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Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology Delivered!

It is quite obvious from the activity on the Siemens PLM hosted Solid Edge newsgroup that users have downloaded or been shipped their copy of Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology (from now on referred to as "ST"). It is also obvious that existing users of history based modelers must "unlearn" what has been ingrained in them over the years when they start using ST.

What they must "unlearn" is this: There is no magic time machine that will let you go back in history and erase something you did in your past.

Sounds like science fiction doesn't it?

No doubt you've seen the movies where some character goes back in time, steps on some bug, and then returns to the present and finds out they have changed the entire history of human evolution. Then they spend the rest of the movie trying to fix what they unintendedly did. Sound familiar?

This is exactly what we have been doing for the past 20 years in history based modelers... going back in time before the feature we want to remove existed, and erasing it. We then go back to the present to see what our change to history has done (sometimes expected, but often unexpected and we spend the next few hours fixing what we unintendedly did).

ST brings us out of the science fiction and puts us back into reality. To delete a feature, you stay in the present and delete the faces that make up the feature, or you fill in over it. The remaining faces adjacent to the deleted feature fill in to heal the solid or the embedded faces disappear. But nothing unexpected!

Definitely more straight forward and understandable, but for those who have been using the magic time machine, it is a foreign concept. ST is here, it's time to return to reality!

Comments

Anonymous said…
The thing that history has traditionally brought to the table is the ability to embed intelligence into the features of a model that is only relevant only at that feature's level.

Having used non-history based systems like CoCreate's OneSpace Designer, and found the lack of history to be a huge drawback, I'm highly skeptical of non-history-based modelers. Basically the CoCreate approach fix to embedded logic errors was to eliminate embedded logic. It remains to be seen (by me) how well ST allows the engineer to capture his design intent and embed it in the model.

Steve
PellaKen said…
Steve, it might be handy to explain what kind of intelligence you are talking about that dependent history would lend to a feature. The reason that I ask is that I find a lot of people tend to confuse dependent history with associativity, constraints, and parametrics, none of which are "history".
Anonymous said…
"Recently, major advances in the ability of CAD systems to do real time "mining" of intelligence found in generic solid model geometry have resulted in an expansion of "direct geometric" edit capabilities, even within history based, parametric systems. These improvements lay the foundation for the next revolutionary leap in technology - synchronous technology."
- From a White Paper Prepared by collaborative Product Development Associates, LLC.

This is very different from CoCreate's explicit modeling, because it's history free AND feature based. It allows user defined constraints and parametrically driven dementions using a system called "Live Rules".

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