A very informative Central Canada Regional Users Group (CCRUG) Conference was held last Thursday at the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga. In case you were not aware, the CCRUG is a volunteer organization that serves the common needs of users of Siemens PLM Software in Central Canada. The conference began with a corporate update by Terry Bergin, the Director of Sales at Siemens PLM Software. The update was then followed by several presentations. The presentations were organized into three streams: A NX track, a SolidEdge / Velocity track, and a Teamcenter / Simulation track. In this post we shall focus on three presentations from the NX track: Synchronous Technology in NX6, What’s New in NX 6, and NX6 Process Automation. Robin Spick an application specialist with Siemens PLM Software in Canada was the presenter. Robin did an outstanding job in all three presentations.
1) Synchronous Technology in NX6
A few years ago, History based modeling revolutionized the CAD industry. For the first time users were able to capture the design intent of a product and make rapid changes to their designs. However, as good as it is, History based modeling does have limitations. For example, there is no simple way to handle multi-CAD data, since generally imported CAD data is made up of dumb solids that cannot be easily modified. Also, an unplanned change can require the editing of several features and can be time consuming to the point that some customers end up remodeling entire parts. And finally, it can be quite difficult and time consuming to make changes to models created by other users, especially if they did not do a good job of capturing the design intent. Synchronous Technology (ST) was developed to address these limitations by bridging History based modeling with History free modeling.
It is important to note that you can still do History based modeling in NX6 if you wish. Basically, there are now two modes: History mode and History free mode (or Synchronous mode). You can switch back and forth between the two modes by simply clicking the right mouse button.
An important feature of ST is its powerful selection tools that allow you to quickly and easily collect the geometry you need to use. For example, you can select a group of faces that are coplanar and simply drag them to move their location. Robin also showed us an example where all the holes in an imported model were selected simply with a window select and then deleted. All of this would have taken much longer in previous versions of NX.
A very exciting feature of ST is its ability to work with multi-CAD data. Robin selected several slots in an imported model and was able to rotate them very quickly. In another example, Robin was able to cut and paste a mounting boss from an imported Pro/E model into an NX model using simply drag and drop. These are things that previously would have been extremely time consuming.
Also exciting is the way that driving dimensions can be added to any face and then one can modify the model’s geometry by changing these dimensions. This means that you do not need to know how a model was designed in order to change it. And it also means that you can add driving dimensions to an imported model and hence modify it very easily.
Click here for ST video demonstration
2) What’s New in NX6?
Next Robin showed us some of the major changes to the interface in NX6. There is now a full screen mode, which includes a toolbar manager that can be docked anywhere in the screen. Also, one can now scroll through icons, this saves on the amount of screen real estate required. In addition to this there is now a command filter that allows users to quickly find a command and then use it right away. Another enhancement is True Shading: a new functionality that allows all NX6 users to do simple renders.
NX6 will introduce the NX Relations Browser, which displays a visual diagram of all the relations and wave links in a part or an assembly. This is something that many users can benefit from. Other enhancements include: Geolus (a geometry search engine), a fully customizable hole wizard, as well as design study and optimization tools.
Of course ST is the single biggest enhancement to NX6. There are also many other enhancements to NX6 that we were not able to cover due to time constraints. Here is a link to some of these enhancements.
3) NX6 Process Automation
Have you ever wanted to automate your designs without programming? If this is the case you might want to look into Product Template Studio (PTS).
Robin mentioned an interesting statistic that 60 to 80 percent of parts are recreated from other parts. What PTS allows you to do is to make any part a template that can later be used to generate new parts. These templates capture design rules and have a graphical interface where a user can easily enter design inputs, this way a non-CAD user can easily create a new part. What if someone enters a design input that is invalid? PTS has validation and checking tools that warn the user if a design input they entered is not valid (e.g. a hole is too big for a boss).
The best part is that the design rules are embedded into the template, so if you e-mail a PTS template to another user, they will be able to use it right away. Note that with some other Process Automation products you would need to e-mail a database as well as the template. Note that there is a PTS author license for creating templates and a PTS user license.
Finally, Robin wrapped up by saying that thanks to ST users will be able to use PTS on imported models. This is something that many customers will find very helpful. Below is a demo of PTS from YouTube.
In conclusion, these were very interesting and helpful demonstrations. Even outside of these presentations there was much talk of ST at the conference. In another presentation Cory Goulden from National Steelcar described how ST is helping them reduce their CAD rework. We also heard Marc Lafontaine from Maya Simulation describe how ST can help analysts modify geometry very quickly without having to spend time trying to understand how the model was built. Note that that what Cory and Marc described are common challenges in CAD. ST was created to help customers with these challenges.
Thank you, to CCRUG for a very informative conference.
- by Joseph Vera
