By Oleg Zykov, CEO, C3D Labs

Oleg Zykov

We can’t talk about predictions for 2023 without mentioning a technology that has been known for a long time. Polygonal modeling is actively penetrating the CAD industry. Traditionally, both in mechanical engineering and architectural and construction CAD-systems a boundary representation is used – B-Rep.

This is the most accurate way to represent geometry. However, more and more models are coming to engineers in the form of mesh and polygonal models. These are data from 3D scanners, generative design results and models from online catalogs. They need to be worked with. All leading geometric kernel developers are working on polygonal modeling tools. We presented the first results of this work at our international virtual conference C3DevCon 2022 in October. If you have both solid and mesh models in your workspace, then you will immediately want to work with them simultaneously. In 2023 we will see the widespread use of hybrid modeling not only in high-end CAD, but in any CAD products.

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By Matt Judge, Vice President, Imaginestics, Vizseek

Matt Judge

In 2023, we see greater demand for mechanical computer-aided design, supported by tools such as visual search.

The fluctuations in the business world since early 2020, plus the current unrest in 2023, where half of the tech companies are hiring and half are cutting staff, make specific growth predictions highly challenging, so we will leave that part blank.

The world went digital in the 1980s. Documents that were once in files, inside filing cabinets, became an organized set of ones and zeros on a hard drive on a desktop, then in the server room. Now, many of those digital documents are in the cloud.

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By, David A. Selliman Director of Sales, CoreTechnologie

David A. Selliman 

The State of the Industry – CAD Interoperability Challenge

You would think after many years of attempts to correct the interoperability challenge, most CAD/CAE/CAM software applications can read their competitive products removing the need to translate CAD models to a neutral format. Yet these reading CADx files fail to bring into the interfaces a solid model or missing elements like PMI (Product Management Information) assemblies and metadata correctly.  PMI is currently replacing the 2D drawing with semantic representation.  Within this paper, you will learn about what the industry is needing to effortlessly share CAD data, known as the digital twin/thread, and its relationship to ISO standards, visualization of large file sizes, and validation.  Most interesting is that the subject of validation is such a wide topic, that I will simplify the solutions that companies around the globe are requesting from SME and interoperability companies like CoreTechnologie. Lastly, I will touch on the fastest-growing industry as it related to 3D printing, known as “additive manufacturing”, and its moving target of what the solutions will look like in the next 12 months.   The importance is the ability to collaborate between OEM, suppliers, and software solutions for downstream applications in the space of CAD, CAE, and CAM.

Barriers to Model-Centric Data Interoperability

• The 2D drawing is still considered the master versus the 3D model by many in industry
• There is a significant learning curve to effectively embed PMI into a 3D CAD model
• Many Application Program Interfaces (APIs) do not adequately support downstream processes due to a lack of PMI
• Major Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) suppliers are concerned with losing market share due to the ease of model transportability with standards-based data exchange
• CAM and CMM markets are distributed across many SMEs

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