The CAD Insider

IES Simulation Assists LEED Certification

DENVER, CO (AIA 2013), June 22, 2013 - IES makes "bang-up" software for AEC simulation. Founder Don McLean, founder of IES demos the software for me at the AIA show. He does not lapse into the vernacular of his native Scotland to describe it, but I'll choose to remember it that way.

IES analyses buildings for air flow, heating, cooling and more. With all this talk about making green buildings, LEED certification, etc., I would think every architect would be running IES software -- or something like it. But they are not.

"So how do architects evaluate complexities such as thermal loads, HVAC needs, currently," I ask Don.

Don sticks a wet thumb in the air.

Thermal template and component view (image from IES)

The product design world has been years ahead of AEC in suggesting that analysis occur early in the design cycle. CAD companies like Autodesk and SolidWorks have suites which include simulation. Both companies have acquired CAE technology and done their best to make it available for the typical design engineer, even the designer. Perhaps it's due to analysis being included in the engineering curriculum whereas architects, the professionals on the AEC world and in control of projects, drift more toward artistic and aesthetic education. For them, simulation may be  foreign concept, Necessary, perhaps, but something that can be delegated. Numbers... how gauche. Aren't there specialists for these dirty jobs?

Don, sensing this aversion to for the technical details, has introduced a more visual display of simulation results. Architects who use IES applications will get a data represented in color schemes shown against recognizable building elements. For example, rooms are displayed with colors representing temperatures as a result of sunlight, a typical thermal load, rather than tables of numbers or numerical reports.

Thermal template and component view (image from IES)

With IES TaP (Track a Project), IES’s online project management tool, architects or anyone on their team can quickly identify how the project is moving towards certification and identify any potential setbacks and deal with them in a timely way. Integrating Tap with IES VE (for analysis) will give architects a running tally of LEED certification points as a building is modified in the design phase. For example, using the VE Navigator for LEED you can change the size of windows or type of glass and see the effect immediately on the LEED status. 

For more information of IES TaP, see here: http://www.iesve.com/software/tap

Good Enough - Podium Renders SketchUp Models

DENVER, CO (AIA 2013), June 22, 2013 - SketchUp makes it quite easy to generate models of buildings but, lets face it, its images look rather prosaic. If you need a pretty picture, there are a quite a few products that will take your SketchUp model and generate a photorealistic rendering.

(image from SU Podium site)

On hand at the AIA convention was product manager James Allen to show me one of these SketchUp renderers. James concedes the overall highest quality of rendering to V-Ray, which is right down the isle. "But its very hard to use," he says. Podium is accessed from a little menu inside SketchUp. It seems to have very few commands -- so there is less to learn.

Who wants to spend time learning? We can't we push a button and generate a picture?

Well, usually because rendering programs are borne from photography, art, maybe physics. They employ jargon foreign to architects. For example, if I want to simply make a black and white picture from a color one, I have to "turn down the color saturation." Huh? Why can't I have a black and white button?

Podium uses an 80% rule as in "most users only need 80% of what high end rendering packages do," adds James. "We give them that." The picture Podium produces may be good enough for most work. The SU Podium output does. look way better than SketchUp's. I can still tell they are CG, whereas with some of the high end renderers results are so good they surpass reality -- cars without dirt and dings, for example.

So maybe you can't see a reflection within a reflection with SU Podium. It costs less than V-Ray., right?

Yes, you can buy Podium for $198 from www.suplugins.com. Podium includes a library of models and materials. "It's like SketchUp 3D warehouse," says James. I ask if Podium allows users to upload model, as SketchUp does, or textures. "It's our stuff, actually," says James. "We make sure it's all up to standards." Some are free but the entire library can be had for an additonal $60.

HP DesignJet T1500 ePrinter - Camel of CAD Printers

DENVER, CO (AIA 2013), June 22, 2013 - You've heard the old joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. The joke is not appreciated by camel lovers. Or engineers. Both groups would defy a horse to put up with what a camel is subjected to. Water storage in the hump, nostrils that seal out blowing sand? Genius.

