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Old 11-01-2007, 05:02 AM
Steve Steve is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Alabama
Posts: 309
Re: PTC To Acquire Leading Product Development Software Provider CoCreate

I do not think that PTC is going to rush out and try and change OSD into a parametric modeler. They are clearly trying to enter the "explicit" modeling market (I very much like this new term, by the way, as it precisely describes the modeling experience - the user must explicitly manage all geometric manipulations and relationships by himself). So I don't think they are going to try and radically alter their vehicle for getting into that market.

What I do hope will happen is that over time PTC will figure out a way to add some of the logic-embedding tools available to parametric, history-based systems into OSD, thus giving the best of both worlds. The ideal tool would be one where the user could approach geometry creation/manipulation from either a boolean push/pull/cut/add approach or through an embedded logic approach.

It could be a tough row to hoe, though, as I saw this kind of thing happen with Unigraphics when they evolved the software from a "dumb" solid modeler to a parametric modeler. The problem they had was when a user went to edit, say, a hole in a block, they first had to identify whether it was a dumb cylindrical face, and if so use boolean tools to modify/move it, or if it was a parametric feature, and if so use feature-modification tools to modify/move it. Another problem that I saw was some users at a company would use the tool as a dumb modeler, while others would use it as a parametric modeler, and it would drive each other crazy when they opened each other's models. The experience needs to be seamless to the end user in order to be effective.

Already I see part of this functionality in Solid Edge, which I am using now. It is fundamentally a history-based, parametric modeler, but it also has the ability to move, rotate or delete faces, and other "dumb" solid manipulation routines.
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