Declarative Modeling part of V6

3D Perspectives, one of Dassault’s blogs that covers CAD, recently put up a post that talks about direct modeling with DS products. Not surprisingly, they don’t want to call it “direct edit”, they have their own name for it – Declarative Modeling. Alright, whatever. You can “declare” specifications. Of course you can.

The main thing to talk about here is that V6 is by now about 3 years old. Not much in terms of real information about how it all works has trickled down to SW users. Seeing as how we will be inheriting the V6 platform in the next couple of years, I think we have a right – and even an obligation – to be curious about it.

The blog post starts with a quote that seems a little troubling:

Warning:  3D geek alert.  This is a technical blog post.

Whew. That’s an easy way to lower a reader’s expectations in a hurry. Maybe I’ll put up a new tagline for my blog:

Warning: No marketing double speak or buzzwords here.

Anyway, there are a few things you might learn about V6 in the article. The main thing is that the V6 kernel is used in everything from 3DVIA to Catia to Simulia to Delmia, and it enables direct edit. This means that all data, including non-native data is editable with V6.

The implementation of V6 for SolidWorks is not likely to be exactly the same as the implementation for Catia, but here’s a video included at the 3D Perspectives site. The manipulator looks a bit like the Solid Edge steering wheel, and that little wheel interface at the bottom of the screen looks familiar. But it still has a bunch of toolbar icons around the screen.

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What you see here is some direct edit workflow, a nice little Indent-like function, and some library usage. Now library usage in V6 has the potential to be a lot more important, because every feature is an entry in a database, that means every feature can be a library feature. I assume this would require some meta data to be useful. Libraries in my experience tend to be very underused in SW, so bringing that idea from Catia forward to SW might be a little tricky in practice.

So when we are talking about direct edit in Solid Edge and NX and SolidThinking, we are really just preparing ourselves for functionality that will likely be found in the next incarnation of SolidWorks.