CAD Atomic Blog

As you may know, Solid Edge University 2013 is coming up in about 3 weeks ( http://www.solidedgeu.com/ ) and that the official announcement about Solid Edge ST6 will come on day 1 of that event (June 25th).  Dan Staples, director Solid Edge Development will provide the Solid Edge ST6 keynote. Well, I have a couple of early treats for you about ST6 that I can share!  Please keep in mind that these are no more than a tiny teaser of ST6, and as a BETA tester I can assure you there is so much more… There has been this rumor going around that ST6 would put some focus on surfacing.  Well, here are two new tools that should convince you it’s more than just a rumor… Reflective Plane  - The typical use case of symmetric molded parts is to model one half and mirror the body of the second half when complete… But how do you know what the whole part looks like prior to being finished with the part?  The answer is the Reflective Plane. It allows display of the second half...

PDM is known as a necessary evil in most engineering worlds.  Why it’s labeled “evil”, I’ll explain in a bit.  It’s necessary because of 2 reasons: Engineering and related disciplines create a huge amount of data and that data is related to parts which are related to a product structure and that may also be related to tooling and equipment.  PDM excels at storing all this data securely and managing the relationships between it and the changes that happen to it. The use of 3D compound document design systems pretty much require PDM after a couple years of use with more than a half dozen authors.  Compound document design systems build assemblies from parts and subassemblies that are all independent files.  When you open an assembly, the design system actually must find and open each and every component file that makes up that assembly, so on an assembly comprised of 350 unique components, your opening 350 files.  Couple this with cross assembly use of com...