Dezignstuff SolidWorks Blog

Earlier this year I had contacted Siemens PLM about getting an evaluation copy of Solid Edge with the goal of exploring the possibility of writing a book on it. I checked some of the Amazon stats, and it seemed that the current Solid Edge books were again mostly step-by-step tutorials for beginners written by educators. The book sales for Solid Edge books were in general well below those for SW books, presumably because there are fewer users.

Siemens PLM marketing people got back to me, seeming somewhat more guarded than the Autodesk folks who just sent me a copy of Inventor with little if any discussion. Siemens told me that they were just about to release a new version of the software, and that any effort should be postponed until after the new software was out. This was before news of Synchronous Technology hit the web.

Once the ST hype started hitting, and it was clear that this was at least going to try to compete with both SolidWorks and the likes of Spaceclaim, a firestorm of speculation was set off. There was precious little real information. All that existed were some overblown marketing statements, and a whole lot of copies of the marketing materials from everyone’s favorite (and unnamed) CAD terrorist. If this was really new, I wanted to know what it was. As time passed, there were few people who had really used the software stepping up to say anything beyond the marketing hype.

So in my curiosity, there seemed to be only one way to draw out people who actually knew what was going on. Of course. I posted my own ridiculous conjecture. Looking back most of it was factually incorrect, because I had no facts to go on, but as time went on, people from Siemens started to comment, and they started to give some actual information.

In the end, I still didn’t have a very good idea about the details of what ST was or how it worked. I couldn’t answer the question about if users would like it or find it useable because those are the kinds of things you can only tell by actually using the software. CAD terrorists and self proclaimed really smart guys were saying similar things, as far as I could tell based solely on marketing materials. Sounded like a bad idea to me.

After the release of the software when actual users had the software installed, things seemed to get quiet. It didn’t seem to be a good sign for the software when users have it in their hands and they aren’t saying anything about it.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a call back from the Siemens marketing people. They wanted me to come down to Huntsville and talk to them about the software, get some training, and take the software back with me. It seems they contacted a few other SW bloggers as well, but I was the only one who accepted. One of the benefits of being independent is schedule flexibility. A separate event was held for members of the press.

Part of the “problem” is that Solid Edge doesn’t have more than a few bloggers that cover the product. This blog seems to have given SEwST more exposure than any other. Most of my coverage was simply out of curiosity. Another part of the problem is that many people have the perception that Solid Edge has not been marketed with much conviction, possibly because if its seemingly jealous relationship with NX. So now that Solid Edge users have something to crow about, they want to crow.

My visit to Huntsville involved a number of people. Most of the time was spent with Mark and Doug, internal corporate training guys who usually train reseller AEs. To begin and end the day, there were as many as 8 of us around the big conference table. Dora Smith of marketing was my main contact. Kris Kasprzak of marketing was also there. Bruce Bose also of marketing was a fellow Rochesterian and RIT alumn. Dan Staples is the director of development for Solid Edge and has commented on this blog a few times. Mark Thompson and Doug Stainbrook were the internal trainers. Mark Burhop, keeps a blog. Mark and Dora can be seen on Twitter.

The questions went back and forth. They had as many for me as I had for them. In the end, they did a great job of showing me the software and answering my conceptual questions as well as they could.

I’ve got a magazine article in the works, and if it gets published, most of the content about the software is in that article. The logistics on the article may fall through, or another venue may open up, so I’m not going to get into the software in depth right here right now.

One thing is clear, though. The guys from Siemens really believe that this product is going to replace history-based modeling. There is none of the Spaceclaim equivocation where the two technologies can coexist side by side. Dan Staples said “Ten years from now history based modeling will not exist”.

The first thing I learn is that I should be writing a Solid Edge blog. If I do a history of everything (well, a history of hits on my blog since my last meltdown in April), it looks like this:

The top four posts were about stuff other than stuff I use. So it’s controversy that people enjoy. Nobody can resist a nice messy train wreck. Good thing, I guess. Lots of train wrecks on this blog.

