Upgrade adds intelligence to 3D design

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jun 29, 2006

Novel capabilities within IronCAD V9 will help designers and engineers bring better products to market faster - allowing for greater productivity.

IronCAD V9 is the latest version of the award winning 3D design solution known worldwide for its ease of use and end user productivity.

Novel capabilities within IronCAD V9 will help designers and engineers bring better products to market faster - allowing for greater productivity.

With a level of design freedom that is unmatched in the industry today, IronCAD is the engineer's tool of choice when deadlines are tight and a high degree of unanticipated change is expected.

"IronCAD has made the design process much more efficient and effective allowing our designers more flexibility and freedom in their work than ever before".

"We could never be this efficient in traditional constraint based systems", says Anders Uddman of Ankarsrum Motors.

IronCAD V9 focused on enhancing its intelligent design capabilities that make IronCAD easy to use for new and existing users.

SmartSnap technology for precisely snapping geometry and automatic feature reordering are examples of its existing intelligent capabilities that have been standard since IronCAD's inception.

Its new "intelligent" creation, modification and positioning capabilities along with many customer-driven productivity feature requests incorporated in this latest release continue to extend design freedom.

Objects within IronCAD are made "intelligent" by implementing capabilities like SmartAssembly, which lets users create attachment locations to automatically position components in a scene.

With this capability, components that are dragged or dropped within the IronCAD scene will automatically align to the nearest matching attachment location; ensuring the component's precise placement.

This capability helps customers that design assembly configurations from standard components create models more quickly by eliminating repetitive positioning of component.

Modification "intelligence" can be seen in commands like the IntelliStretch command.

With IntelliStretch, users can resize components based on a component's overall size box.

This capability overcomes typical limitations of traditional history-based parametric systems by allowing multiple component changes regardless of the order in which they were created.

"The IntelliStretch command breaks the barrier in traditional CAD system by allowing our users to make changes to our machine frames late in the design stage to meet fitting requirements that were not known early in the design".

"Parametrics and the history based design philosophy would prevent us from making these structural changes unless we rebuilt the design or spent hours manipulating the model history", says Leif Bengtsson of Stik in Stockholm Sweden.

Another example of IronCAD's flexibility is the new assembly feature grouping capability for intelligent creation.

This capability allows the grouping of components and assembly features in an IronCAD catalogue; creating a combination that will cut multiple parts and assemblies while placing the grouped components.

Inserting a window unit into a solid wall, where material must be removed before the window and its frame members can be placed, is an application of this ability.

Design variations, which enable users to store multiple variations of parametric component, allow users to build intelligent components stored in IronCAD catalogues.

This new feature activates when a shape is dropped from a catalog into the scene.

Users can then select the variation option to apply - reducing the need to create multiple configurations of components and to eliminate repetitive setting of parameters on components.

"Our goal is to continue to make IronCAD flexible by allowing users the freedom to be creative in the design cycle and to have the power to make unanticipated changes without the system hindering this productivity", states Cary O'Connor, IronCAD's Marketing Director.

"IronCAD V9 is a huge leap in providing this flexibility to IronCAD customer's spreading throughout many industries", he continued.

In addition to IronCAD V9's "intelligent" capabilities, many software improvements have been made.

IronCAD V9 and its accompanying bonus CD are available for immediate delivery.

Shipments to existing customers will begin at the end of June 2006.