Direct Modeling Discussion at isicad.ru Exceeds 100 Comments

Maybe some of you have read "New Armor for Rhino" by Dmitry Ushakov who artistically and in all related details reported about new capabilities of Rhino 3D demonstrated recently in London at Rhino UK User Meeting 2011. Above all, Dmitry described RhinoWorks, the LEDAS plug-in which complements direct modeling (DM) capabilities of Rhino by rejecting tree derivation in favor of a constraint set. As a result, RhinoWorks plug-in can recognize design intent by identifying many constraints automatically (coincidence, parallel alignment, equality of radii, etc.). The mechanism is based on a highly productive geometric constraint solver, a unique LEDAS solution available for licensing to third parties.

Although Dmitry received a lot of very positive references, the English version of his paper did not generate any readers discussion at isicad.net just because our modest English version of the portal does not enable commenting. But the original Russian publication of the paper provoked a hot intensive discussion which today, 3 weeks after the release, today celebrated the 100th comment with no clear signs of decay. (By the moment I finalized this post, there are already 104 comments).

The discussion has involved comparatively not so much internal technical issues of DM, but rather concentrated on its organizational context (e.g. should and can enterprise use one CAD or their diversity is practically inevitable?) and general opinions about how new technologies co-exist and compete with traditional solutions. In particular, some people from industry incline to believe that they should be a priori very suspicious to potential shortcomings of the innovations to leave vendors possibilities to emphasize advantages. Nevertheless, opponents of DM have multiply proposed the examples of models implemented in traditional CADs but, as they imagined, cannot be implemented with DM methods. Such examples were not so successful as expected:).

I can hardly recommend you to use Google translator for reading the discussion in question however, it seemed to impress Dmitry Ushakov who perhaps will write a special paper to analyze how people (mis)understand DM, which properties they mistakenly ascribe to the new technology and which advantages they do not recognize...

Best, 
David
@levin_david , @TheDavidLevin (Russian)

CAD/PLM in June: How I Saw It From Russia Or Within the Country. Part II: PTC, ASCON, and Autodesk

See Part I: Top Systems and Siemens PLM

3. We at isicad/LEDAS are very sorry that due to technical reasons we could not take advantage of the generous and kind invitation from PTC to attend a recent PlanetPTC at Las Vegas. I tried to extract some information especially interesting for me from twitter, from Oleg Shilovitsky, and again from Roopinder Tara. Here for the purposes of my amateur psychoanalysis I took a repeatedly quoted phrase by Jim Heppelmann “We don’t call it CAD anymore. I think we can assume that all design is now computer aided.  It’s not 1970.” Well, maybe traditionally subordinate role of PDM in relation to MCAD was for a long time haunting Heppelmann (the founder of quite/very successful WindChill) and then, finally, he has got a chance to win back by killing Pro/E, especially as such killings did just come into fashion:). Oedipus complex? I feel sympathy for the PTC at least because of its Soviet/Russian origin and by the fact that today for many of its software development managers the Russian language is native. However I do not believe that this PTC can by the overall income approach DS and Autodesk.  

Maybe because today people are very much excited by Creo, we could last week see such a twitter discussion:

• Roopinder Tara:  RT Creating sphere with Creo Parametric 1.0 http://bit.ly/j8yowR . Do we really need a tutorial for this? Where's the ease of use ?
• Blake Courter @rtara Creating a sphere in SpaceClaim: http://twitvid.com/6AJCI
• Dmitry Ushakov @bcourter @rtara Parametric design with spheres in Rhino 3D based on LEDAS LDD http://t.co/joE2yU8
• Jon Banquer  @dmitryushakov @bcourter @rtara If you create a parametric package for SpaceClaim I'll buy it. That's a promise.
• Dmitry Ushakov  @JonBanquer @bcourter @rtara Agreed! :)

The day after tomorrow (6) at the Rhino user conference in London, Dmitry Ushakov will demonstrate how the LEDAS Driving Dimensions module transforms Rhino into MCAD and how it can enhance any CAD with direct modeling facilities.    

