The Future of 3D CAD Interoperability - Spring 2009

By John Alpine, VP Research & Development

The Future of 3D CAD Interoperability: despite appearances to the contrary, progress has been made and more is to come.

While CAD file formats remain proprietary and CAD vendor support for open formats such as STEP largely lukewarm, software maturity, time and customer persistence have slowly improved the state of interoperability. However, time stands still for no one, especially those creating 3D CAD models. As modeling moves forward so do the challenges in interoperability. CAD companies and their users are pushing forward product manufacturing information and creating ever larger models and assemblies.

The good news: expect to see new levels of support and solutions developed to meet these challenges.

Progress as Industry Matures

Almost a Moore's law in reverse, the rate of software changes in large programs declines over time. In most CAD systems, basic boundary representations for geometry, whether represented in Parasolid, Pro Engineer, Catia or ACIS format have remained much the same as problems in topology and geometry have been solved and optimized. This has enabled translation software to continually improve the complex job of retaining high precision accurate geometry while improving the mapping of elements from one system to another. Expect this progress will continue into the future.

Challenges Remain

While progress has been made on accurate and effective geometry translation, challenges remain. I have outline two of the major challenges and what we might expect in the future for meeting them.

Product Manufacturing Information

Just when the industry mastered effective 3D modeling, along comes product manufacturing information. Also called GD&T (General Dimensioning and Tolerancing) fully annotated 3D models can be used to drive automated manufacturing and measurement and replace 2D drawings. While PMI for solid modeling has been around for a number of years now, standards in application of PMI and common methods for its representation and association with geometry are still evolving, resulting in a shifting target for translators.

However, the same forces at work for improving geometry translation are at work in this area too. While still changing with every major release, CAD companies support for PMI and tools for its proper application have slowly been improving and converging as end users demand more consistent and thorough support. Translators, including those leveraging Spatial InterOp, are making large investments in supporting both semantic (machine readable) and non semantic (visual) forms of PMI and improved coverage is being continually introduced.

Performance

As companies get better with modeling, especially whole product modeling (screws and all), average data set size has grown dramatically. Not only are more parts modeled, but models are treated as master representation and detailed down to precise draft angles, bosses and fillets, all increasing part size. Despite incredible increases in computer performance and memory, designers continue to push the limits of software and hardware capacity.

To address these challenges, Spatial and other companies are supporting 64 bit versions of their translation technology. Next on the horizon, look for multi-threaded high capacity translators and increased support for selective assembly translation.

Summary

As the industry around CAD modeling has matured its 3D design processes, steady progress has been made that has improved interoperability between divergent systems. Future challenges in translating manufacturing information and managing very large designs are driving next level of interoperability solution.

Return to Spring 2009 Issue