Other wildly popular posts were the Crisis in the Community post, and some of the unfortunate nonsense about the incredible difference between the words “banned” and “blocked”… which fortunately didn’t survive the meltdown.

So, what does this say about CAD? It seems the pursuit of entertainment trumps the pursuit of knowledge. Even on a work related blog. So from now on, it’s just ridiculous controversy.

The most unfortunate thing about those statistics is that if there were any posts I could go back and rewrite, some of those Synchronous Technology posts would certainly be some of them. The main thing was that I didn’t know anything about ST, and seemingly neither did anyone else who was writing about them. I wanted to get people to start talking about it, so I just said what I thought it was based on only the silly marketing stuff I’d heard, read and seen.

What I thought funniest was that people who didn’t know any more about it than I did were telling me I didn’t know what I was talking about. Well, of course I didn’t! and neither did they. No real info was available! Not knowing was the whole point of posting! To learn. There are a lot of differences between CAD people and CAD journalists. I’m clearly not any kind of journalist. CAD journalists want to look like they know everything even when they don’t. CAD users are really just in search of information and application.

What do I think ST is now? I think I’ve heard people say that you can either use the parametric side of Solid Edge or the Synchronous Tech side of Solid Edge. So they are two different softwares. FrankenCAD might have been off the mark. More of a Jeckyll and Hyde CAD.

I think it’s a direct modeler that uses feature recognition and applied dimensions that combine to work like parametrics applied to the finished geometry rather than parametrics applied to underlying sketch geometry.

100X faster? pppbbbtt. Than what? This sound very far fetched. I can see where no history is much faster than a big tree, but I can also see where feature recognition probably takes more time than anyone will admit.

SEwST sounds cool and useful, but very limited. This is where I branch off into conjecture… It is limited first in the types of edits it can make to limited types of geometry. First of all, it can not handle changes to general NURBS shapes, meaning spline type complexity. I haven’t been able to get anyone who has used the stuff to talk about it. They (SEwST promoters) probably don’t know either. Spaceclaim has limited capabilities in this area.

I’ve been tempted to recreate the SEwST Youtube videos in SolidWorks. Not because I think SW has exactly the same functionality, but just to show that you shouldn’t believe everything you see in a Youtube demo. I really think I could make SW do the same stuff, and make it look stupid easy.

Is this as revolutionary as parametrics was? No way. This is direct editing, which has been around for decades, topped with a combination of things that works like parametrics, heaped with an overly generous helping of hype.

Will it be useful? Yes. Direct modeling inside SolidWorks has already been useful to me for years.

Will it change the CAD industry? Most of the players in the parametric movement already have direct editing. There were several other direct modelers before SEwST. SEwST has built on the Spaceclaim model, and improved it somewhat – although I must clarify I’ve actually used Spaceclaim, but haven’t used SEwST.

Is the CAD sky falling? Not unless your initials are JB. You can’t see what’s going on behind the scenes, but outwardly, I’m not hearing any reaction from a CAD company either endorsing or condemning the direct editing movement. I do expect CAD companies to add more direct editing tools because these days CAD companies are as bad as cosmetics manufacturers with the amount of wheel spinning on useless trends (for example, the ribbon, Vista, realview type functions).

Wow, I went further down that trail than I hoped. SEwST has yet to deliver on a lot of outlandish promises and expectations. The rest of the CAD world is not yet trembling in fear.

Ok, this’ll get tongues wagging. Now that I’ve learned a little, or think I’ve learned a little about Synchronous Technology, I learn that the only thing that’s really unprecedented about it is the amount of useless jaw movement it has caused.

Check out these Catia V6 youtube videos:

Huh. Well if that doesn’t look an awful lot like ST or SC, I don’t know what does. It seems to be called Catia Live Shape. I have exactly zero actual information about it other than what I can see in these videos, and the Martyn Day article I linked to in a previous post. The second video was posted in March, right before the Siemens media onslaught started. So who is it that is playing catch up? Neither product seems to be truly market ready yet, so it remains to be seen who delivers this first to paying customers.

