Here is a great description of Inspire in the German language :K CAD CAM Blog http://cadcam-blog.k-magazin.de/?p=6571 or as my colleague in Stuttgart said “Hier eine schöne kompakte Beschreibung von Inspire in der :K CAD CAM Blog”.
PressCategory Archives
solidThinking 8.5 on DEVELOP3D
DEVELOP3D previewed the upcoming solidThinking Inspired 8.5 Release.
Read the on-line article or download the PDF extract from the December 2010/January 2011 issue.
Josh Mings, the author of the article, wrote:
“We like to explore. Whether we’re designers or engineers, we like to spill the “ifs” across the table (or screen) in anticipation of that single moment when the design has been realised. solidThinking makes this possible in ways that compliment design and engineering.
It makes the design process more dependable and the engineering process more fluid. In this way, it’s shaking up the paradigms that have been sinking in for so many years.
solidThinking is a product to watch and one that other 3D software companies should keep an eye on. It’s slamming more than a few slick tools into conceptual design.
In a very real sense it’s allowing you to form and explore faces, features, joints and ribs as quickly as you think them.
That just isn’t common in the products that are out there today. Even with the organic exploration of structures, solidThinking maintains a history of features while not locking you down to their dependencies.”
Stay tuned for more news in a few days!
Getting the Right Design, Getting the Design Right
The latest issue of Altair Engineering’s Concept to Reality published “Getting the Right Design, Getting the Design Right,” an article describing four ways that we can enhance the entire product development cycle by 1) finding pathways to winning designs earlier in the process, 2) improving collaboration between industrial design and engineering, 3) considering efficient forms starting from the early concept phase, and 4) effectively visualizing and validating design concepts.
Click here to freely download the article. Concept to Reality is published bi-annually for Altair Engineering, Inc. by Penton Custom Media and focuses on cutting-edge design development, innovative product strategy, and global process automation issues.
“Getting the Right Design, Getting the Design Right” was also presented at Altair’s annual European HyperWorks Technology Conference Series in Versailles held October 27-29, 2010. The event attracted more than 500 attendees from 275 companies.
From the Press: MCADCafè on Altair Engineering
Click here to read MCADCafé’s Weekly Review editorial featuring Altair Engineering, solidThinking’s parent company. Jeff Rowe writes about Altair’s products and technologies, cloud computing plans, and product development ventures.
solidThinking on CGW
Computer Graphics World has just published an online exclusive on solidThinking written by Kathleen Maher, senior analysts at Jon Peddie Research and editor in chief of JPR’s “TechWatch”.
Click here to read the full article.
Some highlights:
“SolidThinking is a lovely industrial design tool with a very graphical interface. The company’s tools are NURBS-based, and the software has combined the ability to directly model an object but maintain relationships through a construction tree. As the company says, industrial designers like to make changes, so it offers designers tools that let them try out ideas iteratively without destroying the design intent or, if appropriate, just grab and move features.”
“SolidThinking’s Morphogenesis technology lets users apply some very basic constraints to a rough block and gives it some guidelines as to how much material to save or remove. The software goes to work removing as much material as possible while still maintaining structural integrity. The result is a skeleton that can then be used to develop new ideas.”
solidThinking Inspired 8.0 Review on DEVELOP3D
The January 2010 issue of DEVELOP3D includes a full review of solidThinking Inspired 8.0.
Click here to download the PDF copy of the review. The article is also available on-line.
Here a few excerpts:
“solidThinking has an incredibly rich toolkit for conceptual design.”
“The surface creation selection is first class and can be used to create very high quality forms, but most importantly it is quick and easy to create any number of design variants and concepts. And with the new rendering tools, colours, surface treatment and material options can be quickly and accurately evaluated.”
“Of course, a major part of this release is the introduction of solidThinking Inspired and the morphogenesis tools. I’ve been playing with this non-stop since I first got my hands on it and it’s a fascinating tool for the designer. Using a world-class technology as its foundation, it lets designers explore structure and the performance requirements of a product at a very early stage of the design process.”
“The Inspired interface is clean, sparse and incredibly intuitive and the designer uses a combination of icons and direct input to define where the shape is restrained and where loading occurs.”
“In many cases, the system offers up ideas that might not be immediately obvious and which can be the basis for creating truly intriguing and standout products. But the most interesting thing is that this ‘creative’ process is also generating forms based on sound structure”.
From the Press: I.D. Magazine
In its latest issue I.D. Magazine covered solidThinking Inspired 8.0
and the new morphogenesis™
form-generation technology that allows to grow efficient shapes in response to environmental forces and pressures.
