More synchronous thoughts

The Fading Buzz

Well, the buzz has died down. The party has passed. Now we will see if Synchronous Technology is really going to turn the history-based CAD world on its ear. The pundits are nearly unanimous in saying that it is indeed revolutionary, and that it is going to make huge changes in the directions of all the current history-based CAD products in the not so distant future. But do people who will wind up using the software agree?

Disclosure

I have to make a couple of things clear before I go on. Siemens paid for a trip to Huntsville, Alabama with an overnight there. I spent the night before my meeting with them at Ricky Jordan’s SW user group. At the Siemens offices I met with several executives, technical and marketing types, and others. They gave me a demo and then some hands on training. I got to ask all the questions I wanted to ask. They have given me a copy of the software to use while exploring the possibility of doing some writing projects. In the end, the only writing that has come of it has been whatever you have read here at this blog and a two-part article for Desktop Engineering written months ago, which has yet to be published.

The folks at Siemens are bright, and they believe in what they are doing. They were excited to get an opportunity to put the software in front of people who both write blogs and use software. I believe they also approached other SolidWorks-using bloggers (or blogging SolidWorks users?) but I was the only one who accepted. I’m an independent and can be more flexible with my time than other folks who work for the man. They were courteous and curious, but kept me at arms length. They knew of my love-hate relationship with SolidWorks, and weren’t looking to fan the flames. At the same time they didn’t want to have any ire directed at them. I think they invited me because I was the one SolidWorks blogger who showed the most interest in Synchronous Technology, and I was at least trying to understand it.

Target Audience

Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology is aimed at people who think that history-based modeling is too difficult or time consuming. They want to create a market for CAD non-specialists. The Solid Edge people clearly believe that this brand of  direct modeling is going to not just be competitive with history-based systems, but completely replace it. SEwST is somewhat different because it includes regular Solid Edge, along with SE’s assembly and drawing tools, and sells for the same price as SolidWorks. On the other hand, what’s new about SEwST is most similar to Spaceclaim, and in ways also related to Sketchup Pro, Key Creator, CoCreate and Iron CAD. While details of it are arguably new, I don’t believe you can make a serious case for SEwST being “revolutionary”. The functionality that goes to make it up is already found in other places. I’m not an expert in these other softwares, and I haven’t used them (aside from a short stint on CoCreate many years ago), but I have tried to keep up with the writings of people who have used them.

Available Sources

In addition to actually using the software, I have gone to a couple of sources to read about Synchronous Technology. There is of course the Solid DNA website, which takes the fanboy approach, which I take to mean claiming its just better without giving real concrete reasons. I have a hard time with this approach. There is of course the Synchronous Technology website, which I take to be a corporate blog because of its lack of objectivity. Probably the person who makes the best case for the concept of Synch Tech is Paul Hamilton, even though he is associated with CoCreate. I’ve even read a little Al Dean, Roopinder Tara and Evan Yares. Paul is an obvious cheer leader because he is employed by the industry, but what he writes is valuable if you are trying to understand what’s going on, even if he is writing primarily in favor of a different product. You have to filter out the unbridled optimism from what he says. The other press/pundit types are very enthusiastic, and while they have each actually used the software, I think it has been a long time since any of them directly used CAD to make a living. Their enthusiasm seems unexplainable to me. At least that’s the way I’ll leave it.

Eng-tips is another place you might go to read about user reactions to Synch Tech. I’ve been booted out of eng-tips a few times now, usually for doing what someone considered “advertising”, which turned out to be just stumping non-commercial sources of information. Really odd thing to do for a site that is plastered with advertising and is right up in your face with their sign in. Eng-tips has always seemed to me to be a place that enforces a smiley face, where everyone takes a hit of prozac before posting. This commentary is relevant because of the unusually negative tone eng-tips users display when talking about Synch Tech. Anyway, most of what you read on eng-tips is not favorable to Synch Tech, and it is all from the end user point of view. They seem primarily confused, then betrayed, even bewildered. Sometimes the information they give out is incorrect.

Evolution of Views

Early on, when I started writing about Synch Tech, I was just trying to spark a conversation about it. I obviously hadn’t used it. The other people who said I was wrong about things also hadn’t used it. They were right that I was wrong, but I think they were also wrong about what it was. At one point I called the combination of history and non-history based tools “FrankenCAD”. It turns out that was incorrect too. Frankenstein’s monster was a single being made from multiple beings. SEwST is really two separate beings. More like “Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde-CAD”. You work in one or the other. You can’t go back and forth, and the features of one are not maintained in the other.

Synch Tech and Traditional SE produce different types of parts. You cannot read ST parts in SE, but you can read SE parts in ST. So this is a one-directional translation. If you talk to resellers, ST is the future. Siemens hopes to eventually migrate all SE users into Synch Tech. This means they are forcing users into a completely different workflow. The interface is partially the same, but the workflow and the bulk of the tools will be a learning experience for SE users that get forced to ST. Some of the sketching concepts remain the same, but with ST, sketching is for creation only, not for editing.

I should mention that Synchronous Technology is also a component of NX (formerly Unigraphics). And if you’re one to look out into a crystal ball, Catia V6 is said to be based on a kernel that may contain elements of what Synch Tech does.

Siemens has had a lot of difficulty explaining exactly what ST is. Maybe it was their goal to create a lot of confusion, because it added to the mystery, buzz and hype.

Synchronous Technology Is…

In the end, Synchronous Technology is:

• direct editing
• history-free
• parametrics applied directly to the faces of a solid model
• treats imported models almost the same as natively built models

It is also more than that, but that does for an introduction. Some very clever functionality that recognizes face relationships and applies geometric relations on the fly helps you add relationships to the model as you make changes.