But the geometry creation tools are only the tip of the V6 iceberg, and not even the tip that the Dassault marketing folks seem most interested in, either. Collaboration, PLM 2.0, Web techniques, virtual immersion, “experience” all seem to be more interesting to DS.

Here’s another one where Bernard Charles explains what PLM 2.0 is all about. I can’t really understand it, but that’s because Mr. Charles Franglish is further slurred by the low quality youtube audio. If anyone figures out what he’s saying, please leave a comment.

So, Catia seems to be more focussed on PLM 2.0, and really big picture stuff more than the small potatoes of making and changing geometry.

And finally, the above piece is I think the most powerful statement they make about V6. The virtual host, with her virtual hand and head gestures, right down to the virtual stretch of her blouse between her virtual breasts. This company believes in this virtual reality immersion in a way that wasn’t possible the first time the VR wave hit almost 10 years ago. The first wave led primarily to the proliferation of games. This wave may lead to the proliferation of industrial simulation.

Anyway, ST is not the only game in town. I think Siemens saw a window of opportunity, and it just happened that the window didn’t correspond to a time when they had a real product to sell. Siemens main hope was to strike first, even if it was just a virtual strike.

I have to admit, I was originally kind of interested in this Synchronous Technology topic, but I’m quickly getting over any sort of interest that I had in it. I’m catching a fair amount of crap for it, and not really getting what I think are very good answers. Since I can’t rely on finding anyone with an objective opinion out there, I’m just going to have to put this on the shelf and wait until maybe someone from Siemens sends me a copy to review (hint, hint).

Siemens has started selling this “pig in a poke” at a greatly reduced price (~$3000 - in a notice from a reseller who spammed some forums). The price seems to suggest that they see Spaceclaim as their main competition, even though they are asking you to “trade in” your SolidWorks license to do it. Of course they can’t actually take your SolidWorks license, so the whole thing is just a stunt.

Another thing that confuses me is you hear these marketing testimonials about how company X is seeing such great improvements, but at the same time you can’t get a straight answer out of anyone who has actually used it about functionality because the software is not going to be available until August.

The fact that no one can really descibe it succinctly in a way that makes sense says everything they need to say about it. So if I can’t get users to say anything intelligible about it, then it remains just another glossy ad with nothing behind it. The part that really irks me is that the people who say I’m just criticising because I’m devoted to SolidWorks are waving the SEwST flag without any personal experience whatsoever. I am at least looking for objectivity.

One of the fellows who posted a comment here sent me a couple of long emails which are equal parts rant, defense of MS Ribbon interface, incorrect memory, self contradictions, and underdog flag-waving. Scott Wertel it seems is a fan of Alibre and Solid Edge. He claims CAD is just a tool, but also defends zealotry. I’m not sure what to make of this contradiction. He claimed I had changed my mind about the SW 08 interface, but later recanted, because he was obviously wrong about that.

Anyway, this is really long, but it explains a few things. I’m trusting that Scott’s one view of this stuff was enough to give him the correct impression. Here is what Scott had to say, with comments interspersed:

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Religious zeal

I’ve been guessing a lot about what functionality the term Synchronous Technology was meant to obfuscate. I’ve been both wrong and right about some of my guesses. I’m not the only one. Even Evan Almighty has been wrong and right, but mainly irrelevant. Very few people have any real “facts” about this stuff. We hear what some people want to be true, and some people just blindly repost press releases without any idea at all what it means. We’ve heard some strange emotional rants about why the world needs something like this as opposed to something or anything else, and some equally strange posts seemingly defending SolidWorks from the need to keep up with the Joneses.

I’ve been lucky enough to have Dan Staples of the Solid Edge development team and Chris Kelley, a Siemens marketing guy both stop by the blog here and leave some comments. Dan in particular has been very helpful with the only hard facts I’ve heard anywhere about Synchronous Technology. Even the ST white paper is very heavy in vague declaratives. The truth is that most of those videos posted about ST, well, I’ve been tempted to post equivalent videos of SolidWorks doing exactly the same thing. Not because I have an axe to grind, but just to show that the examples we have seen of ST have been unconvincing because the capabilities already exist in SW and other places. This is why some folks have said ST is nothing new. I think Siemens has done a wonderful job of creating hype, and a less than wonderful job of backing it up. But of course that may be the main attraction of hype – not backing it up is what makes it hype in the first place.

