R18 Enhancements and Updates

Interoperability (Translators, PMI)

Announcements:
R18 will be the last release of support for legacy interface to the Spatial InterOp product line; in R19 only the Connect interface will be supported by the InterOp product.

Enhancements

• Product Manufacturing Information (PMI) is now available for CATIA V5, Pro/E, and Unigraphics generic translators.
• Version updates were for Inventor version 12, Unigraphics Version NX5, and CATIA V5 R18.
• Inventor reader has been enhanced to support assembly files and sheet metal models in folded and unfolded modes.
• Unicode characters are supported in general attributes and PMI attributes.
• Assembly cut feature is supported in Pro/E Assemblies.

• 3D InterOp ACIS CATIA V5 Reader
• 3D InterOp ACIS CATIA V5 Writer
• 3D InterOp ACIS CATIA V5 Manufacturing Option

3D Modeling (ACIS, ACIS Extensions)

The R18 release of Spatial's 3D Modeling products focuses on further building our core value proposition - that of delivering productivity-enhancing components to ISVs: R18 has the following changes that benefit users:

Blending

New Functionality:
• ACIS Blending now has the capability to create curvature continuous blends. This functionality is extremely useful to CAD designers who need to control the shape of blend surfaces with respect to their neighboring surfaces.
• ACIS Blending now has the capability to preserve features which intersect the region of blend surfaces. Users can now control if ACIS blending should retain such features thereby preserving the feature topology or to remove such features.

Functional Improvements:
• Large Radius Blends - Significant algorithmic improvements have been made enabling ACIS to better handle large radius blends. These changes will improve the robustness of ACIS blending when creating large radius blends.
• Three Entity Blends - ACIS Blending can now create three entity blends with sharp pointy ends. An example of such a case is a pie wedge when the user creates a full round blend between the top face and the two side faces.

Local Operations

New Functionality:
• A new interface to tweak is introduced with ACIS R18. The interface called "tweak to body" will allow users to tweak an input face to a sheet body. This functionality is useful to all our CAD / CAM users who were limited by existing functionality of tweaking an input face to a tool surface. This functionality overcomes the existing limitation of tweaking an input face to a single tool surface allowing users to tweak an input face to multiple tool surfaces (which make up the sheet body).
• A new function has been introduced to enable Remove Faces to fill an open gap. This functionality uses the remove face algorithms to extend the neighboring faces to fill a gap in a solid model.

Functional Improvements:
• ignificant functional improvements have been made to ACIS Remove Faces in dealing with removal of blend faces. These changes will improve the robustness of remove faces in dealing with blend faces - both natively designed in ACIS models and imported models.

Kernel

New Functionality:
• A new functionality is introduced in R18 to allow users to re-bend or un-bend a sheet metal part. This functionality will allow ACIS users to flatten a sheet metal part by un-bending it or re-bending it in the opposite direction of the original bend.
• An easy to use tolerize entity API is introduced in R18. This routine is intended to provide an easier interface to customers who need to create a tolerant ACIS ENTITY.
• A new functionality is introduced in R18 allowing our customers to generate bs3_curves from procedural ACIS curves within a given tolerance.

Functional Improvements:
• ACIS simplify entity routine now has the capability to simplify splines surfaces to elliptical cones and cylinders. This will help all our customers who need to create analytical ACIS surfaces from spline surfaces.

System

Functional Improvements:
• Geometry Paging mechanism in ACIS has been enhanced to work during the save / restore process of .sat / .sab files. ACIS users now have the capability to directly page spline geometry to disk during the restoring of ACIS files. Similarly ACIS users now can save paged geometry directly to a .sat or .sab file without consuming excess virtual memory during the process.

Boolean

Functional Improvements
• A new interface to Entity Point Distance is being introduced in R18. This interface will allow users to test multiple points against a BODY. This functionality is extremely useful to CMM customers who deal with large data sets of collected from a physical model and need to compare such large data sets to the designed part.

There were many other smaller enhancements and defect fixes included in R18; please refer to the Release Notes for more information.