Newest release provides modeling tools, user-inspired enhancements and fast simulations.

OSLO, Norway — (BUSINESS WIRE) — May 18, 2012 — Deltek (Nasdaq: PROJ) today announced that two well-known Norwegian law f

Ten Six Consulting to provide implementation services for customers who use Deltek’s Integrated Program Management (IPM) solution sui

GUANGZHOU, China — (BUSINESS WIRE) — May 18, 2012 — ZWSOFT, the leading supplier of 2D & 3D CAD/CAM solutions to the

According to a recent PTC survey, over a third of respondents (37.9 percent, to be exact) said that on a recent project, they experienced dramatic or multiple last-minute changes. But what does that really mean? Well, if you’re like most folks, it means a lot of frustration. It means a lot of rework. And it could mean missing your flight. What do we mean by that? Check out the following video – I might be biased, but I think it’s pretty cool – to learn more.

The original post includes an embedded video. Can’t see it? You can also find it here.

How do you deal with late stage design changes? Have they ever kept YOU from a vacation? We’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

You can also find more resources related to late stage design changes, and other times that you need to be agile in your designs, here.

May 18, 2012 - Livestation, the largest aggregator of live streaming television news, has credited the dedicated hosting it gets from RapidSwitch for

TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwire) -- May 18, 2012 --

The fourth annual Canadian Sport Film Festival (CSFF) today announced a 2012 programme that wil

Guangzhou, China: May, 18, 2012 – ZWSOFT, the leading supplier of 2D & 3D CAD/CAM solutions to the AEC and MCAD industries, today rolled out

Have you ever considered the importance of Material Properties to your Finite Element solution? What about the accuracy of the data provided by material vendors? As Designers and Engineers, we are used to dealing with tolerances. We usually provide default tolerances on our drawing title block. We may add tolerances to some of the model dimensions. For the really bold and daring – or wise and experienced – you might even add Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing to your designs. Do you ever see tolerances on material property data sheets? In my experience, the answer is somewhere between rarely and never, with never in the lead.

Let’s consider a material from the Simulation material database. Alloy Steel has the following properties (numbers rounded):
Young’s Modulus – 30 x 10^6 psi; Poisson’s Ratio – 0.28; Mass Density – 0.278 lb / in^3; Yield Strength – 90 ksi

What will happen to the Finite Element solution if one material property varies? I’m going to start with a simple model in tension and apply Alloy Steel as the material using the default property values. Then I will change Poisson’s Ratio and re-run the study several times in order to compare the displacement and stress results. Recall that Poisson’s Ratio is a measure of the lateral strain to longitudinal strain for a material, or E_lat / E_long (pretend the E’s are Greek epsilon’s). Poisson’s Ratio is relevant to the linear elastic portion of the stress-strain curve and is unitless. One thing to note, if you do not define Poisson’s Ratio for a material, Simulation will assume that Poisson’s Ratio is equal to zero. There is a pop-up warning, too, just in case you forget to enter a value. Note that if you do not have Poisson’s Ratio for a material, 0.3 is a good initial estimate. But definitely exercise all of your options to find out the correct value for your design materials.

For a ½” square bar, 4” long, I have fixed one end and applied a 10ksi force at the opposite end, putting the bar in tension. After running the analysis with default material properties, I set a baseline with Trend Tracker. After creating several custom Alloy Steel materials, varying Poisson’s Ratio from 0.0 to 0.5, I re-run the analysis with each custom material. Trend Tracker will record the details for maximum displacement and stress in the model.

As you can see from the chart, the Von Mises Stress results vary approximately 16 ksi and the displacement results vary 0.00006 inches. As percentages, this is a 28% variation in stress and a 1.2% variation in displacement. I don’t think most of us would be concerned with 1.2% variation in our models, but 28% is an entirely different matter! I did, however, choose the model with this purpose in mind. The high stresses are at the fixed end at the sharp corner – something most Engineers would avoid in their designs. Now that a 28% variation has your attention, let’s look at a more practical model.

This is a simple bracket, a modification of a part in the SolidWorks Essentials manual. I’ve applied a fixed boundary condition to the bolt holes in the base and a normal force to the counter bore face. I’ve repeated the rest of the analysis, just like the square tensile bar, including using Trend Tracker and varying Poisson’s ration from 0 to 0.5.

For this “practical” model, the Von Mises Stress results vary approximately 4,300 psi and the displacement results vary 0.0006 inches. The percent variation in this model is 5.8% for stress and 6.6% for displacement. If you’re designing for a large Factor of Safety, less than 6% variation in your stress results is not significant. Using SolidWorks Simulation, however, most of us are designing for the lowest acceptable Factor of Safety in order to save the maximum amount of money possible on material costs. In this scenario, a 6% variation can be significant!

