As promised, I'm back with some additional information about the upcoming release of Solid Edge ST3 (later this year). This post will hit on some of the customer driven enhancements in the Part, Sheet Metal, and Assembly design environments. As a reminder, this is in no way a complete list of enhancements in these areas.
New to ST3 Sheet Metal is the Etch feature. It allows text or other sketch elements to be created on sheet metal faces which will then be transformed with the model when flattened. When the Flat Pattern is saved to DXF, text is translated to a "stick" font engraving ready!
New Closed Corner types have been added to Sheet Metal such as U & V shaped, Square and Mitred.
New to ST3 Sheet Metal is the Etch feature. It allows text or other sketch elements to be created on sheet metal faces which will then be transformed with the model when flattened. When the Flat Pattern is saved to DXF, text is translated to a "stick" font engraving ready!
New Closed Corner types have been added to Sheet Metal such as U & V shaped, Square and Mitred.
Tabs and PMI can now be added to the flattened Sheet Metal model and they will not display in the folded model. This flattened model can then be saved to JT.
Interpart relations are now shown in Part & Sheet Metal Pathfinder allowing easier navigation and investigation. The listed items can include: Context Assembly, Included Edges, Feature Keypoints, Interpart Copies, Linked Variables, and Reference Planes. It is even available if the part is opened outside of the context of the assembly.
Interpart relations are also shown in Assembly Pathfinder showing a clear indication of whether the link is Driving the selected component or the selected component is driving something else. Also new is the ability to Freeze or Thaw Interpart links. Freeze will allow you to inactivate links for instance on release files to prevent updates and Thaw will allow you to reactivate them later so they will update when performing a revision.
Display Configurations have received an overhaul and there are several new capabilities:
Configuration Manager which provides a "spreadsheet" like view of all configurations and components. and allows you to modify each configuration as well as identify new components since the configuration was last modified.
Snapshot which allows a quick capture of the current display state which can be retrieved quickly later.
Copy Current Display which will allow you to copy the current display state of selected components to an existing configuration
New Drop List which will allow multiple configurations to be selected and applied together and it also allows selection of Zones to be applied as well.
Now the last item I'm going to mention is not something I can not show you in a BLOG post, so your going to have to wait to see it in a Siemens PLM demonstration of Solid Edge ST3 or when the software ships to you, but it is quite important and quite remarkable so I feel I need to mention it... It is a 3D graphics performance improvement of up to 10X. That's right, 10X! Now Solid Edge was pretty fast before, but depending on the display settings used frame rates could drop on larger models. Now expect those models to fly on the screen.
Now as I stated at the beginning, this is just a few of the customer driven enhancements in Solid Edge ST3. There is still much more than what I've covered. Stay tuned because in another couple of weeks I'll post some more about ST3.
Comments
The new V-shaped cutout looks fantastic. This along with the etch facility takes SE ahead in sheetmetal once again.
ST3 is shaping up to be a very signfiicant release.
Now if they integrate trad. and sync environments like NX........
roger