There are several more or less obvious objective and subjective reasons to systematize the main trends in CAD/PLM development at the beginning of 2011. The isicad editorial board has asked its leading expert and reviewer Vladimir Malukh to characterize these trends, and his opinion formed the basis for the article published two weeks ago at isicad.ru in Russian and just published in English at isicad.net.
To give a more pronounced position of isicad.ru, Vladimir’s paper is extended by the Appendix combining an interview with the author and some elements of a Round Table, involving along with Vladimir Malukh, also Dmitry Ushakov and me.
Vladimir has outlined 12 trends and then we commented some of them. For example, we discussed whether Autodesk, DS, or SpaceClaim can really be acquired. Dmitry added his opinion about future of direct editing. I espressed some concerns related to whether CAD could or should be used by everyone. Also I said something about a very simplified approach to a so-called sustainable design...
Recently I read the review of Vladimir Malukh and agree mainly with his vision of new trends of the CAD industry.
ReplyDeleteI just want to pay attention on one aspect of the problem:
Rejecting of the “history-based” approach to solid modeling and rejecting “parametric” approach to solid modeling are the two different things, though very often they are used as synonyms.
Traditionally these two approaches appeared as a single paradigm – parametric feature-based approach of PTC. But, actually, what is the remarkable in the approach of PTC is “parametric”, and what is awful is the “feature-based” (or in another words “history-based”).
Parametric modeling might be neither “feature-based” nor “history-based”. As well as parametrics don’t need to live only in 2D sketches (as it happens now in traditional parametric feature-based approach).
Were we have a really powerful parametric solver (that can resolve in real time corresponding systems of equations containing hundreds of thousands of equations) we could implement parametric approach in 3D space, and to work with solid parts as a whole.
In this case both direct modeling methods and parametric modeling methods could find their natural place in one common workplace.
The good news that we – in Cloud Invent - has such a super solver (we called it Cheetah). And we do believe that this will be the Real CAD Revolution – the real Great Unification of direct modeling and parametric modeling.