View Single Post
  #4  
Old 04-29-2008, 06:55 AM
phamil1 phamil1 is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Fort Collins, CO
Posts: 46
Re: dynamic modeling vs. synchronous technology

Both SolidEdge and UG have had direct geometry editing capabilities for some time now. Perhaps with the introduction of SpaceClaim and the acquisition of CoCreate by PTC, they have decided to improve it and market it a bit more. Their marketing is good - validating what CoCreate has been saying for years. I do like the live feedback!! It is very much like what SpaceClaim is doing. The demos look good, but they don’t show anything too complex, in other words – no topology changes, except for the copy and paste which is fairly easy to do.

Direct editing on imported geometry is fairly straight forward, but what about direct editing of a native model with a full history tree? What happens to the history tree? I have used a few history-based systems that have direct editing, and with those systems the direct edits were actually recorded in the tree and have the typical parent/child relationship. After a while the tree became much more complex and reordering the tree was almost impossible. I am not sure how they do it in SolidEdge, but I bet it is not too different. The edits would have to be maintained in the tree, otherwise a regeneration of the model would overwrite the direct edits. In most cases that I tried, topology changes were not allowed.

If your processes and needs are better supported with direct editing, use CoCreate. If your processes require more control and management use ProEngineer

From a product design point-of-view, I am not sure that mixing the two is really going to work out in the long run. However, for those using a history-based system and have an occasional need for making minor edits to imported geometry, it certainly would be a nice-to-have feature.
__________________
Paul Hamilton
Technical Sales Manager (PTC)
http://p-hamilton.blogspot.com
Reply With Quote