Todd Hatfield of HP is undestandably proud of the HP Designjet T1500 ePrinter. He would not appreciate it being compared to an ugly beast of burden. He is quick to point out improvements made by the committee, which in this case, was formed of users who met at HP's large format printer division HQ in Barcelona with the express purpose of making a CAD printer more useful.

"They worked with cardboard and duct tape and showed us the printer they wanted us to make them," says Todd.

Todd Hatfield of HP presents the beast. The HP Designjet T1500 ePrinter large format printer won't win on looks but it can't be beat for functionality.

So the printer has a front loading roll paper input. It is lower than most large format printers. "We found users were rolling their office chairs up the check on the printer," says Todd. The stand is stiff and strong, more than it needs to be. But users didn't like the printer swaying back and forth, They associated that with flimsiness."

A ledge keeps items from dropping into the innards of the HP Designjet T1500 ePrinter. What didn't they think of?

The result is an intensely practical machine that favors users' needs over showroom looks. You may never have thought of large format printers as sexy but next to the HP Designjet T1500 ePrinter, the typical printer will look sleek, like a sports car next to a truck. Or a camel next to a horse.

But you know 9 out of 10 engineers will pick the camel.

The T1500 does not stand totally on practicality, however. It's fast.

"It's 25% faster than it's predecessor, the T1300," Todd tells me about the swath path of the print head, a full 9/8" which allows it to cover the same print with less passes.

Repro Shops Lag

If the HP Designjet T1500 ePrinter is so good, what is stopping from all the architects  using it? I can't resist being an instigator. It's well into AIA exhibit hours and I need to make my own excitement. Todd loves his printers and he's a super nice guy. Will he crack?

I'm expecting the usual answers: it's just a matter of time before we get market penetration, we've only just rolled this out, we're counting on you to spread the word, and so on...."

But apparently, the printer market is dominated by inertia and clings to old technology. "Architects sign contracts with reprographic firms that use mono LED printers." [the kind HP does not make]."We can't compete with them on speed. If an architect wants a hundred E-size drawings by tomorrow, that's a job for mono LED printers. 

Todd tells me there is trend for general contractors, architects and project owners moving away from centralized reprographics houses and doing more of the prints themselves. "The industry is moving to more digital workflows in design and collaboration as well as using design approaches like BIM which will drive the adoption of color since nearly 100% of the designs are being done in color," adds Todd. "That's where we come in. And inkjets are getting faster all the time."

For economic justification, he points to a 2011 Lyra white paper (commissioned by OCE) that shows every $1 spent on color printing saves $4 of project costs.  Clck here for the paper in PDF.

I'm thinking it just looks better in color.

BuildEdge for SketchUp

DENVER, CO (AIA 2013), June 22, 2013 - There among the AEC software giants whose towering booths are metaphors for the huge buildings they will help create, was Aaron Dietzen in a 10'x10' space showing off a little gem of an application that does nothing more than make one of those giants (SketchUp) just a little easier to use. Make that a lot easier to use if you are extending walls, making roofs, adding windows and so on.

BuildEdge makes a roof on a SketchUp model in no time flat.

Aaron shows me how BuildEdge is able to move a wall in SketchUp by dragging it. The adjoining walls stay with the walls that move. This is because BuildEdge treats walls as enitites whereas with SketchUp, walls are merely lines and surfaces. You may be used to that with your AEC software, but SketchUp users were having to reconnect the wall manually. Every change involved some clean up.

As architects are all about billable hours, a few minutes saved from a couple of wall moves would more than pay for BuildEdge -- it costs a mere $29! But there's more. BuildEdge brings more from heavy duty architectural software into the SketchUp user realm. Making roofs is a cinch with BuildEdge. Aaron shows me a house with 8 walls and BAM! A roof grows pops up on it. It looks nice -- several peaks, edges, shingles. Sure, I've seen that being done in Revit and ArchiCAD, but Sketchup users had to create that manually. It would have taken me hours. Also, windows dimensioned from an edge keep their distance.

But can it change the pitch of this part of the roof? Aaron does it in a wink. Before I can ask to change a sloped roof to a gable, he does it for me.

