CADFaster – 3D Viewing on the Web

Seems like a lot of PR departments recently are mistaking me for a real writer or something these days, because this is the second request for a review that I’ve received this week. My email address must have fallen into a new spam pool.  This product has been around for a while, but sometimes it takes me a while to get around to trying things out. The email I got had the subject “News Item: Updated iPad app for Sharing 3D CAD models”. Or thereabouts.

CADFaster sounds like a familiar story. Upload SolidWorks models onto a web server in some viewable format, and allow people with web access to view, measure, and markup your 3D data. It sounds similar to eDrawings, and it sounds exactly like the now defunct 3D Instant Website.

3D Instant Website was introduced a decade ago, and was part of the SolidWorks Professional bundle. You could upload right from SW, and send people a link to a site where they could use an eDrawings like interface to fiddle with and discuss a model. It was a great idea, but it was underused, and was just retired last year. SolidWorks replaced it with a new paid service called !nFuze, which by any account has flopped.

So I guess that’s where CADFaster comes in. SolidWorks has tried twice and failed twice in this same space. Maybe CADFaster can make it happen by spreading it out to more CAD tools, and more platforms. You can export data from the SolidWorks plugin for CADFaster to be viewed on the cloud, or though a standalone file on iPad or PC. And that’s great. That’s just like 3DIW used to do for free.

CADFaster by the way is not free. There’s nothing wrong with paying for software, but let’s see how they sell this one. You can buy rent CADFaster for SolidWorks for periods of 1 month, 6 months or 1 year, at €14.99, €69.00 or €199.00 respectively. There is no option to buy it outright, I suppose because of the server storage component, even though it can be used without the remote data storage. (By exporting to a file instead of exporting to the cloud, you can use CADFaster in the same way that you would use an eDrawing file that includes the viewer). They are trying to sell this like the doomed !nFuze, and it works like the defunct 3DIW.

The interface is nice enough. The performance (fluidity of rotation) is pretty good. It allows sections, measurements, screen shots, and several visibility options. Using it with assemblies is nice, and for very large models (think architecture) you can actually walk into them for nice visualization with hidden or transparent parts.

They have versions for SolidWorks, Revit, and Microstation. In a brief email exchange with CADFaster, I understand that they feel the bulk of the market for them is in the BIM (architectural) world, so SolidWorks support is taking a back seat for now. The SolidWorks plugin has not yet been updated for SW 2012.

But there are some odd things about CADFaster. It allows you to view on a PC or on an iPad. But when signing in for my free trial, it asked me for a Google or Yahoo login. And yet they do not offer an Android app.

Another odd thing is that it crashed both CADFaster and SolidWorks the first time I made a change to the settings and ran it to make a local file. This was probably due to the fact that I’m using SW 2012, and the plugin has not been updated for that use.

Overall, this is a cool visualization app, and assuming that we will eventually see an Android app for it, it would become more attractive. I don’t like the rental scheme. There was nothing on the web about volume discounts or how to handle multiple licenses. I’ll be interested to see if this product stays afloat. I liked 3DIW, and that fizzled. !nFuze never got off the ground. I like the concept here, and it seems to be better executed than either of those previous failed products, with the benefit of a decade’s worth of hind sight.