Hasta La Ideas

Conveniently located near to Core’s Portland office, Autodesk’s Manufacturing Solutions Headquarters in Lake Oswego, OR opened its doors yesterday to a dozen or so CAD nerds and bloggers (including Core77’s), for a preview day slightly reminiscent of high school. Dubbed “Manufacturing Tech Day,” the schedule had us herding from room to room for a series of seven hour-long sessions in which the product leads for Alias, Inventor, AutoCAD Mechanical, and a few other packages sprinted us through the newest bits of each program for 2010. Here’s what we gleaned for the Industrial Design community.

ALIAS

Yes, it really runs on a Mac. We told you that already, but here it is in picture form. That’s the Mac. And that’s Alias. And it only crashed once.

Improved interoperability between Alias and Inventor. Also something we mentioned before, but it was nice to see another live demo. With the compressed timeline, we only got a few minutes of Alias + Inventor interchange, but it’s reasonably impressive stuff. The demo consisted of free-form modification of the vent shapes on the helmet model above, as a set of Alias surfaces, then switching over to Inventor and watching the thoroughly detailed solid model update with the new shapes, including fillets and draft. This is similar to the passing of information down the stack in solid modelers with surface functionality, such as Pro/E and SolidWorks, but with Alias’ surfacing capability. There are always limitations to how much you can stress a system like this, but it looks at first glance to be about as robust as a single parametric modeler approach.

Better integration of polygon surfaces. Scanned 3D data can now be imported as polygon mesh and used directly in model creation. The demo above shows a polygon surface at left, a native Alias NURBS surface at right, and a loft between them. Neat for exploring alternate takes on existing products, or reverse enginee…er…I mean “investigative analysis.”

more goodies after the jump…

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