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...
