Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Siemens Joins the Rush to Deploy Pushmi-Pullyu CAD

The ignoble Pushmi-Pullyu (“push-me pull-you”) is a two-headed beast made famous by the Doctor Doolittle stories of the 19th Century. The mythical animal is noted for its ability to do either two things at once or struggle to do nothing, and to oscillate between these two extremes. Our 21st Century CAD equivalent is history-free feature-based 3D modeling. For years a few vendors struggled to gain market share with it (CoCreate and Kubotek come to mind), but suddenly Pushmi-Pullyu CAD has become the rage.

SpaceClaim got way more press than it deserved for its new “natural 3D design system” last year, then PTC embraced its inner pushmi-pullyu by buying CoCreate. Today Siemens PLM Software becomes the latest CAD company to abandon the CAD Reich gospel of parameters uber alles with the introduction of what it calls synchronous technology (as if there is something mysteriously asynchronous about using existing 3D CAD tools; but we digress).


The Pushmi-Pullyu, new mascot of Siemens PLM Solutions

No less an authority on these things than Dr. Ken Versprille, the father of NURBS and resident PLM guru at CPDA, says in a published quote (I’ll bet a dollar he was paid to write), “its ability to recognize current geometry conditions and localize dependencies in real time allows synchronous technology to solve for model changes without the typical replay of the full construction history from the point of edit.”

Ken's quote is a real mouthful, so let us translate for the SolidWorks bloggers among our readership: You don’t have to redraw the damn part to make a single damn change all the damn time anymore. The good doctor goes on to say that “… users will see dramatic performance gains. A 100 times speed improvement could be a conservative estimate.”

Wow! Models 100x faster than with Autodesk Inventor and probably 300x faster than CATIA? Siemens resellers must be doubled over with orgasmic spasms at the mere suggestion of such superior results, especially because this new technology will be added to both NX and Solid Edge. Maybe Solid Edge will actually sell some copies again.

When you get the previous word picture washed out of your mind, let us consider something a bit more serious. CAD pundits (self glamourously included as shown below) refer to the Big Four CAD Vendors: Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, Siemens PLM, and PTC. A year ago not one of these had history-free feature-based modeling; now two do. Not that long ago Autodesk and Dassault entered into a bidding war over Seemage; perhaps SpaceClaim just might survive long enough to be so lucky.

A self-proclaimed Leading CAD Pundit caught in the act of meditating on synchronous technology at COFES 2008.

Posted by Randall at 15:42:13 | Permanent Link | Comments (14) |
Comments
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1 - Randall, you have had a breakthrough in your BS-detecting! I haven't had a chance to review Synchronous Modeling yet, but now look forward to doing so more than ever...

Joel (Comment this)

Written by: Joel at 2008/04/22 - 16:19:43
2 - Bojan
"A year ago not one of these had history-free feature-based modeling; now two do."
Actually, it's three. Dassault will soon release V6, it is supposed to have excelent explicit modeling capabilities.
Sorry if you already reported on this, I am new here.

Cheers
 (Comment this)

Written by: Anonymous at 2008/04/22 - 16:29:40
3 - Direct editing has become the rage because it's a badly needed tool. Trying to modify someone else’s design intent using a low level tool like a rollback bar in a history-based modeler takes an insane amount of time.

I'm a CNC machinist/CNC programmer and it's quite common for us to be asked or just expected to modify customers files to help make them manufacturable/ manufacturable at a more reasonable cost. No one wants to pay us for lots of hours to figure out their design intent and more and more customers want the manufactured model to match the designed model.

I could careless who invented or started direct editing. What I do care about greatly is being able to modify customer’s models quickly and easily without having to do it by throwing the parametrics/history in the garbage like is most commonly done now by most machining job shops. How stupid is that?

Perhaps if you had to deal with this situation as often as I do it might not be so funny as you tried to work with a low level tool like a roll back bar stepping through a ton of features trying not to break anything all the while knowing this was taking way too much time.

This is big news because it solves a big problem for many of us who have to use history based solid modelers. I'm hoping this announcement puts tons of pressure on SolidWorks Corp. to focus on needed tools like this and less on bells and whistles most machining job shops have no need or use for. Keep in mind that two of the more popular CAM products (CNC Software-Mastercam and Delcam-FeatureCAM) are hard at working creating CAM add-ins for SolidWorks.

Machine shops who have to work with their customers on design are going to need the kinds of tools that Siemens/UGS showed today. If we get the tools we need perhaps you won't be the only one hogging the pool. Maybe that's why you don't want us to have them? :>)

Jon Banquer
San Diego, CA


 (Comment this)

Written by: Jon Banquer at 2008/04/22 - 18:57:14
4 - Jon, I'm sorry you misunderstand my post. I'm not saying history-free CAD is bad, I'm trying to poke fun at the hype surrounding it. Dassault and Autodesk truly are at a competitive disadvantage with this announcement. We in the media were told for weeks that an announcement was coming that would change the CAD world. What we got was an announcement that changes the NX and Solid Edge toolsets; Kubotek and CoCreate already changed the world of CAD years ago by pushing ahead with this technology when SolidWorks et. al. pushed forward with parametrics. We've covered this thoroughly and seriously at CADCAMNet, and I invite you to take a look at our coverage there. (Comment this)

Written by: Randall at 2008/04/22 - 21:45:33
5 - Randall -- Don't forget Trispectives/IronCAD. They did this stuff back in 1995. They could "pushmi-pullyu" long before Kubotek or CoCreate could even maintain edge tangencies.

But who cares about history? (groan.) (Comment this)

Written by: evanyares at 2008/04/22 - 23:42:42
6 - Randall -- I think you need to take a closer look at what we announced. Its not just the introduction of history free, which is certainly not new. Its the introduction of a technology that allows users to use both history based and history free techniques on the same model. Its not an either or choice anymore. Whats more the users can go back and forth as they wish. I think this is truly new and worthy of at least some of the hype that has surrounded it. (Comment this)

Written by: chris at 2008/04/23 - 10:11:34
7 - For the record, despite randall's leg-pulling, in my experience Ken Versprille doesn't typically get paid for quotes in press releases but does it because he believes there is a value in the technology. There is also, in my view, an eye to ongoing and future work from the same avenues that he is quoting along, but that is acceptable in my mind.

More importantly, Ken doesn't typically spout quotes that he does not believe. (Please note, I do not work for Ken, but have often asked him for quotes, where such discussions come up. I do absolutely respect the man through our experiences together.)

R (Comment this)

Written by: Anonymous at 2008/04/23 - 10:29:23
8 - Chris and "R",
I will be taking a close -- and satire-free -- look at synchronous technology in this week's CADCAMNet. (There's a reason this is free and CADCAMNet is by subscription.) There are significant differences in this implementation as compared to other history-free implementations. As for Ken V., I owe him a leg-pulling. (Comment this)

Written by: Randall at 2008/04/23 - 10:35:28
9 - Looking forward to the 'rest of the story' in CADCAMNet. An approach that gets you attention on the free side to help sell the pay side makes a lot of sense - as long as the basic idea of the free side is in the same direction as the pay side, or else it ends up not being a very good preview. (Comment this)

Written by: chris at 2008/04/23 - 12:39:50
10 - Chris, I'll take that as a "Boo Hiss" on proclaiming the rise of Pushmi-Pullyu CAD. (Comment this)

Written by: Randall at 2008/04/23 - 14:07:28
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