SpaceClaim Advances 3D Direct Modeling for Engineering and Product Design

By DE Editors

SpaceClaim has announced the fourth release of the company’s products, SpaceClaim Engineer and SpaceClaim Style. The company says these direct modelers were created from the ground up specifically to give engineers and industrial designers the freedom and flexibility to capture ideas quickly, edit solid models regardless of origin, and prepare designs for analysis, prototyping, and manufacturing.

While not aiming to displace 3D parametric CAD, company President and CEO Chris Randles said during a recent briefing on the announcement that SpaceClaim was aimed at helping engineers with conceptual design, engineering analysis, and simulation-driven design.

“There is a vast market of engineers who will benefit from access to 3D tools that are CAD-neutral, powerful, accessible, and cost effective,” said Randles, explaining that he and his team hoped the new products would enable bringing direct modeling to the entire engineering workflow.

According to the company, SpaceClaim Engineer is a powerful 3D direct modeler for top-down design, 3D layout, conceptual engineering, and model preparation for simulation and analysis. Unique capabilities include intuitive Pull, Move, Fill, and Combine tools for robust model editing, as well as straightforward 2D and cross-section modeling.

SpaceClaim Engineer interoperates with major CAD systems and with many analysis tools, providing a solution that bridges the gap in typical design and engineering workflows. SpaceClaim works seamlessly with ANSYS Workbench and GAMBIT, ALGOR, CFdesign, and COMSOL Multiphysics. Analysis often occurs at the end of a detailed design process, further delaying the design cycle, escalating costs and slowing time-to-market. SpaceClaim Engineer relieves these issues by ensuring collaboration, thereby accelerating the pace of innovation.

New features in SpaceClaim Engineer include:

• New model preparation tools to detect and repair problems with imported designs and to simplify models prior to analysis
• Increased surfacing power for highly-stylized designs
• Enhanced analysis tools for industrial design visualization and manufacturing validation, including curvature display, zebra striping, draft analysis, and sophisticated draft creation
• Improved translators to open and edit 3D PDFs and open tessellated formats such as STL
• Expanded international language support that now includes Spanish.
 

Pricing for SpaceClaim Engineer starts at $1,995 per seat.

SpaceClaim Style brings 3D solid modeling to industrial designers and product stylists and enables them to work collaboratively with their clients and the entire development team. With SpaceClaim Style, users get a rapid creation environment that enables flexible design capabilities and converts hand-drawn, 2D, and surface data to accurate solid models. The benefits include faster design ideation, easier design manipulation, and reusable deliverables. Pricing for SpaceClaim Style starts at $895 per seat.

SpaceClaim enables upfront analysis and complements and leverages investments in existing CAD tools. SpaceClaim supports standard data exchange formats ACIS, STEP, IGES, ECAD, Rhinoceros, DWG, DXF, STL, OBJ, XAML, VRML, 3D PDF, and includes interactivity with Bunkspeed HyperShot. With add-on modules, SpaceClaim Engineer can import and edit Pro/ENGINEER, Autodesk Inventor, CATIA V4 and V5, VDA, Parasolid, SolidWorks, JT, and NX native files. Additionally, SpaceClaim allows the extended design team to work concurrently, finish projects at a fraction of the cost, and accelerate time to market.

SpaceClaim
Concord, MA