Latest update to the IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite brings powerful enhancements and new 3rd party integrations to customers.
ATLANTA, GA. November 19th, 2013 – IronCAD, LLC, the leading provider of design productivity solutions, today announced the release of the 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite (DCS). This new release delivers new productivity and collaboration capabilities that reduce the overall time in the design process and enhance data sharing among the thousands of companies and engineers worldwide using IronCAD’s Design Solutions.
The new 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite of products brings not only customer driven improvements in the design capabilities, but enhances the way customers can collaborate within design groups and with their customers. Users can share data between the IronCAD suite of products that can be leveraged at any level within an organization as well as online with the GrabCAD community and online customer projects. Using the integration with KeyShot, customers can quickly and clearly communicate designs in bid proposals and technical documentation shortening the collaboration cycle while delivering to customers’ expectations.
Key highlights provided in the IronCAD DCS 2014 include:
Delivering Productivity
- Intelligent Editing of Multiple Part Features: It’s common in design to make changes where multiple features that are on the same part or across different parts must adjust by the same amount. With the new capabilities added, users can simply select all the features to be changed and pull a single handle to perform the modification, reducing the need to build complex parametric relations.
- Simple Replication of Parts/Assemblies: Patterns and related features (i.e. links) are used throughout the design to create multiple features in various locations. Typically other parts will be generated to align to these feature locations. In the 2014 IronCAD DCS release, users will be presented with on drop options to replicate the parts/assemblies along these feature locations making it simple to rapidly place these objects in the proper location.
- Behavior Driven Activation of Features: Often users wish to define specific ways in which an object is modified when first applied as a feature or new object in a design. Now users can set specific handles on drop to be active allowing users the ability to directly input driving values. This reduces the time involved to edit features and provides a simpler way to set the desired default editing behaviors on objects.
- Automatic Constraint Connections on Drop: In some designs, it is required to define the way in which objects move in relation to other objects. New intelligent options have been added to automatically define these relationships at the time an object is dropped onto an existing object. A simple example would be an automatic coaxial constraint being applied to a fastener dropped into an existing hole location.
- Intelligent Sizing Handles: When sizing geometry, users may find it difficult to precisely modify the geometry to locations on other objects (such locations may be hard to reach by cursor location in the 3D environment) or they may not understand the rules that define how an object can resize to these locations. New behaviors have been added to allow intelligence to be defined on handles so that they can be quickly resized to these exact locations in other objects by a simple right-click command. Users can simply hit any point near the desired location and they are confident that geometry is precisely sized correctly.
- Re-engineer with Ease from Existing Geometry Data Including Point Cloud Data: Facet based objects and scanned point cloud data is becoming a common utility in the re-engineering process. IronCAD Solutions support the import of these often extremely large data sets in an optimized working environment while providing quick creation tools to recreate geometry referring to this data.
Enhanced Collaboration and Sharing
- Fast, Easy, Accurate Visuals with KeyShot: Users can now quickly transfer and update designs directly into Keyshot to use their award winning rendering capabilities to quickly produce realistic visuals for communication in bidding, final presentation, and technical documentation of products.
- Online Collaboration and Sharing with GrabCAD: The IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite today provides real collaboration by enabling users to communicate design data seamlessly throughout their design process within their organization. The GrabCAD Integration is a natural extension for our solutions that offers customers the ability to directly share files and projects within their online design groups and with the GrabCAD community at a simple touch of a button.
- Direct Access to Components on TraceParts: Users typically require standard or purchased parts to be used in their designs. With the TraceParts integration, customers have access to hundreds of supplier catalogs and over 100 million CAD models and product datasheets suitable for the design, purchasing, manufacturing and maintenance processes.
- Live Design Modifications between Rhino and IRONCAD: IronCAD has had a long standing connection with Rhino to provide the ability to make use of Rhinos strong surfacing capabilities. User can edit design features from IRONCAD in Rhino that may require more complex surface alterations. These edits will be automatically update in IRONCAD while maintaining existing relations to these modified features. This capability has been extended to support the latest versions of both IRONCAD and Rhino giving user the most recent advances to create and edit their designs.
- Enhanced Process Between Design and Collaboration: IRONCAD COMPOSE is a free product that allows users to deliver their standard components in a lightweight and IP protected way that can be easily dragged and dropped together to automatically configure products. Often it may be necessary to make additional design changes to these configurations to meet customers’ requirements. Now users can load designs originally created by customers in COMPOSE into IRONCAD to automatically convert these to editable precise design geometry. This allows users the ability to make the desired design modifications easily on the customer configured files and quickly send the results back to the customer for validation.
In addition to these key improvements the 2014 DCS focused heavily on additional customer driven improvements and the quality and stability of the product. The 2014 DCS also includes the latest versions of ACIS™ & Parasolids™ modeling kernels, Techsoft 3D HOOPS™ Visualize Platform, and Spatial’s 3D Interop translators to provide seamless data translation with standard and native industry CAD formats.
The 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite is available for immediate download for via the IronCAD website at www.ironcad.com/download.
"IronCAD is committed to delivering true productivity through performance, flexibility, and collaboration and this release confirms our commitment." commented Cary O’Connor, IronCAD’s VP of Marketing, "Customer’s now have more power in the design making it faster to create, modify, and finish the design tasks. In addition, they can extend their collaboration with the many new enhancements and integrations to improve the communication process among their customers leading to higher customer satisfaction and shortened time to market.” he continued.
About IronCAD
Based in Atlanta, GA, IronCAD is a leading provider of 3D Design Productivity Solutions that deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction and productivity. Solutions that can be used either standalone or as complementary collaboration solutions which can be used throughout the enterprise. Its flagship product IRONCAD has won many industry awards for its innovative technology and leads the industry in its ease of use and design productivity. IronCAD products are being used successfully by thousands of customers worldwide. For more information on IronCAD, call 1-800-339-7304 or visit www.ironcad.com.
