Evan on Engineering Software

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

- Abraham Maslow

Once upon a time, between when I graduated from High School and went to college, I worked in construction, setting concrete forms for basements of tract houses. The job required more muscles than tools, but one of my most important tools was a hammer.

My hammer of choice for form-setting was an Estwing, with a smooth face 22 ounce head, rip-claws, one-piece forged head and shaft, 16” overall length, and a molded nylon grip. You can buy nearly the same hammer today.

I didn’t choose that particular hammer by accident. I chose it because it was perfectly suited for the type of work that I was doing. Had I been doing framing, I might have used a Vaughn framing hammer with a milled face, or possibly a TrueTemper rig axe. (Today, I’d also use a pneumatic nail gun.) But for form-setting, the Estwing was nearly perfect.

Choosing a CAD tool is a lot more complicated than choosing a hammer. But CAD tools, like hammers, vary in their suitability for particular types of work.

For the last 20 years, the vast majority of popular CAD tools for mechanical design have been more similar than different. Inventor, SolidWorks, and Solid Edge are all based on a concept pioneered by Pro/E: parametric feature-based modeling.

Parametric feature-based modeling was such a powerful concept that it helped PTC take the CAD market by storm, and essentially forced every other significant player in the MCAD market to follow suit.

Despite its strengths, there are two problems with parametric feature-based modeling that are inherent to the technology, and that can’t be fixed:

• It doesn’t work well for most people, and
• It doesn’t work well with most data.

While I can back-up these points with peer-reviewed research, I’m going to save that for another time. For now, I want to talk about a CAD technology that overcomes these two limitations: feature inference modeling.

Let me put a definition to that term: Feature inference modeling is a technology combining feature recognition and direct editing. It allows a user to intelligently edit a solid model, irrespective of its source or underlying construction history.

Feature inference modeling is available today in products such as SpaceClaim, KeyCreator, CoCreate, and IronCAD. It will be available soon in Solid Edge and NX. I expect that, within the next several years, most major MCAD tools will incorporate some level of the technology.

Feature inference modeling is not a simple "check-box" item on a spec sheet. Different CAD tools implement it differently, and to different extents. There are two characteristics common to all implementations of the technology:

• Intelligent editing. This means the software is smart, so the person using it doesn’t have to be.
• Dumb data. This means the software can work with any boundary representation solid model data (the kind created by all modern 3D MCAD programs), no matter how it was created, or where it came from.

There may be some argument about which company actually pioneered feature inference modeling, however all the players I’ve talked to agree that they have Siemens PLM to thank for legitimizing the technology, by its announcement and promotion of Synchronous Technology (which incorporates feature inference modeling, combined with 3D constraint management.)

Feature inference modeling is a really big thing. No kidding. For 25 years, I’ve watched mainstream CAD tools get increasingly more complicated and insular. This is the first technology I’ve seen that really changes the game.