Siemens UGS PLM Conference and Solid Edge V20 Launch Event...

When:    Thursday 12th July 2007
Where:   Villa Park, Birmingham

SOLID Applications Ltd will be launching Solid Edge V20 at our next customer meeting on July 12th 2007, at Villa Park in Birmingham.

The event will also include Customer presentations and present the Vision for SIEMENS UGS Teamcenter & PLM.

To reserve your place at this, Free of Charge Customer Meeting, please call, email, or complete the online registration form on our website.

Click here for more information

Solid Edge V20 Review Written by Al Dean, MCAD Magazine Monday, 18 June 2007

Changes are afoot at the company now known as UGS PLM Software. The acquisition of UGS by Siemens has been one of the most hotly talked about moves in the CAD industry for the last few months, but at present, the only thing that seems to have changed are email addresses and signatures. While the business is going through some transition, a couple of things have remained constant – and one of those is the company’s mid-range offering, Solid Edge.

If you look at the mainstream product development software market, Solid Edge has always been seen as the poorer cousin to the likes of SolidWorks and Inventor - in terms of marketing, awareness and sales. But technically the system has always been able to hold its own in benchmarks and competitive analysis.

The fundamental awareness problem changed two years ago with the launch of Velocity Series. This saw the power within Solid Edge combined with a number of different offerings from the UGS stable. Solid Edge provides the key 3D modelling and 2D documentation portion of Velocity Series, while data management is delivered with Teamcenter Express, simulation capabilities with FEMAP and, more recently, NC programming with NX CAM Express.

But while Velocity Series is about a range of integrated tools and technologies to create a fully managed environment that covers the majority of the part to production workflow, what we’re focussing on here is the latest release of Solid Edge V20.

As with all Solid Edge releases, there are several key themes into which each of the updates and enhancements have been shoe horned and V20 is no different. It concentrates on design collaboration, working with large assemblies and engineering productivity – so let’s crack on and walk through each in turn.

Design collaboration

A good place to start is 2D migration. All vendors are chasing the huge AutoCAD user community and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future – after all, there’s a lot of people left out there using 2D and they all want them as 3D users. For those that missed it, UGS released a free 2D application last year and so far it’s been downloaded by over 50,000 users. This took all of the 2D drafting tools available inside Solid Edge and reduced the cost to absolute zero, meaning that instead of maintaining AutoCAD licenses, you get 2D for free. But within those tools and within Solid Edge at large you also have tools to assist in making use of AutoCAD data – and these have been updated.

For example, the system now supports the ACAD Colour 7 attribute which automatically inverts black/white lines depending on background sheet colour, so your drawings are displayed exactly as they were in AutoCAD. The Solid Edge drafting tools now support multi-sheet drawings, Image and Smart Frame objects, Images with drawings, blocks, embedded documents and such. The system has also been extended to support the loading of Xrefs from AutoCAD – these aren’t externalised and managed as you can in SolidWorks, but it does mean your DWG data loads correctly.

Moving onto 3D data exchange, there is now an additional cost option for a Catia V5 bi-directional translator that allows you to read and write .CatPart and .CatProduct files. It doesn’t replace the existing Catia V4 tools and is available for purchase separately. While the V4 translators cost around £495, the new V5 translator is priced a great deal higher at an additional £4,995. Costly, yes, but in comparison to acquiring Catia, even with the recent changes within the V5 pricing model, it still represents a significant cost savings if you’re just looking to load and write out Catia V5 models. Elsewhere you can read Pro/E Wildfire 3 files and should you want to, you can now load in STL files and use it as reference data.

Product planning

Now, let’s look at the tools brought to this release for planning a new product. The last few releases have seen tools added to Solid Edge which make the planning of complex products less painful, by allowing you to work at a very schematic, 2D sketch level, then fleshing out the design as it progresses. This hasn’t changed in Solid Edge V20, but you are now given much more control both over the product and how the data is managed.

One thing that’s increasingly desirable in these days of dramatically reduced time to market is the ability to reuse portions of existing designs in a new project. So, with this in mind, the new Structure Editor allows you load an existing product Structure from Teamcenter and inspect and visualise that structure, and run ‘where used’ searches for example, with the eventual goal of reusing either all of it or just portions. It allows you to choose to replicate certain parts or sub-assemblies (so they remain the same) and have them copied and placed in the database as new items (so you can edit them). You have full control over the process and it’s shown in a split window format, with the source assembly on the left, the target on the right. Both views are synchronised, so as you expand sub-systems or scroll, they remain the same.