“Designers and engineers can use the software to develop new biomimetics forms or test the strenght of existing shapes.”
I.D. Magazine, Ian Volner
January/February 2010 issue
PDF here
From the Press: DEVELOP3D at the solidThinking Product Day
DEVELOP3D recently covered solidThinking 8.0 and solidThinking 8.0 Inspired with two articles which followed the recent solidThinking Product Day in Ludwigsburg, Germany.
About solidThinking
There’s been a debate raging on a recent post… with a reader questioning why you would want a history tree when working with complex surface forms. In short, seeing solidThinking in action answers those questions. By maintaining a fully featured history, by linking the seemingly simple curve forms you use to create surfaces, then the maintaining an intelligent history of the edits that you make (such as moving control points, pushing and pulling geometry), you have a toolset that’s perfectly linked for creating multiple design iterations, new concepts and new models in a very short space of time.”
“…concepts, ideas and forms… can be created, played with and worked in a fraction of the time you’d take to do it in a general purpose modelling systems. And the reason you can do that is because you’re using an intelligent modelling system tuned for the process, rather than a generic surface modelling tool.”
Nov 2, 2009
About solidThinking Inspired
“What solidThinking Inspired is about is giving the design community a new tool that, while it’s based on robust proven technology (as used by the likes of Airbus for optimising wing spans or leading architects, SOM, for designing high-rise buildings) its delivered in a manner that enables its use for creativity, rather than simulation. This is a tool that’s intended for finding new design alternatives, for providing, as the name suggests, inspiration, when working on new products. By bringing this type of technology, removing the complexity, but retaining the robustness, designers have the ability to research new structures for any given performance requirement and experiment further. solidThinking, a maker of 3-D design software, thinks it has hit on something big by borrowing a page from nature. The latest release of its software has something called a morphogenesis tool, which amounts to a filter designers can use to tweak their projects. The filter stems from research done around algorithms that try to mimic how human bones grow and support weight.”
“European HyperWorks Tech Forum: Day 1 continued: A quick peek at solidThinking Inspired” by Al Dean
Nov 4, 2009
From the Press
The launch of solidThinking 8.0 and solidThinking Inspired 8.0 has been covered by many media. Here are just a few of their reports:
“The hybrid NURBS-based solid and surface modeler is designed to emphasize creativity and innovation and facilitate research, experimentation, and exploration in the early stages of product development, the company states.”
“solidThinking also released 8.0 Inspired for industrial designers and architects, a module for use with solidThinking 8.0. Inspired introduces morphogenesis, the company’s new design exploration technology based on the laws of nature and biomimicry that influence the growth of bone tissue and how its structure is influenced by stresses in its environment. Morphogenesis essentially examines an existing design and asks, “What would nature do?” then generates options that the designer might not have considered.”
Cadalyst, Nancy Spurling Johnson
Oct. 4, 2009
“solidThinking, a maker of 3-D design software, thinks it has hit on something big by borrowing a page from nature. The latest release of its software has something called a morphogenesis tool, which amounts to a filter designers can use to tweak their projects. The filter stems from research done around algorithms that try to mimic how human bones grow and support weight.”
The New York Times Bits Blog, Ashley Vance
Sept. 18, 2009
Also ran in the New York Times national print edition on Sept. 21, 2009
“solidThinking Inspired 8.0 with morphogenesis technology adds a new layer of design thinking to the creative process by allowing the designer to study and review how nature would most likely solve the same problem, yet back off from the literal and strict bio-natural response to environmental forces at various degrees of subtlety.”
Architosh, Anthony Frausto Robledo
Sept. 18, 2009
“Designs tools that mimic structures found in nature could make for stronger and more environmentally friendly products, according to computer-assisted-design company that has drawn on ‘biomimicry’ to inspire its latest piece of software.”
WIRED.CO.UK, Katie Scott
Sept. 16, 2009
“The technology, which ST is calling morphogenesis, is a sort of semi-automated biomimicry toolbox, and after an hour-long phone and webinar demo last week, we have to say it’s unlike anything we’ve come across in the CAD world to date… It’s not explicitly an engineering aid — the forms created are far from manufacturing-friendly — but since the process is based on optimal material usage, using it as a design guide nudges the product towards greater efficiency, which is something engineers love. For the same reason, it could be thought of as a decent example of green technology too, giving designers hints on how to do more with less material, early on in the form-giving phase.”
Core77.com, Carl Alviani
Sept. 15, 2009
