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In Part 10, I claimed “the future of CAD is cooperative”. This might seem obvious, but one look at current ongoing difficulties reveals the magnitude of the non-cooperative problem. It’s an inconvenient fact of life for too many of us and the reason I spent so much time examining the ongoing shift in the CAD industry; a shift which is arguably a result of efforts to circumvent artificial barriers and market reactions arising from those efforts. However, having spent a fair portion of that time discussing two of the three roadblocks – data portability and proprietary formats – I want to briefly touch on the third: extensible semantics.
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This is probably a good time for a brief, updated review.

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In my last entry I said I’d post some examples of recent developments in the CAD arena. So without further delay, here are some items which caught my attention.

Dassault CATIA V6

What’s notable about the forthcoming release of CATIA is the continued aggressive push towards a virtual interface along the lines of Microsoft Earth. From MCAD Online (Link): (more…)

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I previously offered (reLink) that there were three issues of particular relevance to the future evolution of “next generation” 3D CAD applications:

My last entry, in which I discussed the emergence of “direct modeling” 3D CAD, was still very much about data portability. While I’d previously confessed to “largely ignoring the trend toward ‘direct modeling’ “, the truth is that in researching next generation solutions I found I couldn’t ignore the trend. And this is because the direct modeling segment of the 3D CAD market is solving the kinds of data portability issues which is frustrating so many users.

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First let me confess to not having paid sufficient attention to the “direct modeling” wave that’s flooding the CAD market. While the technique isn’t new, it’s made substantial gains in recent years… both in the release of some interesting new modeling applications (e.g. SpaceClaim) and noteworthy upgrades (e.g. Siemens NX5), as well as in significant investments (e.g. PTC acquiring CoCreate in Dec 2007).
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In my previous post I touched on the data portability issues which plague CAD applications, particularly those which employ parametric, feature-based history trees (a dynamic, rearrangeable record of the creation process). However, whether it’s within a corporation’s own firewall or between businesses and their vendors online, CAD applications must become increasingly “cooperative” if their developers expect them to survive.
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One reason for the current level of relative application complexity is the segmented, proprietary CAD market and the gated communities which form around a particular application. As we saw with SolidWorks some time ago, a productivity enhancing user interface combined with competitive pricing can breach insular walls and drive “volume” migration/adoption. The consequence of course being that competitors are forced to respond in kind.
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In my previous entry the migration of digital tools in general was discussed; in particular, advancements in both usability and collaborative capabilities. In this and a couple of follow-up entries, I want to apply those filters to 3D CAD applications.

The Inevitable Fall of the CAD Priesthood

With any difficult to master skill there usually arises a group of experts who, over a period of time, too often take themselves a bit too seriously. The CAD community has plenty of these priests. And they’re not especially interested in giving up their lofty positions. That’s why I’m not surprised to read some of what I find being posted online by old school CAD experts; a significant portion of which amounts to “this new-fangled stuff will never work, I tell you”.
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