Industry 4.0 is not another marketing buzzword. We have been finally convinced in this since we experienced a huge volume of inquiries related to PMI and meta-information.
Let’s shred some light on the concept of PMI. There are 2 kinds of Product and Manufacturing Information: semantic and graphical. The semantic PMI actually stores a lot of data, while graphical PMI is meant to be displayed in the 3D.
Semantic PMI is a set of annotations, drafting symbols, values and manufacturing related information (such as type of operations or materials) associated with the 3D geometry. In addition to that semantic PMI can be approached programmatically, which allows to build engineering software on top of it.
Graphical PMI can be generated from semantic PMI. Graphical PMI most commonly is a set of polylines, that you actually see in the 3D view of applications. It’s only aim is to be human readable and it can’t be accessed programmatically.
Some of the CAD file formats can carry PMI data (such as JT and STEP AP242, both supported in CAD Exchanger) and in latest CAD Exchanger Cloud release we added it’s support. At this moment CAD Exchanger only supports graphical PMI, the support of semantic PMI is already on it’s way.
To enable PMI just go to the product structure and locate any element of the tree, which has a small "plant" icon next to it. This will open PMI panel to the right with the available PMI entities. You can either enable them all, or enable one by one. In addition to that, if model carries so-called 'model views' (pre-set of the camera position and enabled PMI entities) they will also be present in the dropdown menu.
Support of VRML 2.0
Initially designed for web in 1994 VRML has undergone lots of changes and subsequently has been ‘pushed out’ by it’s successor X3D, which is currently state of the art 3D format for web.
However, there are tons of VRML data out there and lots of people successfully use it today, therefore, for the convenience of our users, we’ve decided to extend our support of VRML, and added missing VRML 2.0 to our scope of supported formats.
Background settings
In the software developers community there is a meme related to those, who use light theme in their software applications.
As you might have noticed, CAD Exchanger Cloud is light, so even our own developers found it hilarious that we can’t switch gorgeous purely white background color to dark. In addition to that, we received an inquiry from our user, who requested to add the ability to tweak the background settings and that was the moment we surrendered and decided to add this (the most controversial) feature to our product.
Now In CAD Exchanger Cloud you can change the background color in the ‘View’ menu. For that just click the ‘eye’ icon, and there you will find the ‘Background color’ item. There you can choose any color from the presets on the right, or fine-tune your custom color in the color picker. Once selected, the square icon next to the menu item will take the selected color.
Thank you for your interest in CAD Exchanger Cloud. Stay tuned for more upgrades and please let us know how we can improve our product to make it more suitable for your day-to-day live.