So the next time you’re analyzing that awesome design, consider reviewing the sensitivity of your analysis by varying a material property or two. Now you’re armed with powerful information you can share in your next design review. Material property variations from your vendors are no longer an issue! Now go make your products better with SolidWorks Simulation!

***

Bill Reuss is a CAE Specialist at 3DVision Technologies, a SolidWorks Value Added Reseller with locations across Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.  He is a regular contributor to 3DVision Technologies' Blog where you will find new ideas to improve your productivity with SolidWorks Simulation.

Go behind the scenes of Tim Burton's latest kitschy reinvention with Method and The Senate.

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Technology Will Allow UK’s Leading Specialist Aquatic Science Consultancy to Manage and Distribute Terabytes of Data
Huntsville, Ala., May

Edwin Prakoso’s blog CAD notes http://cad-notes.com/ published a list of the the his blogs most popular posts from 2009 to 2012.

Check it out, perhaps something on his most popular list is something you have been searching for.
http://cad-notes.com/2012/05/cad-notes-most-popular-articles-2009-2012/

This is the first in a new series of “How To” videos that demonstrate some of the more advanced FEA modeling functionality accessible through Femap.

In this video we’ll see how to use Femap to set up a constraint equation that relates nodal degrees of freedom of a finite element model. Constraint equations can be used to create rigid connections between nodes, or calculate some useful quantity that is a function of nodal displacements.

How to set up constraint equations

Alastair

Follow Femap on facebook and the Femap group on LInkedin

BURNABY, British Columbia — (BUSINESS WIRE) — May 18, 2012 —

Teradici,
the developer of the PC-over-IP® (PCoIP®

Solution provides real-time management of components and application
processes for EMC Documentum D2 and EMC Documen

A pioneer of computer-aided design software for engineers, PTC – as it prefers to be known – has in the last few years pushed into new areas of manufacturing. The company’s products help make sophisticated devices like smartphones smarter, but it’s also behind a whole different class of household appliance: more connected and more capable washing machines and refrigerators, for example. Some 27,000 clients worldwide use PTC software, including many of the world’s best-known brands – companies like Whirlpool Corp., Harley-Davidson, Hyundai Motor Co., and Caterpillar Inc.

“We help companies transform the ways they create and service products,’’ said Jim Heppelmann, chief executive officer of PTC.

Last year, PTC’s revenues jumped 20 percent to $1.2 billion, and its market value grew 25 percent to $3.3 billion, making it fifth on the Globe 100 this year, and the top technology company on the list.

Read the full article

Scott Davidson presented Flamingo nXt Basics via a live webinar yesterday. We recorded the session and it's been uploaded to a Vimeo album. If you didn't get the opportunity to attend, you may watch the video.  See how to use new features in material creation, material assignment, lighting and rendering.

May 18, 2012 -- eSpatial, leading provider of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and pioneer in mapping software delivered via Software-as-a-

May 18, 2012 -- Members of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Association have chosen EuroGeographics’ Secretary General and Exe

<< Part 16 By David Lewis Discovery Charter School Goes 3D and Disrupts Things a Bit Vernon & Riley got invited to present on 3D Printing as a way to reduce waste in manufacturing at the most recent GATE Conference at UC Santa Cruz. The GATE program is for Gifted And Talented kids in the [...]

Find out how Gnomon Studios’ Meni Tsirbas created a fun CG animation using Maya, ZBrush, modo, MetalRay and V-Ray, and the help of some talented students…

Imagine a post-apocalyptic future where the only survivors are robots and… wait for it… slugs. Yeah – bet you didn’t see that one coming!

Exoids is the latest animation from director Meni Tsirbas starring a cyborg slug called Gus Nitrous.

Watch the Exoids trailer

Tsirbas has been directing film and TV for over 10 years and works in both live action and animation.

He has 15 years’ experience as a VFX supervisor and digital artist, and has worked on diverse projects ranging from Cameron’s Titanic to Paramount’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and advertising spots for Nike.

You may also remember him from a series of production diaries we covered in 3D World in 2007, when Tsirbas directed his first feature film Battle for Terra.

Tsirbas’s is currently the resident director at Gnomon Studios and this short marks the start of a new series of joint ventures between him and The Gnomon School of Visual Effects.

“I wrote and directed the film, animated all the animatics and camera, and did the lighting,” he says. “However, about 40 extremely talented part-time crew-members made the film happen.”

The trailer didn't take too long to put together: "Once we had enough usable footage I spent the good part of a week cutting, sound mixing, and animating the credit sequence," says Tsirbas

Reel-world experience

“Most were select students from The Gnomon School of Visual Effects. The film was made at Gnomon Studios, which is the school’s on-site content creation wing.”

“It’s an amazing place that I help run. Basically once a student is selected, they get to work on a real-world production with a professional director (me) while still at school.”

“The resulting high-end experience and demo reel material is so invaluable for the students that it usually leads to some pretty amazing industry jobs soon after graduation.”

