SpaceClaim release 6 ideas

All, so we are planning Release 6 right now and all feedback is greatly appreciated. What I found the last time I asked this question is that we were able to handle many feature requests in the Service Packs of the current release -- and I hope to be able to do that this time as well.

If something is obviously broken, call or contact Technical Support so we can get a call # assigned to it -- but if you can think of something (however small) that would really make SpaceClaim perform well in your environment, I would like to know about it. Feel free to pile onto other people's requests, too.
F

Tags: 6, Release, behavior, enhancements, workflow

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Permalink Reply by Klaus Middendorf on January 14, 2010 at 8:15am

Hello Frank, Hello Blake,

some weeks ago I argued, that IMHO multitouch-capabilities are of no serious use for CAD-applications..except for presentations. (Still stick to that) At the end however I stated that If for example a company like WACOM came forward with a digitizing tablet that supported multi-touch I might probably fall in love with 'multi-touch'.

I just wanted to inform you that WACOM sells such a tablet now. (Wacom BAMBOO touch)

I could'nd test this as yet with spaceclaim but with another app. since I don't have the
resources for another spaceclaim engineer subscription at this time.

Its truly amazing and I'm longing for the day, when I can first test it on spaceclaim.

take a look: http://www.wacom.eu/index2.asp?pid=294&lang=de&spid=3

best

klaus

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Permalink Reply by Frank D on February 17, 2010 at 10:45am

Klaus
So I have shown this Multi-touch SpaceClaim to a ton of people. Everyone comes to the demo with some sort of previous experience with touch (on a machine tool, a wacom tablet, touch-screen single-touch PCs, etc.)

I don't even try to describe it, or demo it to them like we demo regular SpaceClaim. The best thing i can do is to just let them touch the screen and build stuff. The idea of SpaceClaim is that you can just change what you see. The thing that multi-touch lets you do is to remove the layers of abstraction between object, screen, PC, mouse.. and bring it down to just object and touch.

I am happy to support the Wacom MT tablet,, once I get my hands on a unit, but again, that is still an additional abstrated layer -- that is good for precision work (where your fingers get in the way of what you are trying to sketch) but also not that much better than a mouse... So a little ease of use, some more natural ways of looking at and examining a model, are some of the reasons to try it out.

Let me know what you think when you do.
f

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Permalink Reply by Laurence Seeff on January 14, 2010 at 12:21pm

Hi Frank,

A couple of suggestions I can think of offhand:

1. The ability to merge/combine two touching splines/lines into ONE spline/line.

2. Projecting text onto a tube/round surface does not work - only the letter that falls onto the middle of the tube is, the rest distort as the distance from the middle of the surface increases, until it crashes totally alond the midplane.

3. A repeat command - I need to chamfer 15 edges at 2.34556mm and not all are visible and would like to type "2.3456" once. THere is a size drop down box but this demands extra clicks and is prone to cause errors. I envision a scenario as follows: Slect first edge->pull-> type 2.3456->select second edge-> ENTER...and the second edge will be chamfered by the same size.
Or....sketch a circle of 12.34mm, click on a new spot and enter will do the same (draw a circle of 12.34mm).

4. Rhino import enhancement - sometime a 3dm file cannot be imported and crashes. Perhaps a report of sorts will help solve this issue.

That's it for now...one short notice.

Laurence Seeff
Colorfills
info@colorfills.com

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Permalink Reply by martin kopplow on January 25, 2010 at 2:30am

You got my vote on the repeat command. I had that in another application and used it a lot. I miss it in Spaceclaim, and it would be so easy to do, doesn't even require new GUI elements!

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Permalink Reply by Frank D on February 17, 2010 at 10:57am

Laurence
I will treat your issues separately:
1) You can already merge two edges/curves/lines/splines with the Fill tool. Just select the shared vertex and then the Fill tool. Something new in the Prepare>Stitch tool in R5 SP1 is the ability to extend two selected curves (that can extend) until they touch. It can merge two parallel lines. For offset parallel lines, it makes a new line from the non-close endpoints to each other.

2) We do not yet have "Wrapping" for text of curves. We do have it for images and videos, and we are planning enhancements for R6 in the area of wrapping text.

