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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To cover the gap between this installment and my last entry:

In this section I’d like to do one thing: call attention to technology migration and the accelerating pace at which this migration is occurring.
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In the previous installment I focused on tools that help designers create virtual models. In this entry I want to focus on other ways to generate virtual models (in all their varying glory).

The word “sampling” is probably most often associated with music, but it’s not at all limited to that application. Physical models are sometimes sculpted and their shape digitally sampled, or a previously existing reference might be digitized and used as a scaffold for building a new, virtual model. Or something entirely unrelated can be sampled and turned into a virtual 3D model {Note: had to add this excellent example: “spam architecture” – Link}. Once digitized, there’s not much that can’t be done with digitally sampled information.
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