An excellent SolidWorks User Group Meeting was held last Wednesday night in Toronto at the Days Inn on Wilson Road.  The evening began with a complementary barbeque dinner for the guests. Two excellent presentations followed. In the first one Eric van Essen from Javelin Technologies showed us some very helpful SolidWorks tips, and in the second presentation Jon Hirschtick talked about SolidWorks and the future of CAD.

 

For those of you who have yet to go to a SolidWorks User Group Meeting, these sessions are a good opportunity to network with other users and to learn some excellent tips. Chris White and Richard Matthews do a great job running the Ontario SolidWorks and Cosmos Group. This particular session was very well attended with SolidWorks customers from all over Ontario.

 

Just before Eric’s presentation we had the pleasure of seeing Richard Doyle from SolidWorks. I met Richard last year when he hosted the SolidWorks Technical Summit in Toronto. Richard talked about the success of the SolidWorks User Group Network and also told us about some great websites such as the SolidWorks Forums and interesting blogs like Solid Smack.

 

 

Ted Lee from Javelin introduced Eric’s presentation by quoting one of Jon’s visionary statements that he made a few years back, that SolidWorks should be as “easy to use as a light switch”. In this presentation, Eric actually modeled a light switch and in the process showed us some very powerful yet easy to use SolidWorks tools. One of my favourites was the FilletXpert, which allows you to seamlessly create fillets without having to worry about the order in which they should be selected. FilletXpert also has a pop up toolbar that allows you to automatically select multiple edges (e.g. all concave edges). Layout Sketches was another great tool in the presentation. Eric showed us that if we delete an “On Plane” constraint on a Layout Sketch it then becomes a 3D layout sketch that can be used to simulate advanced mechanisms. Just a side note we at CADmech are big fans of Layout Sketches and use them on a regular basis. They are great for conceptual design and for controlling an entire model with one single sketch. Finally, Eric showed us some very useful short cut keys, such as the S key that is used to pop up a context sensitive shortcut bar. As well as the F9, F10 and F11 keys that are used to View/Hide the Feature Manager Tree, the Toolbars, and activate/deactivate the Full Screen respectively.

 

 

Jon Hirschtick is an excellent presenter, and always gives us interesting insights. He began his presentation by saying, “we are half way done”. Meaning that as good as SolidWorks is, there is still room for improvement. Then he listed four current trends that we in the CAD industry really need to look at: Hosted Computing, Open Source, Video Games, and Touch Interfaces.

 

1) Hosted Computing

 

A few years ago many of us used Eudora or MS Outlook for our personal e-mail. Nowadays, almost everyone uses a hosted e-mail application, such as Yahoo! or Gmail for personal use. Online banking is also a very popular hosted application. Hosted applications have several advantages, for example they can generally run on any OS or any browser. They don’t need to be installed and they are automatically upgraded. This means everyone is always using the same version. But what does this mean to the future of CAD? Jon gave us a demonstration of BluePrint Now a free online DWG editor, which is available at SolidWorks Labs. While it is only a prototype BluePrint Now was very impressive. Jon mentioned that it will take some time for 3D CAD systems to become hosted applications. Also, some hosted applications like Google Docs have a long way to go to become as powerful as installed applications. Nonetheless, it is interesting to imagine what the future holds in this arena.

 

 

2) Open Source

 

Jon began by dispelling a few myths about the Open Source movement. Unlike what some may think, the developers are not an undisciplined group of hackers; instead they are a very organized group of sponsored programmers. The companies that create Open Source systems are also highly focused. Jon pointed to several existing Open Source applications such as: Linux, Firefox, Open Office, and MySQL. Another interesting fact about Open Source products is that they have a very transparent development process. For example bugs.mysql.com lists all the bugs in MySQL and lists the developer that is working on the issue. Now how does this affect the future of CAD? Jon showed us an interesting site called Creative Commons. “Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share” (from Wikipedia). This is a form of collaboration used by authors, scientists, artists, and educators that perhaps could be extended for design projects as well. Jon mentioned that we might be able to benefit from increased collaboration in our respective industries.

 

3) Video Games

 

We saw that video games are setting the standard in graphics when Jon showed us some excellent examples of some games with high-end graphics. Further to this many video games now have complex physical simulations that previously only existed in CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) software. In fact there is special hardware that can enable real-time physics in video games, such as PhysX by NVIDIA. What effect is this having on CAD? The effect is that the new generation of CAD users will have very high expectations thanks to the graphics that they experienced in video games. In fact CAD graphics are improving as we speak. In SolidWorks there is Ambient Occlusion, which can make your models look very realistic. Also, there is Spherical Environment Maps (please see the graphic below).

 

 

4) Touch Interfaces

 

The next generation of CAD users will be people that grew up with simple touch interfaces like the iPhone, GPS gadgets and the Wii. The SolidWorks interface was designed for the generation that used MS Office. An excellent example of a touch interface currently used in CAD is the Space Pilot. What will the future bring? Jon hinted at touch interfaces similar to the Wii in CAD. He added that SolidWorks should be getting more into hardware, in order to optimize the entire user experience.

 

After the presentation, Jon answered many interesting questions from the audience. The users were very happy to have learned new tips from Eric and also glad to have seen Jon’s vision of the future of CAD. Much was learned. To wrap up, here is an interview of Jon by Ben Eadie that was done in SolidWorks World 2007. Here Jon also touches upon many of the same themes from the user group meeting regarding the future of CAD.

 

- by Joseph Vera