3) I thought about a repeat command.. but instead.. we added a function to the pull tool (in the beginning) that lets you copy a feature size to another, as you are creating the second. It works like this.. hover over a round or chamfer or hole of a known size, then go pull another, and it will snap to the previously-hovered-over feature size. Try it and let me know

4) We are working on support for Rhino 5 models in R5 SP2 (perhaps this could be the source of the problem?)

In general, if you are seeing crashes please file them via Support so we can fix them right away.
Thanks
F

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Permalink Reply by Frech on October 18, 2010 at 2:26pm

The repeat command is in many other cad's, and we save time with such a small thing.

Mario

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Permalink Reply by christopher bartlett on January 14, 2010 at 2:28pm

Recently, I've been looking to purchase a new laptop--tablet--computer that will run SpaceClaim. There are very few multitouch capable laptops that have the high end graphics card capibilities required by SpaceClaim.

I suggest that a compatibility mode be added--for graphics--while using SpaceClaim on laptops. Something that would work with the integrated graphics chipset common in new laptops--INTEL 4500MHD would be great.

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Permalink Reply by Frank D on February 17, 2010 at 11:18am

Christopher
Two things on this.. the Intell 4500 MHD works just fine with SpaceClaim in the examples we have in house, though with multiple displays you are taxing the machine and things go haywire sometimes at the OS level.

Separately, we have added a MT supported hardware page,here:
http://cdn4.spaceclaim.com/cdn1/files/SupportedMT.pdf

Some of these machines have that graphics chip in them. I have heard that some of the laptops that are coming out soon (spring?) will have the discrete graphics along with the MT behavior, which would make highly powerful PC (for SpaceClaim's needs) indeed.
F

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Permalink Reply by Charles Crosby on January 15, 2010 at 2:44am

Something that I really need for preparing models for CFD is a better way of replacing fragemented edges with a single continuous edge. The repair split edges option sometimes works, but it would be nice to just replace an entire existing edge with a continuous smooth one.

The other useful thing would be an ability to deal with curves and/or splines in space, not on a surface.

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Permalink Reply by martin kopplow on January 25, 2010 at 2:28am

I totally agree with the 3D curve editing in space request. This has turned out to be an issue faced almost every day for me. Using Spaceclaim and thus being able to exchange data quite flexible brought me more automotive jobs, and now I need to work with automotive surfaces every day, or design parts that fit with them. I can fake quite a lot by re-using existing geometry, but there are always parts that need to be done from scratch, and Spaceclaim still lacks possibilities here.

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Permalink Reply by Frank D on February 17, 2010 at 11:37am

Martin
Can you tell me more about what exactly you want in terms of 3D curve editing?
We are planning some work in that area, so any examples you have would be greatly appreciated.
F

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Permalink Reply by martin kopplow on February 18, 2010 at 1:52am

Frank,

the first thing that comes to my mind is to free the spline tool from the sketch plane, so we can put splines down in 3D, and then to have all the sketch tools available in the face curve mode. Thinking further, every face, even a curved one, should be treated as a possible sketch surface. Think of sketching on a cylinder. This could be combined in one single more powerful sketching tool.
Also, the tweak face mode lacks snap possibilities. If we are in tweak mode, we can move control points around, but not snap them to adjacent faces, and also we cannot control tangency to adjacent faces. If you could add that, patching up gaps in curved objects would be greatly enhanced and you could model just about everything.
Control points of splines should be freely movable in 3D, too, and alternative through-splines would be nice now and then, because you can better snap them to existing geometry.
And then, there should be a way to exit sketch without making a closed loop a face. Sometimes I just need the loop, not the face that will make the curves go away as soon as it comes to existence.
I also miss an offset surface tool, that will do nothing else but create an offset surface of a set of selected faces. Now, we use the pull tool, but it does way too much, and is therefore limited by too many constraints.
The pull tool should be enhanced to allow sweeping a profile along at least two (better more) guide curves in combination with the up to option, which does not work today. A pull "A" up to" B" along "C","D", ... option is a must have, as is a tangency constraint for spline end points.

There is sure more, just it doesn't come to my mind just now. Tell me when someone from Spaceclaim is around my place (Northern Germany), I'll demonstrate what I mean.

Martin