Broomfield, CO, USA, December 18, 2007 - Spatial Corp., a market-leading provider of 3D components, today announced the winners of its 3D InterOp Model Contest. The winners received cash prizes totaling $8500 and commemorative plaques. This year, Alibre Design was also added as a CAD system to expand the scope and repertoire of the contestants.
To win, the models had to demonstrate innovative use of CAD design, assembly and feature modeling, dimensioning, and tolerancing. Entries in CATIA® V4, CATIA V5, Autodesk Inventor®, SolidWorks, Pro/Engineer®, Unigraphics formats, STEP, IGES and Alibre Design were accepted for submission. Screen shots of the winning models can be viewed at www.spatial.com/model_contest.
Daniel Dahlenburg was the first prize winner ($5,000) for his CATIA V5 model concept, which was inspired by the GeeBeeR3, one of the most famous air-racers from the 1920s. The aircraft is powered by a 6.5 ccm two-stroke engine and controlled through four servos that get their input signals from a four-channel radio-control system. The model took Daniel approximately six weeks to build, and consists of 136 items (86 individual parts). The rough shape of the plane was derived from reference photographs, and the dimensions were modified for smooth integration of standard Radio-Control components - nearly all parts make use of CFRP.
Richard Hedderich was the second place winner ($2,500), with a model designed in SolidWorks of a Skywalker VTOL airplane. Mr. Hedderich stated that he and Kent Crookston have been working on this model for almost 8 years, and are looking to produce a working prototype of the Skywalker VTOL for flight testing in the spring of 2008. Before using SolidWorks, the initial concepts of the model were drawn in 2D sketches and realized in wood and fiberglass. After learning SolidWorks in 2001, the team was able to evolve and refine the design of the Skywalker to get to today’s development phase.
The third place win ($1,000) went to Bill Price for a V-Twin air-cooled motorcycle engine model. He did all the designing, part and assembly creation in Alibre Design Expert v9 and 10. SAT and STP files of the Alibre parts were used to make a version of the motor he could import into Rhino 4.0 and render images with Flamingo. The design incorporates current high performance features including four- valve per cylinder heads, double overhead cams with shim-under buckets, narrow included valve angles, downdraft intake ports, fuel injection, three spark plugs per cylinder, electronic engine management and oversquare bore-to-stroke ratio.
“This second year of our InterOp Model Contest has yielded some of our most competitive models yet. The wide diversity of designs we received is a testament to the broad range of solutions that our 3D Interoperability and 3D Modeling components support,” said Jerry Walters, Spatial VP of Marketing, Sales & Services. “The InterOp Model contest is a fun event that provides an opportunity for the CAD community to show off its work, but it also serves another purpose. As many already know, at Spatial, our customer-centric business model impels us to continually improve our customer service and products. The investment we make in the InterOp Model Contest goes right back into this effort by taking all these excellent model entries and using them as real-world examples in our testing center.”
About Spatial
Spatial Corp. is a market-leading provider of world-class 3D software component technologies. Spatial develops, markets, and supports best-of-breed 3D component technologies and services, to address the requirements of 3D in Business-to-Business (B2B) applications. Spatial's components for 3D modeling, visualization, and interoperability have been adopted by some of the world's most recognized software developers, manufacturers, research institutes, and universities. Headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, Spatial has offices in the USA, Germany, France, Japan, China and the United Kingdom. For more information, please visit Spatial's Web site at www.spatial.com, or contact Spatial by email at info_spatial@3ds.com or by phone at 303-544-2900.
Spatial Corp. Media Contact:
Cyndi Dyas
+ 1 303 544 2906
Cyndi.dyas@3ds.com
ACIS and SAT are registered trademarks of Spatial Corp. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.