Another very useful new tool is the Assembly Auto-constrain capability. This allows you to take an imported or legacy assembly, load it into Solid Edge and use some intelligent tools to add assembly mating conditions. It’s not fully automated, but does get you there much faster than doing such work manually.

Now, let’s look at the tools available for working with really large assemblies. The first is Zones. These are commonly used in the shipbuilding, auto and aero industries to sub-divide a product into more manageable chunks and V20 brings Zones to the mainstream – where typically it has been the sole preserve of the higher-end system. Zones allow you to define spatial envelopes to isolate specific areas of a product. A zone is intelligent and will update dynamically to include either parts that it entirely contains (the Inside option) or that are within or intersect partially with that envelope (Overlapping option). To create them, they’re defined either by dragging out a box or selecting parts you want within it. When stored within the assembly file, the user can choose to open just a specific Zone and the system will just load those parts into memory – you do have the full product structure available in the PathFinder. When you combine this tool with the new intelligent caching (which will selectively unload parts from memory if you haven’t used or referenced them within a specific time frame), you have the potential to make large assembly working much more efficient.

Connected to this is the new Drawing Review Mode. Essentially, this disconnects your drawing file from the source 3D assembly. This means you just load the drawing and nothing else – but can still actually work with it. All manner of 2D dimensions and annotations can be added, measurements taken and jobs printed. As soon as you perform an action that requires 3D data (such as adding a new view or an isometric dimension), the system will just load the data you need – meaning that you take the performance hit only when you absolutely have to.

Productivity enhancements

In this section I’m going to take a quick look-see at some of the other updates which didn’t quite fit into the first two categories. The first is the impressive new Goal Seeking tools. Solid Edge has always allowed you to make the most of 2D working practices, either for sketching or planning more complex product. This enables you to take a basic 2D sketch, create some parameters, then have the system vary a given input or variable to reach a desired design goal. You can only use one input and one output, but it adds a great deal of intelligence and can be integrated into the 3D modelling process very easily to add more intelligence.

Another update for this release is support for grouping, both within the assembly and feature tree. You can create feature groups with a part model to assist with tidying things up – unlike other systems, these require that your groups do not break the feature construction history and will maintain it where possible. Within an assembly context, it allows you to create assemblies or sub-systems from flat hierarchies, which will be useful for both existing assemblies that need a little organisation, for product planning and of course when working with complex imported assemblies.
Conclusion

Here we have Solid Edge V20 highlights in a nutshell. It’s another rock solid release that shows a number of things. The first is that the development team has a real handle on what its users are doing and where the boundaries of the application are being pushed – hence the Zoning, Structure Editor and other assembly handling tools. The first two (Structure Editor and Zoning) are going to be extremely useful for many users and it’s fantastic to see these types of technology filtering down from the high-end systems into the mainstream where they are just as applicable. Elsewhere, UGS seems to have realised that people do work with third-party data and has provided some intelligent tools that allow you to bring data in, work it into shape very quickly, and get on with the job in hand.

Finally, there’s always the thought leadership and I love the introduction of the Goal Seek tools – yes, it’s limited to just one input, but you can do something really useful with it and I would hope this gets expanded upon as there is always a need to solve fundamental engineering problems at the very early stage. And when you consider that those tools are available in the free 2D application, that’s a powerful thing indeed – if not unique

To sum up Solid Edge V20 is an impressive release, one that continues much of the good work done in previous versions. While the Siemens acquisition is still at the very formative stage and it’s not quite the right time to comment on it, it’s clear that Solid Edge is being developed aggressively and with the advent of the Velocity Series, is starting to take the position it has deserved all along within the mainstream market.

Copyright 2007 SOLID Applications Ltd. All rights reserved

The statements in this newsletter that are not historical statements, including statements regarding expected benefits of the product, adoption by customers, continued innovation and other statements identified by forward looking terms such as "may," "will," "expect," "plan," "anticipate" or "project," are forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements, including, among others, risks relating to developments in the PLM industry, competition, failure to innovate and intellectual property. SAL disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.