My Experience

What I found by using the software was that there is a reason why most of the demos you see for ST involve editing geometry. That’s because editing is the one area where it has some real strengths. If you need to edit an imported model, a direct editing tool is the only way to go.

Actually building things in ST can be a little frustrating, particularly if you are used to a different way of doing things that involves using construction geometry. This seemed to be an obvious lack, especially when it came to setting up symmetry in a part. I found the software to be just lacking in tools. If this is intended to be a tool for non-specialists, it has a long way to go. The couple of extremely basic tutorials that exist for ST were not adequate to answer the many questions people have about how the software works.

Relying on the Live Rules to automatically apply the geometric constraints with each edit means that you have to check that it got the right relationships each time you edit. In the end, I didn’t feel I could rely on this to automatically do the right thing.

The workflow didn’t work for me either. Selections were order dependent, which might be a Solid Edge thing rather than exclusively Synch Tech. Also there was none of the click-drag interaction, it was all click-click. Something SolidWorks users at least will recognize. Many settings or options would not preview, so you had to accept the setting before you saw the effect. Just didn’t raise my confidence. Maybe it seemed un-intuitive because I’m ingrained in another way of doing things. The direction of change was the wrong way for “ease of use”. SolidWorks is far more flexible when it comes to pre- or post-select, click-click or click-drag, and definitely better with previews.

Of course there is the major limitation of working exclusively with extruded or revolved shapes. This alone will be a deal killer for many users. Fillets in any system are dependent upon the order in which they are applied. The problem in ST is that you can’t change the order. The only good news here is that undo and deleting faces work very fast. Still, you might be surprised by the kinds of changes you can make around fillets. ST can definitely make changes where fillets are involved that would completely choke SW.

Even so, sometimes fillets would limit the types of changes that could happen. If you combine the ideas of entropy and model topology, changes in the model can only lead to simpler topology (fewer model faces). If you make a change that removes a face from a model, there is nothing you can do (aside from remodeling the feature) to get the face back. That is to say that once a face is removed from the b-rep, it is gone forever. In Solidworks, because the b-rep is built in stages, as long as a face is built by a feature at some point in history, you can get it back if another feature cuts it away or covers it over.

Siemens has gone to great lengths to establish the limitations of history-based systems. But I think there are a few things they didn’t count on. First, the types of parts that ST is limited to (prismatic face shapes) are not typically complex parts. I also think they have dramatically overstated rebuild times for the types of parts ST can edit. It’s true that complex parts have rebuild times in SolidWorks that are unacceptable, but ST cannot edit complex shape parts. I think their argument in this direction is misleading. If you can show me a part made from extrudes and revolves where it is built efficiently and has more than 400 features, I may retract that.

Further, I did a large pattern in ST one time, and it is time consuming to create and edit it. Patterns and other types of features such as holes and fillets are considered “procedural” features, which means that a feature definition is stored for those types of features. Large patterns take a lot of time in ST as well, maybe significantly less than SW, but still a lot of time.

On the up side

There are some things I wish SW could learn from SE and particularly ST. I know I’m always grousing about this CAD stealing ideas from that CAD, but I just want to point out that it is not all bad news for SEwST. First is the ability to select one side of a dimension and have the dimension change in that direction. In underdefined SW sketches, it’s a complete crap shoot as to which side of a sketch will change.

I loved the ability in ST to completely ignore rebuild times (because they didn’t exist).

Surprisingly shelling has some advantages with this system. You can selectively shell a shape more easily with ST than SW. By selecting the faces to “thin wall”, you can exclude an area from being shelled. In SW the workarounds for this are feature order or multibody modeling. Neither is as good a solution as selecting faces to thin wall. On the down side for ST is that if the number of faces is large or the topology is complex (split into many small sliver faces), selection can be nightmarish.

After using SEwST, I have a new appreciation for the Instant3D tool in SolidWorks. I still don’t think I will use it, but for people who are simply too lazy or really in that much of a hurry, it offers a way to edit the underlying history-based model without regard for the history itself. It doesn’t work all of the time for everything, and it will never find its way onto a best-practice list, but it is an interesting and useful tool. Also, the SolidWorks Move Face tool is a pale reflection of the “steering wheel” functionality in ST.

One huge topic SolidWorks could benefit from having a look at is feature tree management, rebuild management, and a few other things in that direction. Check out this blog post where I suggest a few things SW could do to improve overall rebuild speed by getting rebuilds and the tree under control.

Summary

The concept of direct editing as embodied in SEwST is beautiful. It solves problems from interoperability between different brands of software to version compatibility within a brand. Those alone are super compelling ideas for me. For editing imported models, this system is in its glory. How often you do that determines how much you need this.

For comparison, Spaceclaim (another direct modeling system) sells for as little as $775 at Novedge. SEwST has much more functionality, and sells for starting at ~$4k. If all you really need to do is edit imported data, you might consider something a bit less expensive.

For a system aimed at non-specialist users, SEwST is far too complex and process dependent. You can’t just pick it up and understand intuitively how to make changes or how to apply the parametrics. It will fail to edit sometimes, and if you are not a b-rep analysing type of user, you will never know why.

Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology is a nice alpha version of the software they are should one day create. I think the interface needs to be less busy, and less cryptic. It’s even worse than SolidWorks when it comes to replacing text with icons. It is great technology, and a fun tool to use, but with all of the limitations it is not a SolidWorks killer, and in its present state Solid Edge users will not be happy to be forced to ST.