So what have we learned?

- Synchronous Technology means that all of the relations in a part are solved simultaneously instead of linearly.

In SolidWorks, mates in an assembly are all solved simultaneously. So are sketch relations. These are driven by D-Cubed, also owned by Siemens. What are two of the least reliable areas of the SolidWorks software? You got it, sketch relations and mates. Go back and count how many times I’ve singled those two areas out as things I would like to have fixed. I think this is a bad omen for ST. D-Cubed proves that simultaneous solutions are not an incredibly reliable source. Of course SW’s problems could be an implementation issue, and it still remains to be seen how Solid Edge’s implementation of simultaneous solutions for relations within a solid model is going to work in real every day modeling.

There is no doubt, history can be a cumbersome way to create geometry, but it is also just as often a great asset when making changes. Getting away from history is a great theory, but based on what I’ve seen of simultaneous solutions, there may be a reason why other CAD companies are not flocking to it.

- Synchronous Technology really is something new – a new way of putting together a lot of old stuff.

“Synchronous” can mean “solving relations simultaneously”. Or it can mean integrating several modeling technologies or techniques. I think the “synchronous technology” term benefits from some intentional double entendre, but at the same time is sufficiently vague that it doesn’t mean anything in specific as a stand alone phrase. All of this probably makes sloganeering marketing people wet their pants in glee. Still, clever new names or not, this is all familiar territory.

Simultaneous solutions? Check. D-Cubed. Shaky foundation. Been there, done that.

Driving dimensions and geometrical relationships on “dumb” geometry? Check. Spaceclaim.

Feature recognition? Another shaky foundation. Check. Several CAM products use this, as well as FeatureWorks.

Live Rules? Behind the marketing name, this is indistinguishable from parametric relations. In fact, it looks much like parametric relations applied directly on the solid model. Dan sort of confirmed this, I think. Parametric relations on a solid model to me is the one thing to really get excited about with ST. The screen grab below was taken from a youtube video.

- Siemens is totally changing directions in the high end and midrange markets, and is throwing this Hail Mary in the hopes that all the commotion may attract more attention than all of the Spaceclaim and CoCreate non-news.

With Synchronous Technology, Solid Edge has removed itself from the SolidWorks – Inventor fray. They have been removed for some time, they just never admitted it until now. Personally, I think the hype has been brilliant, but the failure to follow up the hype with some sort of intelligible scheme that real users can understand leaves the whole thing looking like the vacuum cleaner salesman saying “trust me!!” It’s kind of telling that I had to dig this info out of people, and that Siemens clearly does not have a clear and intelligible message for users.

Chris Kelley appears to be a one-man Solid Edge blog machine, but he is marketing, not technical. Really, are there any technical Solid Edge blogs out there? Why are they not giving us the low-down from a users point of view (or are they and I’m just not seeing it?) I’m not bashing Solid Edge as a product, I don’t know enough about it to bash it. It seems so much like SolidWorks as to be practically the same, historically, anyway. But the product hasn’t seen the broad industry acceptance that SolidWorks has seen, so Siemens had nothing to lose by changing the rules and aiming low.

What I mean by “aiming low” is that the whole direct editing movement seems to be enthralled with the ease of use idea. I think this is meant to expand the definition of a “CAD user” to mean someone lower on the specialization totem. The message here is “ease of use” rather than “power” or “control”. These ideas always seem to be diametrically opposed.

- What remains in Solid Edge is no longer a history based modeler.

Some people who don’t know (including me) have said that ST is Spaceclaim bolted on to SolidWorks. I don’t believe this to be the case. I’m now under the impression that ST is Spaceclaim bolted on to CoCreate, or there abouts. There is no history left. Siemens has abandoned history based modelers. This seems to be one of the things that Dan was saying.

