Spaceclaim’s new version

A little racy for a CAD site maybe. Certainly got guy’s attention, though. I think she got “voted off the island”, because stodgy engineering manager types thought “getting it” wasn’t exactly what the young CAD students had in mind. They removed her from the site, but I got old pictures from Jeff Mirisola, who had a stash of Juliannas, and who by the way is also currently unaccounted for. Uh, I think I’ll let that one go.

And then there’s the CCNTV announcer:

A quote from the CCNTV site (owned in part by a woman): “Hosts: our wonderful female hosts, with great legs and brains, include Amy Adams, and Kira Cauthorn”. Kira is pictured. Speaking of brains, women with brains are a lot sexier than you might think:

Aw, come on, you knew where that one was going, and kept on reading. Anyway, follow the link and hear Kira use the phrase “golden dog turd” with an (almost) completely straight face. Wow, is this what CAD reporting has devolved to?

Do these CAD sites take us engineers and designers as pathetic undersexed louts? Are we so easily manipulated by this kind of stuff? Of course we are, that’s why they do it.

Anyway, I haven’t even started yet, and I’m already distracted and WAY off topic.

I believe we were talking about Spaceclaim. Let me try the banner again, this time without the distraction:

First of all, let me express my sincere wish that Howie Markson and the guys at SC have a sense of humor. ;o) This was not a planned distraction, it was, like the rest of my life, a completely spontaneous error in judgment.

As I was about to say before I so rudely interrupted myself, Spaceclaim has a new version called 2007+ Professional which is coming out in November 2007. One of the things that’s new with this version is that they will now allow you to download a beta trial version. On this point, I agree with Grabowski, that trial versions are not all they’re cracked up to be. SolidWorks has survived without one for a long time. There are better ways to try out software, like sitting with someone who knows what they are doing for a few hours to really evaluate it. Face it, you aren’t going to teach yourself all the nuances of the software in an hour. Anyway, it’s a 181 MB download. Have at it.

The thing that intrigued me most about this new version is the sheet metal capabilities. They made a point to stress that they didn’t want to “oversell” the sheet metal, because aparently it is maybe not as strong as it could be. Still, what they showed look good. You could pull flanges, and if it sensed that you were dragging a flange into another wall of the part, it would automatically jog the flange. Sheet metal works like anything else, it is as at home with imported data as with native data.

In case you have forgotten the basic message with Spaceclaim, it is a non-parametric direct modeler, so you just pull or push on edges or faces. Generally it is not suited to complex shapes, but it does machine design parts with the best of them. They claim that they are not out to compete with any of the established players like AutoCAD or SolidWorks, but that they are looking to fill a niche which is for non-CAD users who still need to manipulate CAD data. People like analysts who need to make simplifications, or machinists who want to add stock or show the work piece in various stages, or technical illustrators who need to remove detail, even for people writing ECOs to show the changes requested to the production CAD data, also conceptual design can be handy in Spaceclaim.

One term they are fond of is CAD-neutral. They even go as far as to say that Spaceclaim is not even a CAD system at all, in one comment on this blog by Joe Lichtenberg. I think that is a bit of a stretch. What do you call it if it is not a CAD system. It creates and edits CAD data, and functionally, I really don’t see the distinction.

Spaceclaim says that as of mid-September, they had 98 customers with over 500 licenses of software. They employ 63 people in the original SolidWorks building, and have signed up 21 resellers in US, EU and Asia.

Also new are integrations to Ansys, CircuitWorks and maybe most importantly Rhino. There is the beginnings of an API, with some 20 calls currently available. Working in sections and the ability to pull edges of solids are also new.

The ability to name entities such as faces and place driving dimensions on them and define which one moves when the value is changed sounds suspiciously like trying to get some parametric advantages, and yet selling the capabilities of a non-parametric system. In any case, the dimensions are not linked to sketches, but directly to model faces, so it is still direct modeling, the dimension just remembers one size that you may want to edit frequently.

Yes it does parts, drawings and assemblies, but no, I think they are different from what SolidWorks users are used to. Yes, it does solids and surfaces and multibodies, but again, it does not follow SolidWorks very rule constrained way of working. One very refreshing aspect of this is that you simply do not see features fail, or problems on rebuilds, mainly because there are no features, and rebuilds always happen in real time when editing.

So, check out the new Spaceclaim for yourself. Import something and try to edit it. Sign up for a webinar, and learn the basics from the team.