Register for FREE attendance to the next Introduction to solidThinking, a live training session which introduces the concepts and tools of solidThinking.
Duration: 1 hour.
Dates:
July 8, 2010 – 2:00 PM EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)
July 13, 2010 – 10:00 AM EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)
Last week, solidThinking team members had the pleasure of joining over 450 attendees at the 2010 HyperWorks Technology Conference (HTC) in Novi, Michigan, April 27-29.
The annual three-day conference is part of the HyperWorks Technology Conference Global Series put on by our parent company, Altair, and offers sessions on advancements in simulation-driven design practices, design optimization, data management, process automation, cloud computing and decision support systems.
Attendees have access to an extensive PLM technology exhibition, including solidThinking. I had the opportunity to speak during day one of the conference among leaders including Altair founder and CEO Jim Scapa; HyperWorks CTO Dr. Uwe Schramm; Ford Motor Company Vice President of Engineering for Global Product Development Paul Mascarenas; and Porsche General Manager – Virtual Vehicle Christoph Guembel. I was joined onstage by solidThinking Industrial Designer and Product Specialist Darren Chilton, who also later provided a product demo to Jeff Rowe of MCADCafe at the solidThinking exhibition booth.
There was positive dialogue and enthusiasm expressed throughout the conference from attendees, Altair representatives, partners and exhibitors, and we were impressed to present to a standing-room only audience as we shared the benefits of conceptual design technology on product development. We discussed “Getting the Right Design, Getting the Design Right,” focusing on ways industrial designers can leverage advancements in modeling and rendering technologies to enhance the entire product development cycle, including:
1. Exploring more design alternatives and identifying winning designs sooner
2. Considering efficient forms early in the concept phase
3. Managing modifications and improving collaboration with engineering
4. Using rendering for interactive design review and validation
Overall, the HTC provided us with a setting where we could contribute our knowledge and user feedback to a wide audience and share it across many industries. Congratulations to Altair on a successful conference. The HTC Global Series moves now to Japan (June), India (August) and Europe (October).
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
Lighting an interior that only receives natural light through doors or windows can be a difficult task. In fact, for the most part, the lighting of the interior comes from the light bouncing off the walls, floor and ceiling. In order to achieve a good result, this ‘bouncing’ must be handled properly. Here is a tip on how to obtain good lighting with just one light source in a scene like the one represented in the image below.
This scene does not contain any light. In order to simulate the natural light, follow the below steps:
- add a light to the scene using the Light tool that you find in the modelling toolbar;
- place the light anywhere in the scene;
- open the Shading panel, right-click on “Light [none]” in the shader tree and choose “simple sky”.
Now we need to adjust intensity and shadows. Set them as in the picture below.
At this point, if we render we can have an idea of where the direct lighting hits the floor (see image below). The scene is dark because we have not yet activated the ‘bouncing’ of the light.
In solidThinking, there are different ways to activate and control the light’s bouncing. In this case we will use a method that provides extremely fast, high-quality and natural-looking results.
We use the Final Gather algorithms that we can activate in the Rendering section of the Shading panel. Once it is enabled, we just need to control and adjust some parameters, as shown in the images below.
Once we have set these parameters, we can render and see the final result (see image below).
We’re pleased to share that the solidThinking web site is now available in Chinese and Japanese languages to support our international user community.
The language setting can be selected from the drop-down list located at the top left of the solidThinking site.
More languages are coming soon.
DEVELOP3D recently covered solidThinking 8.0 and solidThinking 8.0 Inspired with two articles which followed the recent solidThinking Product Day in Ludwigsburg, Germany.
You are invited to the first solidThinking Product Day on November 2nd at the “Forum am Schlosspark” in Ludwigsburg, Germany.
The information day is part of the 3rd European HyperWorks Technology Conference 2009 (www.altairhtc.com/europe), which you might be visiting (registration is free).
The solidThinking day is dedicated to all creative trend-setters of the design community in Europe and will offer networking with the developers of solidThinking and solidThinking Inspired and experiences from real customer use cases.
The solidThinking day will start at 11.00 am on November 2nd and will include workshops and papers from solidThinking spokespeople and users. It will end at 18:00 with refreshment at the Welcome reception of the 3rd EHTC, to which all attendees of the solidThinking day are invited.
Ludwigsburg is located in Baden-Wuerttemberg, not far from Stuttgart. Baden-Wuerttemberg is one of the largest tourist states in Germany. It is situated in the very heart of Europe and is just as famous for its delicious cooking as for being the industrial home of globally renowned companies like Daimler, Bosch, Porsche, Boss, Adidas and Puma.
Ludwigsburg has a lot to offer. In the baroque centre of the town you can see the baroque quarters, which host the birth houses and residences of famous poets, such as Morike and Schiller, and you can stroll around in the castle park or go shopping and try out the local restaurants.
The solidThinking Information Day is FREE of charge.
Register today at: http://www.solidthinking.com/forms/EventList.aspx
With the help of our users’ feedback and support, we are proud to release today solidThinking 8.0 and solidThinking 8.0 Inspired.
Check out our multimedia news release at
www.prnewswire.com/mnr/solidthinking/39369 for the complete announcement, stunning visuals and more.
Designers are constantly seeking new sources of inspiration and for technologies that most naturally translate that inspiration into a viable design. We’ve listened intently to your feedback and have integrated new enhancements and capabilities to these latest releases in order to meet designers’ and architects’ key needs and software-use nuances. All updates have been made to further stimulate your creativity and continue to offer as much design flexibility as possible.
Both solidThinking 8.0 and solidThinking 8.0 Inspired will feature major user-centric design and productivity enhancements, such as a restyled and more streamlined user interface, powerful 3D manipulators for transformations, real-time and progressive rendering, new materials and models libraries, High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) capabilities, and much more. Additionally, as part of solidThinking 8.0 Inspired we’re introducing new sources of computational inspiration, including morphogenesis™ – a new technology that allows designers to leverage efficiencies in nature when creating and developing their designs.
Drawing on the principles of biomimicry, the morphogenesis feature in the premiere release of solidThinking 8.0 Inspired mimics processes and physical laws in nature to help designers and architects generate forms and structures in response to environmental conditions, using the results as inspiration to further stimulate their designs.
The advancements within solidThinking 8.0 and 8.0 Inspired are dedicated to providing our users with the capability to explore virtually countless design options.
For more information, cool visuals, demos, webinars and download opportunities, visit us at www.solidthinking.com.
Come and meet us at the IDSA 2009 International Conference (September 23-26, in Miami, FL) where we will be presenting solidThinking’s latest release.
Don’t miss our booth and our breakout session “Human Thinking and Computational Inspiration, New Challenges and Opportunities for Product Design” is scheduled for Saturday, September 26 from 11:30am to 12:30pm.