Many UG users I have known have said that UG never was much for history based modeling, and with Solid Edge showing as an “also ran” in the parametric history based market space, it is no surprise that they decided to changed direction, possibly if for no other reason than to distinguish themselves from SW and IV. So now they have a chance of being on the top of the heap of non-history based modelers, and trying to capitalize on the wave of direct editing modelers really rejuvenated by the popularity and simplicity of Sketchup, and given a shot in the arm by Spaceclaim.

Summary

Solid Edge and Unigraphics/NX are both strong products, but they aren’t market leaders. Solid Edge was acquired from Intergraph, and part of NX is SDRC. How is Siemens going to grow this set of products? A bold move like completely rearchitecting the software might not have been inevitable, but it really isn’t a huge surprise.

I’m very interested to see what rank and file Solid Edge users think of these changes. For those that are happy with the history-based view of the world, Solid Edge may have just handed SolidWorks a small infusion of new customers. There are several people who are not paid by Siemens who are going around claiming that this stuff is the answer to all their prayers, even though they have never laid hands on the software or fully understand how it really works.

I’m going to guess that the new Solid Edge will have a little burst of sales just due to curiosity, but in the end, interest will wane. There is a reason why products like IronCAD, CoCreate, KeyCreator and Spaceclaim have not become overwhelmingly poplular while products like Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks and Inventor have. I don’t think a massive hype campaign is going to be enough to change this decades old momentum.

It may be a great idea, and it may have required some revolutionary thinking to bring it to fruition, but I think Synchronous Technology is going to become another forgettable buzzword that marked a sharp turn in the road for an “also ran” history based modeler.

I understand confusion when I see it. Different segments of the CAD industry are moving in different directions, and it is by no means a given which direction is the correct one. In the end, I believe we are going to see more direct editing (non-history) based tools, but I don’t think FrankenCAD is the obvious choice.

In one corner we have the noisy, but still rather stuffy Siemens/UGS with its Synchronous Technology pom-poms and cheerleaders, claiming that history based modelers are going to give way to non-history based direct modeling, or at least mixed modelers which employ non-history based modeling within a history-based framework. This is an ugly FrankenCAD mix, and as details leak out, I don’t think it gets any prettier.

And then in the other corner we are seeing the budding romance of a non-history based modeler (Spaceclaim) with another non-history based modeler (Rhino), but then one of them goes and adds some history based functionality. Rhino with implicit and explicit history shows that the direct editing crowd understands parametrics has value that they can’t deliver. This is FrankenCAD from the other direction. How does adding random parametric history dependent features to a non-history based model work? This sounds rather like CoCreate software, which is another also-ran in the direct editing miasma. This story of Spaceclaim and Rhino teaming up and Rhino adding history isn’t getting as much press as the other Synchronous story, but I think it is the more important of the two.

Here’s why. Oreos. Yes, oreo cookies.

Spaceclaim on its own is limited. It has cool editing capabilities, but they are limited to analytical geometry – prismatic stuff with lines and arcs, single curvature, developable surfaces. It has some limited capability with general case NURBS shapes, but it is really limited. You can make simple machined parts and sheet metal parts, but more complex castings and plastic parts aren’t really part of the Spaceclaim equation. What Spaceclaim is missing is exactly what Rhino is best at – swoops. And frankly, Rhino, in all of its complex shape surfacing glory, is no match for a solid modeler when it comes to prismatic work. Plastic part engineering in Rhino would be tedious. What Rhino is most missing in its software is exactly what Spaceclaim does. Oh, and they are both direct modelers.

Everybody has been waiting for Dassault or Autodesk or PTC or UGS to swoop down and snag Spaceclaim, but it keeps not happening. What is happening is that these two small, rogue, direct editing CAD companies are starting to work together. It’s like an Oreo cookie. The wafer is good, but I wouldn’t eat it by itself. The filling is also yummy, but by itself isn’t satisfying. Put them together and you’ve got something that stands the test of time. I would like to see these two companies do more than just share files.

