At the end of 2018 let me make a little recap of our wins and tell about how life in our company evolved, what we have achieved and what we are going to do in the next year.
Let’s begin with the most important thing. To this day we have managed to increase the team by 1.5X compared to the last year, which means that we have lots of fresh ideas and more opportunities to bring these ideas to life. Newcomers boost CAD Exchanger SDK, garnish GUI, improve Cloud and respond to your requests daily, our dear users. We are glad to welcome new team members and wish them success in solving their complex goals.
This year is special for us due to appearance of absolutely incredible customers. NASA uses CAD Exchanger to conquer the space, PHILLIPS, JVC and NOKIA are shaping our day-to-day consumer electronics. Bright, talented startups like Visualive bring next gen CAD visualization to the Cloud with the help of CAD Exchanger SDK. Teams from more than 110 countries use CAD Exchanger to build our present and invent our future. We are thrilled to see this happening and hope that our software will continue to design breakthrough products faster.
What comes to our own product, CAD Exchanger became noticeably better in 2018. During this year we rolled out 3 juicy releases with further improvements:
- Performance. Performance. Performance.
- SolidWorks support
- IFC support
- PMI support in STEP AP242
- New versions of already supported formats
- Optimized processing of the product structure
- Built manipulator
- Significantly improved GUI interface
In addition to traditional products we launched production preview of CAD Exchanger Cloud. Software stack in web-development completely differs from the regular software development, so we literally had to build CAD Exchanger form scratch. Nevertheless, we were able to publish it and align it’s features with CAD Exchanger Lab and SDK within very aggressive deadlines.
Thankfully, our efforts were noted by huge industrial media like: 3DPrint.com, 3Dprinting.com, Meral-AM, Xakep, to name a few.
All that’s left to do this year is to please you with the winter 3.5.2 release of CAD Exchanger. Here is what we’ve made so far.
Improved display of the complex 3D designs
One more feature we are proud of is the third version of visualization mesher. Remember with the last release we have declared that we started to work on the improvement of processing of the heavy weight files? Today’s update brings us one step closer to fulfilling this mission.
One of the stages of the 3D design viewing is meshing. And the challenge here is to compute the minimal amount of triangles needed for correct displaying with the right level of accuracy. The fewer triangles will be used, the faster the model will be rendered. However, the quality of the design should be preserved and be as detailed as in the source software. If you expect detailed model, then mesher should use just right amount of triangles to display each detail of the complex geometry.
To achieve optimal balance we have been developing our own meshing algorithm for more than an year. In the previous release it was available for limited testing and now we are ready to show the results of the benchmarking.
As you can see, in some of the cases the triangle count has been decreased for more than 10x, which gave us almost 3x performance boost.
We hope that new visualization mesher in coupe with previous improvements will save your precious time and work with large assemblies faster
Export dialogue
In the ideal world software doesn’t have tutorials. The whole functionality is intuitive and certain interface elements could be customized. We won’t claim that CAD Exchanger is ideal (on the contrary, we are ensured that the improvement is everlasting process), but in this release we made an effort to streamline user experience.
We are talking about Export dialogue. Until now it was very minimalistic. It contained only text field with browse button (where you could copy-paste the desired path), export options and export button. We expected that the hot path would be the pasting of the path to the text-field and immediate ‘Export’ after. However, as practice revealed, people preferred to use standard file dialogue (where you would choose the export file format in the dropdown menu). This approach is good for certain cases, but it could also be confusing, as after you would hit ‘save’ in the file dialogue you would still need to press ‘Export’.
To simplify the life of those who prefer standard file dialogues we decided to re-imagine export dialogue.
Now on the export panel you will see the list of the available file formats. Inside the team we couldn’t decide how it should look like: should it be a list or ‘cards’, so we made both and let you decide what works best for you.
After the selection of the file format you would just hit ‘Export’, which will open the familiar file dialogue and there you can paste the path or choose it manually.
Formats
Every release we add something to our scope of supported file formats and versions of the file formats. We are file converter after all. Here is what we have made so far in this release:
- JT
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- Significantly improved processing of the files with the external references with the help of delayed loading of the elements of product structure. This allows to dynamically load certain elements, which significantly improve responsiveness of the application and decrease memory load.
- Improved the quality of the importer
- SolidWorks
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- Added support of C# and Java in CAD Exchagner SDK
- VRML
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- Added support of VRML 1.0
- Improved the quality of the VRML V2 importer. Now it became faster and more robust.