Seriously, why isn't every SketchUp user doing building using BuildEdge?

BuildEdge is a plug in for SketchUp. Commands are accessed from a small menu window after you install the program. It works with the free SketchUp and the professional version.

There is a trial version with limited capability avaialble on th BuildEdge site. Yeah, it doesn't do windows.

For more information, go to http://www.buildedge.com/

AEC software giants

A Quarter of PTC Users on Creo, Goal is 50% by End of Year

You would think that after making a product that everyone says they want, that product would be automatically and universally accepted. Not true. Ask Coca Cola, whose "new Coke formula" introduced in 1985 after millions of dollars of market research including thousands of taste-tests, met with lukewarm welcome and had to be embarassedly withdrawn.

In our industry, this is happening with Creo, a direct modeling, easy to use, 3D MCAD package, meant to replace Pro/E Wildfire, old history-based software. It was exactly what customers were saying they wanted. 

Creo was introduced with much fanfare, an overly theatrical prison break, symbolic of the constraints of the old CAD parametric, history-based systems. Here was direct modeling. Freedom.

Two and half years later, only 25% of Wildfire users have converted to Creo. PTC hopes 50% will do so by end of 2013.

"The SMBs [small and medium sized businesses] are doing much better [of converting], says PTC CEO Heppelmann. "It's the enterprise customer that is lagging. We won't be able to convert them until all the data they have can transfer."

Understandable, as design data for a big company is a vast investment. You are not going to convince John Deere (one of PTC's biggest customer of Pro/E) that it should switch to Creo for a few bells and whistles. I imagine they are quite comfortable in their "jail."

"We knew they weren't going to jump onto Creo 1.0," says Hepplemann. "Or 2.0. But by 3.0, we think they will come."

Creo 3.0 is not due til later this year

The risk to PTC is that their best, most high profile customers, will be stranded on an island from which PTC has sailed. They may well see Creo off in the distance, a very different CAD system which will get more different with each release. If they have to learn and transfer their data to a very different Creo, why not evaluate competive CAD programs, too?

 

DFMPro Puts Manufacturing Experience in a Box

ANAHEIM, CA (PTC Live Global 2013), June 12, 2013 - An engineer fresh out of school is overflowing with knowledge, yet knows nothing --about manufacturing. Reminders are happily supplied by machinists.

I'll call my machinist Bill. I'd use his real name but he might still be alive. When I unfurled my drawing (this was more than 20 years ago) and showed him a perfect part, he lost no time in pointing to a curved surface on which I had specified a hole. "How the hell am I going to get a drill on that?" As I rolled the drawing back up and slunk back to the drafting table, I could almost hear Bill and his buddies having a good laugh.

It was my first experience with designing for manufacturing. It manifested itself in the form of a grizzled curmudgeon of a shop foreman back in my day. Geometric may have found a way to put Bill in a box. Called DFMPro, I suspect it is not quite a humbling experience.

DFM Pro will detect the lack of a flat spot on which a drill would enter and exit. 

On hand at PTC annual user meeting to demo DFMPro was Sameer Konejkar, head of products and technologies. Sameer shows me how it can find lack of socket clearance around screw heads, lack of access that would prevent servicing of a part (great news for anyone who's tried to remove an oil filter from a car), and holes not aligned in mating parts (preventing insertion of fasteners). Customers have said DFMPro has helped them find thin mold walls, undercuts, incorrect bend radii. I'm sure it can do a whole lot more.

DFMPro claims to be able to solve 20% of the rework parts go through and that a manual DFM process can be error prone. It integrates with Creo Parametric, SolidWorks and NX. You can buy it for as little as $3K for an individual locked version of $9.5K for unlocked version that can be shared.

DFMPro may not know as much as an experienced machinist but but at least you would be spared the humiliation.

NVIDIA GRIDs Have Power to Share

DALLAS, TX (Siemens PLM Connection 2013) June 5, 2013 - The NVIDIA GRID K1 and K2 boards are like a polygamous husbands -- so much power in one package that they can't confine it just one user.