4. ASCON, the leading Russian CAD company, is known not only by its strong KOMPAS 3D MCAD as well as PLM components but also by practical achievements in SaaS, and more generally – by their serious attention to modern trends in CAD/PLM industry. ASCON is increasing its marketing activity by investing obviously considerable resources. Of course, they organize a lot of events, in particular often coming to the end users in the cities and towns all around Russia and CIS. But last week the company held a comparatively unusual conference “Technologies of ASCON” where my attention was attracted by a statement made by the ASCON director of business development Evgeniy Bakhin: “We want our original geometric modeler to become a product to be worldwide distributed independently of KOMPAS 3D”.

Several days later, at the big event in Saint-Petersburg on PLM in shipbuilding,  Alexey Petrov, the ASCON deputy director for working with key customers, made a presentation with a message that big Russian customers, such as from defense, because of economical and security reasons, should prefer national Russian PLM solutions. This message, couple years ago more intensive, is for sure a part of marketing which maybe is reasonable (I mean - effective) when addressed to the defense customers. Alexey demonstrated a chart from IDC (however from 2007 ) which shoes that more than 70% of CAD related software in Russia is imported:

5. Autodesk CIS is implementing its Big Marketing Project called SAPRYAZHENIE (see here   about the Russian language trick with this name as well as characteristics of the project itself).  The team of Autodesk managers and experts, together with active members of the Autodesk CIS community (today – 3000+ registered members), including related bloggers, are subsequently visiting 13 cities in Russia and CIS where they with real triumph meet local Autodesk today’s and potential users: tell them about fresh products and solutions, give prompt technological consulting, explain business schemes, etc. In June, the event was held in 5 cities in European, Siberian, and Far East regions, in some cases situated 10 000 km from each other… From all what is known, heard, and seen, one can conclude that Autodesk is very smartly addressing young generation of engineering software users: kindle their interest and enthusiasm by the methods and in the language mostly natural and effective for youngsters. Note also that by the beginning of their road show, Autodesk CIS released the first issues of “The Autodesk CIS Community Magazine”  which also integrates their user community…

What is the Strength of LEDAS?

In the last month, LEDAS was happy about two events related to academic domain.

One of our young specialists and effective managers, Egor Ermolin (29) got his PhD in mathematics. His thesis is named "Collision Detection and Resolution on Polygonal Models". Note that the methods and algorithms considered in Egor's work take into account relevant laws of physics - the feature which positively distinguishes them from the methods today used in computer games and makes them especially valuable in digital prototyping within CAD domain. It's worth mentioning that Egor has had a choice: to get his PhD either in computer science or in mathematical modeling. Unfortunately, in Russia (don't know how about in other countries) to get a PhD in math is traditionally more difficult than in computer science. In particular, because pure mathematicians (who vote for the approval of PhD) are often suspicious against people who came from industrial software development. However Egor has chosen a more difficult way and has won.

From 16 to 20 May, i.e. in parallel with COFES 2011, Novosibirsk University, together with some institutes of the Novosibirsk Research Center and other respectable organizations, has held the 49th (!) International Scientific Student Conference called “Students and Innovation Process”. Ivan Sysoev (23) from LEDAS was awarded by the 1st Prize for his work "A System for Editing 3D-geometry Based on Geometrical Constraint Solver”. Ivan is an active member of the RhinoWorks team, his important contribution is about creating some key algorithms of automatic recognition and maintenance of design intent of a history-free 3D-model .

Note that previous generations of the LEDAS people also actively took part in the above mentioned conference, including Dmitry Ushakov, today the LEDAS CEO and scientific adviser of Egor and Ivan.

The strength of LEDAS is probably it its permanent ability to attract young talented people and effectively include them into creative activities that favor the progress of individuals and the whole team.

I believe that if a company wants to have clear competitive advantages in the market of science-intensive software development, or simplier - in the market of solving very hard software-related problems, then it must possess a strong and broad scientific competence in relevant domains. When we speak about CAD/PLM, this seems to me absolutely obvious. Later, I want to discuss this topic in more details.

Constraint-based parametric modeling with RhinoWorks from LEDAS: Webinar, June 8

What it's About
Register Now, Attend, and Get a $100 Discount on RhinoWorks 2.0 
  
The picture below is a fragment of the full cover from isicad.ru #81(Russian edition) which says "Rhinoceros is ploughing. RhinoWorks - Revolution in Direct Modeling" (NB: plough in colloquial Russian also means work very hard, ~ as a dog,...):