We’ve heard a lot of explanations about what is going on with Synchronous Technology, but the message is getting more rather than less confusing. At first it was just direct editing tacked on to parametrics, Spaceclaim bolted onto SolidWorks. Then it became something far more than that that mere mortals could not possibly understand, and self-proclaimed brilliant people could not explain. Now it appears to have many aspects to it, including everything previously mentioned, procedural features, form features, and feature recognition. That’s an awful lot of “features” for a direct editing (non-feature-based) modeling scheme.

Secretly, I’m hoping that it might be condensed to a statement something like “parametric relationships brought down to the final model faces, rather than intermediate features”. So you make geometry somehow, anyhow, and then put parametric relationships directly to the faces. You get the benefits of paremetrics without the overhead of history. This is something I wondered about in an earlier post. I’ve been writing a lot about the direct editing conundrum for about a year, mainly due to the appearance of Spaceclaim on the scene.

The alternative to a simple statement of the software seems to be something that is too complex to trust or use. Siemens is using the term “feature recognition”. Feature recognition is something I’m familiar with from two sources – FeatureWorks, which is one of those 40% solutions, and FeatureCAM, which also recognizes features for machining. In both cases, a lot of manual intervention is required to do real work, and in both cases, it works best on very simple geometry.

Another warning flag on the Synchronous stuff is that when I have mixed modes in SolidWorks (history based parts with direct editing features), you get a lot of confusion about how to change things at the end of the tree. Geometry gets “double jeopardy” because you could change it using either history based or direct editing features. Especially if multiple people do the work, this will add to the confusion. The mixed modeling that Synchronous Technology represents is an ugly frankenCAD, in my opinion. Cool idea, yes, but I think in practice this is going to be a bad idea. People will prefer a clean break.

In all of the times I have heard top SolidWorks users talk about the direct editing tools in SolidWorks, they have done it from the point of view that these tools are cool, and can make some tasks easier or simply possible, but they are also a best practice nightmare in terms of maintaining editability, and that its a sloppy way to work.

To me this suggests that if you’re going to move from history to non-history, it is best done either sparingly within a single CAD file or by moving from one CAD file to another, even moving to a different application. Once you start doing direct modeling on a part, switching back and forth causes a lot of confusion.

History based modeling is not going to disappear, let’s be clear about that. There are too many proven benefits. I’m sorry if sometimes history based modeling is intellectually difficult. I’m sorry about that. How else are you going to get the history based benefits of things like the shell feature, or fillets? History is not history.

What’s happening here is that the CAD industry is again appealing to the CAD bottom feeders, a trend that seems to be gaining momentum in an effort to expand the CAD market into new areas it hasn’t previously occupied. People who can’t hang with the intellectual/training demands of history based modeling are going to go for direct modeling. But I don’t think it’s a given that they are going to flock to the unnatural FrankenCAD combination of history and non-history modeling.

It boils down to this: Machinists and people doing simple concepting work will use direct editing because its a no-brainer (think Sketchup) and less expensive. Engineers responsible for production models will still use history based modeling because it represents more complete control. To the extent that you have both types of people in the same organization, it may make sense for that organization to get one tool that does both, but honestly, direct editing comes at the end and the beginning of the project. At the beginning, their models are used as reference, but the production model is made from scratch. At the end of the project, it doesn’t matter because edits are for mfg, for example adding stock, and won’t be pushed back up to the engineering model.

As an aside, all the references to Synchronous Technology so far have been with respect to solid modeling, not necessarily to surface modeling. Add to that the seeming lack of capabilities around complex shapes, and I for one will not be able to make use of this concept at all. I will be much more likely to be able to use whatever comes of the marriage of Spaceclaim and Rhino.

Spaceclaim + Rhino = solids, surfaces, prismatics and general NURBS, mainly direct editing with some history

Synchronous Technology = solids, prismatics, mainly history with some feature recognition and a lot of unknown details

To me, the Spaceclaim/Rhino FrankenCAD – SpaceRhino – seems like the more attractive combination. A big part of the reason for that is that you can see what that combination is, and what it does. This Siemens thing is still too much of a pig in a poke.