The K1 has 4 Kepler GPUs, each running up to 8 users, for a total of up to 32 users. The K2 has 2 GPUs and can support up to 16 users, though they are "high-end" Keplers, for high-end graphics.

With this hardware from NVIDIA, a central location can house shared workstations in racks, each loaded with graphics memory that NVIDIA makes, and run a bunch of cheap terminals. You may need a good display or two, but companies can save having to buy expensive graphic workstations. This is known as "virtualized workstations."

Two parts to the NVIDIA GRID board -- the big one is the heat sink. The K2 takes 225W of power.

If you are into a more monogamous one user, one workstation relationship, you will be wondering why on Earth any user would want to share a workstation. The benefit of sharing clearly lies not with you, dear user, but on the shared server side. Think big installations. The one server can be cared for in one place, easing maintenance of it, by a dedicated and trained staff. So with beehives of graphical activity, such as animation and rendering services, it would make sense for the IT staff to have the servers all under one roof, so to speak, for easy access, rather than running around for each little cubby where the wild-eyed, ponytailed special-effects creating wizard has caused unnecessary mayhem loading an unauthorized program and brought down the network, ignoring every one of the for-your-own-good rules the IT staff issues from time after time.

Milan Diebel of NVIDIA was kind enough to show me this technology at the Siemens PLM event. I asked Milan if the reason for sharing was cost, but Milan indicated that was not so. "At $3750 for a K2, its not so much a pricing issue," he says. "Data cetralization adds tremendous value in terms of improved collaboration, productivity and IP protection, not to mention the benefits for IT for centralized care, management and maintenance of hardware...that is what makes sense for the bigger companies."

Playing user advocate, I looked closely for a model on a virtualized workstation compared to a regular workstation to see if the rotation of a CAD assembly lags but I can't really see it. This problem, known as latency, has been known to plague remote computing systems. NVIDIA claims to have reduced latency with patented technology.

It looked good to me, but I can be easily impressed. The next step is to get this in the hands of a discerning CAD user for real testing.

For more information from NVIDA, see http://www.nvidia.com/object/grid-boards.html

Virtual Reality: You Can DIY or Call Virtalis

ANAHEIM, CA (PTC Live Global 2013), June 12, 2013 - You would think Paul Ewing's job at Virtalis would be easy. All he has to do is let people know that computer-generated virtual worlds in which you can immerse yourself -- a concept we have been promised since the onset of computers and by countless sci fi books and movies -- have arrived. And he can deliver it to you and set it up. Shouldn't that make us all reach for our wallets?

Virtalis is in the business of selling a system that, depending on how immersed in 3D you want to go, will let you feel like you are in a virtual world. This virtual world will appear in 3D in varying degrees of believability, ranging from a wall with a 3D image to a 6-sided "Cube" that you step inside for a "fully immersive" effect. This is the world of virtual reality, or VR. It's here, not just in movies, and Virtalis will sell it to you.

Users at CNH interact with the Virtalis ActiveWall, a virutal reality display, like the one shown at the PTC annual user meeting (image by Virtalis)

The fact that you don't know a company exists that actually makes virtual reality real for you is what makes Paul's job hard.

"We met a company that said they were going to try to build their own VR system," says Paul. "They would have had to buy the projectors, the screens, build the room...they would have to research how to set it up, what to buy, how to get all the different parts speaking to each other and how to get their software working. And this is an industry that is moving fast. What if you need a new 3D projector after a few years? Would you know the best one to get?"

I get it. Virtalis has been building 3D immersive environments for years. Wouldn't a company want that expertise and get a turn-key VR environment, made by one-stop shop experts who know about the hardware needed, the software, the integration, the interior design, etc., rather than having people figure it out by themselves?

I'm reminded of my first furniture project 20 years ago. We needed a folding futon couch but I got sticker shock in the showroom. "I can make that," I said. Ten months and thousands of dollars of shop equipment later, a couch was actually delivered.

Behind the curtain. Virtalis assembles the machinery required to show the VR, a combination of 3D projectors, screens, other hardware.

