Okino’s Industry Standard PolyTrans Provides Robust Support for Converting Autodesk Inventor^® 2012 files (and all other major CAD file formats) into major downstream 3D packages and file formats 

Toronto, Ontario – April 26^th 2011 -- Okino Computer Graphics, a leading provider and pioneer of data translation solutions to the DCC/Animation and enterprise Fortune 1000 markets, announced today that its software products have been certified for Autodesk Inventor 2012 software under the Autodesk Inventor Certified Applications Program. Certified applications must meet certain implementation guidelines and demonstrate the highest levels of robustness, quality, and interoperability with Autodesk Inventor software.

Please refer to this URL on the Okino WEB site for the Autodesk Inventor solutions page:  http://www.okino.com/solutions/autodesk_inventor.htm

Now into its 23^rd year of development, Okino’s PolyTrans|CAD is one of the most complex, robust and widely used products within the 3D graphics market, allowing cross conversion between all major MCAD, DCC/Animation and VisSim 3D file formats + programs. Okino’s Inventor importer solution allows crack-free geometry, hierarchy (assembly data) and materials to be transferred cleanly and robustly from native disk-based Autodesk Inventor files or from a running copy of the Autodesk Inventor directly into any Okino data-conversion-compliant program: the stand-alone Okino PolyTrans & NuGraf products, PolyTrans-for-3dsMax, PolyTrans-for-Maya, PolyTrans-for-Softimage and within many third party products such as: 3DCreate^Ò (by Visual Components^Ò), Cinema-4D^Ò and its “Engineering Bundle” (by Maxon Computer), EON Reality^Ò, NGRAIN^Ò military training products, Pytha^Ò (by CATS^Ò Software), Quest-3D^Ò (by Act-3D^Ò), VirTools^Ò (“4DC” .nmo pipeline by Realicon^Ò) and others.

"Okino's software products are industry standards used world wide by almost every major corporation with robustness second to none," said Robert Lansdale, President & CEO of Okino Computer Graphics, Inc. "Since 1988 our entire company philosophy has been to provide the best of experiences for the import of large CAD assemblies into Okino software where the assembly data can be manipulated and viewed in real time, optimized, composed, reduced, tagged with materials and rendered with ease. Our software is also the industry standard for the conversion and re-purposing of CAD data to all major animation programs and downstream 3D file formats. Downstream uses include product documentation and manual creation, animation and rendering software, visual communication and review of data, and for accessing simpler and easier to manipulate versions of the original CAD datasets. Okino's NuGraf and PolyTrans products provide the "swiss army knife" of features, functionality and problem solving capabilities that the Autodesk Inventor user had not had access to before."

HP-9 Compressor. Imported, optimized & rendered from Autodesk Inventor.
Artist: Ed Steinerts. Designed & © 2011 by Gardner Denver Nash.

Major Benefits of the Inventor Importer to Okino Customers

• Import complete assemblies (including assembly cuts and patterned geometry, as well as multiple sub-assemblies) from a live running copy of Autodesk Inventor, or from native Autodesk Inventor .iam and .ipt files on disk (no copy of Autodesk Inventor required for this latter feature).
• Autodesk Inventor assemblies can be imported directly into Maya (using the PolyTrans-for-Maya native plug-in system) or directly into 3ds Max (using the PolyTrans-for-3dsMax native plug-in system). The native PolyTrans plug-in systems for 3ds Max and Maya have been refined for well over 1.5 decades, specifically for importing large CAD assembly models.

• The ability to quickly transfer assembly data into Okinos' NuGraf product for interactive scene manipulation, real-time OpenGL shaded views and object manipulation, complex material assignment, 2D bitmap and 3D procedural texture assignment, and rendering by Okino's stable, proven and fast scanline or multi-threaded ray tracing renderers. Once inside NuGraf (or PolyTrans), the data can be easily re-exported to any of the supported Okino 3D file formats.
• Okino's "CAD Scene and Hierarchy Optimization System" has been integrated right into the Autodesk Inventor importer. This is most important when importing large CAD models into 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, Cinema-4D or Lightwave. These animation packages can have performance problems when the source CAD model is large, and/or has a large number of individual parts (which is often the case with the BREP model topology of data provided by Autodesk Inventor).

• Complete control over material parameter modification on an automatic basis. Many CAD systems like Autodesk Inventor have basic material parameters (like color, ambient + diffuse shading coefficients, opacity, etc) but when they are transferred over to a rendering and animation system they often look "too bright" or "highly ambient". This can be expected and is quite normal. The material tweak parameters easily allow such saturated shading values to be automatically compensated for.

The Autodesk Inventor to Okino Software Data Conversion Process

When importing part or assembly data from a live running copy of Autodesk Inventor, the data is transferred from Autodesk Inventor to the Okino side of the pipeline using the Autodesk Inventor "Automation Server Interface". This is an exposed set of functions which Autodesk Inventor "publishes" to the outside world. Okino's Autodesk Inventor importer queries all the part, assembly and material data from the running copy of Autodesk Inventor using this COM interface. Such a pipeline is exemplified in this diagram:

Autodesk has also created a smaller stand-alone "Inventor View" application which exposes this COM interface to Okino software. This allows the Okino importer to read in Inventor .iam assembly files and .ipt part files directly from disk without requiring a local resident copy of Inventor to be installed on your machine.

Applicable WEB pages

The following are pertinent pages on the Okino WEB site relating to this press release:

http://www.okino.com/solutions/autodesk_inventor.htm  = Okino solutions for Autodesk Inventor users

http://www.okino.com/conv/conv.htm  = Okino PolyTrans home page

http://www.okino.com/nrs/nrs.htm       = Okino NuGraf home page

http://www.okino.com/conv/filefrmt.htm   = Supported file formats

http://www.okino.com/conv/filefrmt_cad.htm   = Okino’s CAD compatibility chart

http://www.okino.com/solutions/solidworks.htm   = Okino solutions for SolidWorks users

http://www.okino.com/proe.htm   = Okino solutions for Pro/Engineer users

http://www.okino.com/conv/users.htm   = List of notable users

http://www.okino.com/testimon.htm  = Customer testimonials and product reviews

http://www.okino.com/new/brochures/index.htm = A selection of our monthly full page advertisements

http://www.okino.com/press/releases.htm = Recent Okino press releases

Availability

Okino products are available directly from Okino Computer Graphics and through a number of Value Added Resellers. The Inventor CAD importer is a component of the Okino "CAD/Pack" add-on license. For more information or to download fully functional demonstration versions (with minor limitations), please visit http://www.okino.com. To locate an authorized VAR or for customer inquiries, email Email Contact or contact Okino at (905) 672-9328 or toll free at (888) 3D-OKINO (1-888-336-5466).

About Okino Computer Graphics

Okino Computer Graphics can best be understood as two distinct sub-companies: one which specializes in the CAD market, CAD products and CAD users, and one which specializes in the animation/DCC/VisSim markets. We excel at providing the industry standard converters to an extensive user base for these distinct, yet often overlapping, markets. If you are new to Okino and our software then please take a moment to review http://www.okino.com/conv/users.htm which enumerates what has made our software's usage so wide spread throughout the 3D industry.