When the Focus Becomes the Tools Instead of the Design

I’ve spend the better part of my career to this point trying to figure out how to do stuff with a tool that wasn’t meant to do that stuff. Most of it has been moderately successful, some of it was only valuable as a learning experience. In all this time, I’ve spent the majority of my energy focusing on the tools. I would sometimes take a break and talk about the results, but mostly I’ve been talking about how to use the tools to get results. There has been a need for that kind of information because frankly, capable tools have been too expensive.

The answer from industry has been to develop the business side of CAD – how do you get people to pay for software – and the IT side of CAD – how do you keep people from stealing the software. And some of them left it at that, ignoring the CAD side of CAD – the tools to design real products.

The result has been that the process of product development has been unnecessarily stagnant unless you’re hooked into 3D printing in some way. It is certainly cool for 3d print to get some love after a couple of stagnant decades, additive processes really deserved the shot in the arm that the last decade has given them. But CAD was on an all-time high of interest until about 2010, and falling from that pinnacle was maybe a little demoralizing for people who thought of themselves as CAD this-or-that. You’ve had to broaden your horizons to product development, or engineering technology, or PLM/digital twin, or one of a couple dozen catch phrases that are more acceptable and less limiting than just plain old CAD.

So things are about ready for another shot in the arm for CAD. It’s already had it, but folks for whatever reason are just a little slow on the uptake.

The development of Pro/ENGINEER was a huge boost for CAD, and we were suddenly able to jump into a more realistic world of 3D, and build parts feature by feature. It was a product of the times, and was very process based, to the point that the tools really required a lot of training.

SolidWorks picked up that torch and made things easy to use. Maybe a little too easy. The tools didn’t actually evolve much, just the interface, so users would stop following the heavy process and get themselves in trouble with the easy-to-use mantra.

Direct edit has existed for a long time, but was overshadowed by the better marketed history-based tools. Direct edit tools have always been looked down on by people who considered themselves “parametric modelers”, not understanding of course that direct tools can also be parametric. The history, or order or features was the distinguishing characteristic.

Enter synchronous technology. The first two releases were (in my opinion) philosophically not very accessible (I didn’t get it). But starting with the 3rd version they had made some changes, and the concept really started to make sense to me. That’s the hard part of brilliant product design. Take a great idea that no one gets and turn it around so that it starts to make sense to people. Synchronous technology puts the intelligence in the software, not in the data. The data is just geometry, and you can move it from tool to tool and it can still be edited. Brilliant? No, it just makes sense. Remember how long it took you to learn how to manipulate history-based data to get it to do what you want it to do? I’m here to tell you it was a waste of time. You didn’t need to do that, and all that learning just made doing simple stuff much more difficult.

All of this point-based data is doing the same thing. It’s not replacing math-based-nurbs-models, it’s adding to it. More tools? More CAD tools? Yes please! I know it’s not the corporate position, but I kind of look at subd as synchronous for shapes. You tug and pull. No history-based shenanigans, no dependencies or rebuilds, or planning sessions to get the feature order or sketches right – just make the geometry the right shape. It’s almost too easy. Way easier than surfacing.

The tools for synchronous and subd are even the same to some extent – the selection set and the steering wheel. There is no complex concept to grasp. There are no invisible relationships to satisfy. The tools and process have not usurped the data.

So if you’re tired of studying the tool, it just means you’re using the wrong tool. Maybe you don’t need business developments to CAD. Maybe you don’t need IT developments to CAD. Maybe you need tools to help you design products. Is that a disruptive innovation or what?