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Effective computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) programs include the following main components: the user-interface (UI) and the application logic.

In turn, the application logic of the CAD/CAM software itself consists of the following parts:

The 2017 1.1 release of Spatial’s CGM™ Core Modeler improves the robustness of its feature recognition capabilities by extending the range of recognizable structures. Feature recognition rapidly identifies manufacturable structures in a model (such as holes, pads, logos, etc.), enabling users to group and perform subsequent operations on these constructs. This capability enables improvements to many workflows, such as reducing complexity for downstream simulation and analysis.

As water jet and laser cutters become more sophisticated, the geometries that they are able to cut are also increasing in complexity. 

As we live in a less than perfect world, 3D CAD models are far from perfect. Particularly, models often times contain gaps, which can be found between adjacent vertices, edges, and faces. 

In this post I’m going to talk about how we use C3D Toolkit to generate 'live' sample code snippets for our CGM documentation.

John's recent post on documentation and behavior driven development reminded me of an interesting experience I had last fall in developing training documentation.  Our annual 3D Insiders' Summit (early bird registration is now open, by the way. We hope to see you there!) always gives the sales team a rare opportunity to come together from around the world in one geographic location with a large chunk of the development team.  We decided to take the time to have some introductory CGM training for the TAMs (Technical Account Managers), and through the process of elimination, I somehow landed the task of organizing it.  

Here’s a quick poll:  How many of you have figured out by now that 16,777,217 = 2^24+1, and that the "24" refers to the 3 RGB bytes in RGBA32?

I am writing this blog post largely in response to John’s blog post: Public Virtual Methods: A Bad Idea. John and I work closely, and have for as long as I have been at Spatial. I like working with him because,

I have spent many years of my career here at Spatial developing Thread-Safe ACIS and now I’ve been given the opportunity to additionally work on the multi-processing infrastructure in CGM. The two modelers use very different multiprocessing technologies, and it has been interesting comparing and contrasting them. The main goal is the same in both cases, to provide a means for our customers to leverage multiple processors to improve performance in their end-user applications.