Maybe Virtalis' high-end ActiveCube systems, which can cost $150,000 up to $1,000,000+, inspire the same sticker shock but Virtalis will send their people to your location, help you design your VR room, do the installation and training and hand you over a working system. So reassuring… Entry level ActiveWall/ActiveMove systems can be had for as little as $25-30K and their experience means that it’s almost as simple as plug-and-play.

If your company wants to immerse and interact in 3D and virtual worlds, swallow your DIY urge and give Virtalis a call.

For more information visit www.virtalis.com  

iSEEK Shape Search Going Mobile

ANAHEIM, CA (PTC Live Global 2013), June 12, 2013 - Don Flugrad, cofounder of iSEEK, was manning the booth at the PTC annual user meeting, but it  iSEEK's CEO, Abir Qamhiyah, who commanding all the attention. Cascades of red hair, short dress, heels... CAD geeks don't see that often.

Cofounders Dr Abir Qamhiyah (left) and Don Flugrad of iSEEK.  ISEEK's shape search is based on Dr Qamhiy PhD thesis.

Eyes back on the product, I ask Don what's new? iSEEK has been pushing geometry-based search for some time, the ability to look for a part based on a similarity in shape to another. It will scan your database of parts and show you what is similar, rather than having to scan the parts yourself or try to remember part numbers. Don will tell you that the old way of searching [which is used in most every CAD system] relies on database engines using text or number searches. Bit database programs also work that way. And that's fine for addresses, phone numbers, part numbers, maybe even a standard part, like a screw, etc. but how is that going to help you find a yoke for a landing gear wheel, kinda like the one you made for another assembly? You just know one must exist, as you company has been making landing gear for decades, but where the hell could it be? A frustrating search later, you decide to just make a new model.

It is a scenario oft repeated. "Design engineers spend 20% of their time searching for the right document," says Don.

CADseek has been integrated with PTC's Windchill for over a year.

An algorithmic visual search makes perfect sense to me. A database search would be ok in a perfect world, where every part is stores with appropriate metadata. Really, who does that?

Shouldn't a CAD company have acquired iSEEK already, I wonder, only to realize I've again fallen in love with a concept. I better leave the M&A* to the suits.

What's next, I ask Don.

"We'll soon have the ability to take a picture of a part with a Android phone and be able to do a search," says Don. "For example, you have a broken washing machine part, you take a picture or two, and the app will find the part."

Android? Oh, yeah, I think engineers prefer Androids. I want to ask the CEO if she has an Android or an iPhone but I can't break through a throng of admirers.

--

*Mergers and acquisitions

zSpace Integrates with Teamcenter Visualization Mockup

DALLAS, TX (Siemens PLM Connection 2013) June 5, 2013 - zSpace has a pretty cool way of interacting with 3D models. Donning the thinnest of clip-on glasses and using a muti-button scribe, you can click and drag from what appears to be a holographic image that rises up from a large tablet. The tablet, a zSpace device, is connected to a computer under the table cloth at the Siemens PLM annual user meetin, I'm told, though it's only a laptop. zSpace has been showing its technology for years, and each year appears to be further down the road. It is a solution searching for an industry, zSpace could be used for medical images ("The appendix we will be taking out is right here"), movies and special effects (I hear James Cameron was shown zSpace and had a favorable impression) and product design, just to name a few.

zSpace's Amanda Scott, with her 3D glasses, can see a holographic image of the NX assembly.

The integration with Teamcenter visualization mockup (years ago known as VisMockup before it was acquired by Siemens) is the first CAD integration for zSpace. To interact with a model using zSpace, even with the glasses, seems fairly natural and easy. I am working in 3D after. I wave the stylus around in the air with a model that rises up to met me, also seeming to be 3D. Compare that to the surface on which your mouse moves, or the screen where your model is displayed. Both methord are 2D abstractions of 3D space which your brain is working hard to convert.

To make it easier for  Teamcenter visualization mockup users, zSpace has duplicated the familiar compass icon. There are buttons on the stylus, each with a different function.

I look forward to future CAD integrations. Hopefully zSpace doesn't get distracted by a more lucrative industry.