A bumpy ride

The action follows Gus Nitrous on his quest to find water. On his way he makes a wrong turn into the Exoids-occupied city of Los Angeles which sets him off on a high-speed desert chase.

The CG film has a live-action feel to it, thanks to the camera moves and perspective tricks

“Exoids is a culmination of many influences including post apocalyptic action films like The Road Warrior, grittier animated films like Rango, and my recent focus on live-action direction,” says Tsirbas.

While watching the trailer you may notice that the camera moves are a little shaky and the picture doesn’t always look precise – don’t worry, that’s intentional: “This film has a deliberately imperfect and live-action feel to it, so the camera has a lot of bump and shake to it,” says Tsirbas.

“We use realistic depth of field and lens apparitions, and even simulate film stock that’s subtly aged and distressed.”

Exoids’ 3D software arsenal

Maya was used for most of the modelling and all of the rigging, lighting and rendering.

“Maya was our go-to 3D software for pretty much everything,” says Tsirbas. “So not only did we model, rig, light and render in Maya, but we also used it for dynamics, especially with Maya Fluids.

ZBrush was used for character sculpting.

Maya was the go-to 3D software, used for all the modelling, lighting and rigging

“MetalRay was our renderer,” says Tsirbas, “although VRay was also tested on some model turntables, since I’m very interested in using it on future projects. Our other modelling packages were modo and LightWave 3D.”

Maya used for dynamics

Tsirbas took advantage of Maya Fluids for a number of shots in the animation: from the dust kicked up by the car, to the missile trails, to the explosions.

“Fluids offer a more cohesive and contained look verses the more broken up look of particles,” Tsirbas explains. “For the Exoids’ lightning, I used Maya’s canned lightning effect as a starting point.”

“We then integrated some 2D solutions which worked well, but are now testing a new approach using Maya NURBS objects with animated displacements running through them. I think the final lightning will use a combination of 2D and 3D effects.”

Problems of a fast-moving pipeline

The major challenge for Tsirbas and team was was getting the characters completed in time for animation.

“[In this production] we started animation before the final sculpting and texturing was done,” says Tsirbas. “So we’re now doing some reverse engineering to make the character’s latest sculptural detail work with animation that’s already complete. There’s really no way around such pipeline challenges when you’re on a tight schedule.”

How did it all begin for Meni Tsirbas?

I started working in CGI back in the early 1990s with my company, but my big break happened in 1996 when I was recruited to work at Digital Domain on Titanic. That was a fantastic experience, but my original passion of film direction was still there. So over the years and while doing digital art, I spent my spare time making short films and taking any directing jobs I could get, often at the expense of more lucrative VFX Supervisor gigs. Thankfully the risks have payed off, and I’m extremely grateful to be doing what I love most of the time.

I knew I wanted to be a director since I was a kid. I also loved visual effects and, at the risk of ageing myself, thought I’d get into miniature work and motion control photography. But when computer animation emerged while I was still in film school I immediately took to it and started a VFX business. This was back in the late 1980s early 90s. I’ve been involved in CGI and direction as a career ever since.

Where does Meni Tsirbas look for inspiration?

Inspiration is a strange thing to pin down. Like all directors and most CGI artists I’m an avid film fan and watch at least one movie a week and usually more. I also love science-fiction novels and comics. So my influences are numerous, but my interests do tend to skew toward science fiction and fantasy.

I love what concept artist Neville Page has been doing lately, especially his work on Cloverfield and Super 8.

Director Meni Tsirbas singles out concept artist Neville Page as one to keep an eye on for his exciting work

I think The Incredibles is probably my benchmark for the perfect animated film. Beyond its great animation, design, premise and so on, it’s really just a great film, regardless of medium.

Words of advice for aspiring 3D artists

The animation industry is quite special in that true talent gets noticed and hired. It’s a simple as that. Character animation in particular is a very competitive field. So you have to have an exceptional demo reel. What that takes is a lot of hard work advancing your skills, seeking out honest critique, and being smart about just what ends up on your reel.

• Learn how to craft a winning showreel with advice from the experts

The animation is currently in post and Exoids is slated for release in early June 2012. We can’t wait to see it and see what else Tsirbas and Gnomon come up with in the future.

Visit the official Exoids website

Ramat Gan Israel – April 13th, 2012.-- VisionMap Ltd, announced today that its A3 digital aerial camera imagery is now supported by Intergraph's

With Creo 2.0, PTC introduces a new role-specific app supporting modular product design that extends the way organizations can approach concept design and delivers significant productivity enhancements to its existing Creo apps.

Creo Options Modeler  contributes to the company’s AnyBOM Assembly technology vision, a strategy that is intended to give teams the power and scalability needed to create, validate, and reuse information for modular product architectures. By combining Creo Options Modeler with Windchill Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software, explains PTC, manufacturers can generate and validate precise 3D representations of product configurations defined by an individual bill of materials (BOM).

Read the full write-up