At its annual conference, taking place this week in Phoenix, Arizona, SolidWorks launched Industrial Design, the second SolidWorks application to operate on its 3D Experience platform.
If you are unable to attend but would like to know more on a particular topic, please feel free to tweet me @tim_r_brown with any questions you might have
The application is focused on promoting a more social engineering experience by using a cloud-based tool to design and collaborate anytime, anywhere and move from concept to final product more quickly.
“The needs of the CAD user community have been a beacon of technological innovation and we are committed to developing tools that respond to evolutions in the product design process, from a technical perspective as well as a collaborative one,” said Gian Paolo Bassi, the new CEO of SolidWorks. Bassi this week replaced outgoing CEO Bertrand Sicot, who has moved within the company to take up the role of vice president of sales at Dassault Systèmes.
Unveiled at the SolidWorks World 2015, the company hopes to use Industrial Design to remove the constraints of traditional industrial design software, including data incompatibility, extensive rework of designs and a disconnect between industrial and mechanical design teams, lack of collaboration during the design process and difficulty in evaluating multiple concepts can slow down the product design process and reduce cost efficiency and time-to-market.
The Solidworks Industrial Design application eliminates some of these barrier the company said will allow engineers and designers to quickly solve industrial design challenges and easily transition to mechanical design. Safe, secure, intelligent data storage on the cloud can be accessed anytime from anywhere to share designs, collaborate on ideas, save and evaluate multiple concepts.
Industrial Design also tackles the need for designers to produce variations of a single idea and features a simple way to ‘branch’ multiple alternative designs from a single base design, which can then be worked on in parallel. And if no one single variation stands out but elements of a number of different designs are desired, the particular best elements of all the alternative designs can also be merged to create a final design.
With SolidWorks Industrial Design, designers can create complex shapes in 3D and add mechanical data directly to a model without changing product design software or environment.
“In the digital age, design is free flowing, mobile and collaborative,” said Michael Thompson, Global Product Manager, Wacom Technology Corporation. “We feel that our partnership with SOLIDWORKS Industrial Design will enable professional designers working on Wacom pen tablets or creative pen displays to bring their ideas to market in a rapid and seamless way.”
SolidWorks Industrial Design is the second application to be introduced on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, following the launch in 2014 of Solidworks Conceptual Design (formerly called Mechanical Conceptual), a conceptual design application.
SolidWorks World 2015 is taking place at the Phoenix Convention Center until February 11, 2015 with plenty of demonstrations and opportunities to ask questions.
