should be, but most are really Figure 4. You can output model files powerful. to many different formats to make Product lifecycle them available to anyone. management (PLM) software is the current important buy for most companies. It seeks to manage your product from concept to retirement (the product’s, not yours). A lot of vendors make this kind of software. File translators bridge the sometimes-wide gap between engineering and the rest of the world. And there are many kinds of programs available. If you need to generate stereolithography or other rapid prototypes, you need to have a good stereolithography apparatus (SLA) translator. Most modeling programs come with this capability built in. If yours doesn’t, you might consider investing in a more modern package. Even staying within the engineering community, you have to translate data to stay compatible with everyone on your team. Nowadays, thanks to corporate buyouts and takeovers, you can have different locations within the same company that operate with different software packages but work on the same projects. Some 2D translators, such as computer graphics metafiles (CGM), are vector based. You can take geometry from your 3D modeling program right into the most popular graphics programs, including Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. I do this all the time for labeling images in manuals. You also can save bitmap images — JPEGs or TIFFs — into paint programs such as Photoshop. From there, you can bring static images into Microsoft Word and Excel, different kinds of databases, and even Internet sites. You can translate 3D files in any number of ways. Old standbys like IGES and DXF are still available, but these days, STEP is very popular. Some formats allow for more than just geometry transfer. These are the newer, more exciting ones. Of course, there is VRML, but what you get with that is just a faceted representation of the model. You can’t measure it accurately. Formats such as JT are much more accurate (figure 4). SolidWorks’ eDrawings lets you see a very accurate depiction of your model, and it has a lot of really great functionality. I was sold on this program the first time I saw it years ago. A newcomer in this arena is Adobe Acrobat 3D. Yes, the de facto standard document transfer program 44 November 2007 | cadalyst | www.cadalyst.com Figure 5. I can’t think of a better way to explain a repair than to show an animation of it being done. Products such as Adobe Acrobat 3D will usher in a new era of do-it-yourself confidence. Imagine the possibilities! now does 3D! It’s pretty slick, too. You can save a PDF (portable document format, for the uninitiated) that includes fully rotatable models with all sorts of metadata, including materials and tolerances. You can enable measurement and exploded views (figure 5). You even can attach other files (Word or Excel) to pass on the information you want recipients to see. You can password-protect it as well. I think this kind of functionality will build the future, and I am quite excited about it. Share and Share Alike When it comes to sharing your data and collaborating with the rest of your diverse design team, it’s never been easier. Today’s products make it a snap. And for the most part, they are easy to use, powerful, and secure. What more could you ask for? Direct transfer of one file format to another without losing anything in the process? Well, you’ll have to keep waiting for that one, I’m afraid. But with the kinds of tools at your disposal right now, you can work with a speed and an efficiency that beat anything you had just a few years ago. And that shows we’re making progress. c Mike Hudspeth, IDSA, is an industrial designer, artist, and author based in St. Louis, Missouri. 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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