What’s New in Solid Edge 2022 Part 1: Overview

In a time when other engineering technology developers have seemingly lost interest in CAD, Solid Edge is still developing stuff for people like us. There are some really significant developments in this release that range from sketching to point clouds. Lots of enhancements across the board. It seems like we say this every release, but this will make you happy to be a Solid Edge user. And it’s not all playing catch up.

What are the big developments in Solid Edge 2022?

Interface – The interface is being tweaked to give options that will make users of other systems feel more at home. Solid Edge is generally careful not to torch their existing customers in favor of customers they hope to have some day, so in most cases, if you like the old interface, you can keep using it. But for potential new customers who are used to something different, there are other ways of working and accessing tools. An easier way of saying this is that Solid Edge is trying to accommodate Solidworks users, and the interface has options that will be more familiar.

Convergent hybrid bodies – In 2022 when you make a convergent hybrid model (with mesh and BREP), the mesh stays mesh and the brep stays brep. In the past, the brep converted to mesh. Now you can add regular brep features to mesh bodies.

Subd – more commands for creating and controlling shapes. Subd is another way to leave the history tree behind. They’ve added control sketches, bridging, offsets and split with offset. The initial toolset was kind of basic, and now we can see they are adding more sophisticated tools to take subd from a cool novelty and work toward a real practical replacement for complex surface modeling.

Big Engineering – This wasn’t something anyone said to me, but it’s an impression I got from several of the new functions. There’s a lot of stuff aimed at plant design, large assemblies, fluid flow processing, framing and piping. See the theme? One of the topics that fits under this heading is big point clouds in the assembly. The use case for this they specifically mentioned is scanning an existing plant or facility and then building equipment around it. Dan actually said that they can use a Billion – with a B – points. At that level, the point cloud doesn’t need a faceted mesh, the points have color and become like a transparent skin. He talked a lot about plant design, but I’ll bet there are a ton of other applications for this closer to product and smaller equipment design.

STEP AP242 – I know, you’ve learned to yawn and roll your eyes every time there’s a STEP announcement, right? Except this time. I’ll write more about this in a later article, but you can now export and import PMI attached to the solid. And if you use Synchronous, you can use those imported AP242 PMI dimensions to drive the model. “Who’s dumb now?” says the AP242 imported part to every other imported part. There are other interoperability enhancements in 2022, but this one takes the cake, in my book.

Configurator – Solid Edge is adding a configurator. It’s not Rule Stream, and it’s not DriveWorks, and it’s not Excel. Now you know what I know. Configurators give us engineer to order scenarios, with an interface front end, and drawing output.

Xcelerator Share – This is an on-line viewer/markup program. That short description feels a little anti-climactic. Xcelerator is a Siemens digitalization platform, but the Share part is pure PLM. You won’t find this in the What’s New document, but it’s the kind of thing that I think is LONG overdue, and gives us a realistic and usable implementation of cloud tools. There are logins and permissions, sharing, markups, and direct interaction with Solid Edge. It’s a collaboration crossroads of users and non-users. Because its web-based, its also hardware/platform independent. There’s even a task management component. It’s not quite PDM, but it allows non-CAD users to participate more fully in design review type activities. And yes, it connects to Teamcenter too.

CAM Pro 2.5 – 2 1/2 axis milling, included with Solid Edge.

Catchup – If you follow the What’s New in Solid Edge over the course of several releases, you know that a certain percentage of what is new is often catching up to competitors. (The competitors do that too.) That might make Solid Edge seem more like a follower than a leader, except that there are also a number of areas where Solid Edge is way out in front.

In tomorrow’s post we’ll talk to Dan Staples about what’s new in 2022.