10,000 Year Clock Serves As A Crash Course In Materials Science
Choosing the optimal materials mix has long been a vexing challenge for engineers, particularly when trying to zero in on a composition that can withstand the wear and tear of a product’s full lifecycle. But what about when the plans for that product call for it to be housed inside a mountainous cavern with a lifespan of 10,000 years? Continue reading
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PTC Gets Ready to Mobilize Windchill
Last June, during PlanetPTC Live user conference, Brian Shepherd, PTC’s executive VP of product development, decided to shake things up a bit, quite literally. He previewed an iPad app (only a prototype at the time) that lets you explode an assembly model by shaking the device. By the end of March, what Shepherd demonstrated could be available commercially. Continue reading
Creo Direct 1.0, A Brand New Direct Modeler from PTC
Creo Direct 1.0, part of PTC’s Creo app family, was “built from the ground up,” in PTC’s own words. That warrants an explanation, as PTC already has a robust, commercial-class direct modeler. Under the campaign to remake itself as the house of Creo, PTC renamed CoCreate as PTC Creo Elements/Direct. In fact, PTC now has not two but four direct-modeling alternatives: Continue reading
Autodesk Goes Christmas Shopping, Buys T-Splines’ Asset
Consumer confidence is rising, judging from the stream of shoppers crashing through the gates of shopping malls during pre- and post-Christmas sales. And consumers are not the only ones opening their wallets for good deals. Three days before Christmas, Autodesk went out and bought T-Splines‘ technology assets. This put T-Splines’ lineup of surfacing plug-ins — T-Splines for Rhino, tsElements for SolidWorks — in Autodesk’s pocket. Continue reading
Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Express: A Free Push-Pull CAD Modeling App from PTC
A few weeks ago, we got the first glimpse of a PTC Creo app, in the form of a free paint and draw program called Creo Sketch. This week, PTC comes out swinging again, with a free direct editing application called Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Express (CE/Direct Modeling Express).
If you’ve seen or used Co/Create, PTC’s push-pull CAD modeler, you’ll find yourself in semi-familiar territory. CoCreate’s Copilot (the control arrows for moving and rotating features) greets you from its new home, CE/Direct Modeling Express. You may think of CE/Direct Modeling Express as a trimmed down version of CoCreate, derived from the same underlying technology. The software allows you to push, pull, rotate, and move faces and features with little or no concerns for feature history or parametric history — a freedom that’s ideal for exploring design concepts before committing to production or manufacturing.
CE/Direct Modeling Express’s flexible modeling approach is not just for 3D modeling; it extends to 2D sketching as well. The software is quite good at guessing your desired constraints, so if you push lines and arcs around in 2D, you’ll find nearby segments reshaping according to how you’re moving the geometry.
In CE/Direct Modeling Express, part modeling and assembly modeling are just a tab away. The software makes little or no distinction between the two. You can, for instance, create a new part within the assembly environment by sketching a profile on a new work plane and extruding it into a solid. It’s a lot easier to design interlocking parts (for instance, creating a shaft that must fit into a hole in an existing part) when you don’t need to launch a new modeling window to create a new part.
The software’s present import, or 3D reading, is limited to neutral formats mostly. So if you want to work on a SolidWorks, Inventor, or Solid Edge file, you’ll have to convert it from its native format to a neutral format (IGES, STEP).
CE/Direct Modeling Express has Realism Enhancement options for you to activate ground reflections, shadows, background colors, and rendered surfaces. It’s not as refined as ray-traced rendering, but it’s sufficient to give you a good idea of the finished product’s aesthetic appeal.
CE/Direct Modeling Express and its predecessor Creo Sketch serve as proof of PTC’s plan to drastically reform its CAD and PLM strategy, shifting from an all-inclusive package to a series of standalone modules. For quick concepts in 3D, or quickly reshaping imported 3D CAD data through a neutral file format, CE/Direct Modeling Express offers more than enough functions — far more than what you could rightfully expect from a free program. There is, however, a limit to the number of parts you can work with in assembly — it’s 60.
The limit is removed once you upgrade to the commercial version, Creo Elements/Direct Modeling. The commercial version also gives you sheet metal tools, along with decal (embedding 2D images in your design), photorealistic rendering, and exporting STEP and IGES files.
For more, watch the video report below:
