The best thing about Microsoft Vista......

Is that it makes Windows XP look good.

The more we play with it, the more issues it seems to have. Vista is a hell of a load for any current system in both processor, memory and graphics.

A work friend bought his daughter a laptop last week. Vista eats the battery, dead within an hour. He's been told he'd get more life out of it by turning off the aero interface, or downgrading to XP.

Come back XP. All is forgiven!

But Apple's reliability sucks

To equalise yesterday's outburst, a word of warning to all who are thinking of buying Apple products, specifically laptops. I've bought 5 Apple laptops, an eMac and Mac Mini in work, a G5 dual PowerMac desktop and recently a 24" iMac for home, all over the last 4 years. While my desktop machines at home have been 99.9% reliable the laptops have all had their issues, as did the eMac. Serious enough that I wouldn't even think of buying an Apple laptop without their Applecare insurance. I've learnt the hard way.

My first notebook was a 12" iBook. This great little machine was small to carry around and was the first Apple device to get me to convert. However it started to develop some serious issues soon after purchase - regularly kernel panicing and rebooting. I guessed it was the third party memory I had fitted so bought some more. This seemed to work for a few months, then the hard disk started playing up, so I reformatted and upgraded it. It worked Ok for a while and then it would reboot no more. This was one month after the warranty had worn out. I bought a new motherboard for $400 and took it all apart but never got around to putting it back together.

I bought another iBook for my niece before mine had shuffled off its mortal coil. I've just been told the motherboard in that has died, which is rather annoying. It was one of the latter iBooks and hoped that Apple had sorted the design issues but alas no it seems.

My eMac in work is a CRT screen and computer all in one. Great for email and writing. 2 years no problems, then, two months ago, it would boot up but crash or freeze on running any applications. I reformatted the hard drive did tens of system tests but could not fix it. The eMac was well out of warranty but I checked in the forums to see if anyone else had similar experience. Turns out there were hundreds of machines and Apple had extended the warranty to three years for certain serial numbers - which mine was luckily in. Dodgy capacitors on the motherboard meant over time death was inevitable. I've just had the machine back. We bought a Mac Mini in the meantime - that's still running.

I bought a fantastic 17" PowerBook for home which worked faultlessly for 18 months and then the LCD inverter decided to pack it it. Obviously out of warranty, I bought a replacement part ($200) and took the screen apart (not easy). It worked fine for a coupe of months and then coloured lines stated to appear all over the screen, and its $1,000 for a repair so I got rid of it on ebay.

Can anyone see a pattern emerging?

Last year I bought a MacBook, the Intel Apple laptop, in fact I am writing on it now. I took out Applecare. It's worked well so far but the build quality isn't great. On the front right-hand edge where i rest my palm, acid has weakened the plastic and the plastic has split - this will get replaced under warranty, i just need some downtime to take it in.
2 months ago I bought my girlfriend a MacBook and yesterday the battery refused to charge and wasn't recognised. I rang support and they are sending over a new one. I didn't take out Applecare, I think I had better do so this year.

So both iBooks died (excessive heat I think killed the flawed design), the eMac died, the PowerBook's screen went into colourful decay after 18 months and both MacBooks have issues, neither luckily all that serious, and they are both under warranty. Yet I still love these machines, despite being at the sharp end of some serious design issues. Would I buy another Apple notebook? Hell yes, I think they still rock! I have my eyes on a 17" MacBook Pro next (or this rumoured ultra thin notebook).

But i would take out Applecare and if anything went wrong out of warranty, check the online forums to see if anyone else has had the same experience, sometimes Apple extends the warranty if there's enough pain in the community.

Apple needs to up its efforts in analysis of its innovative designs and there are certainly issues with quality of components in manufacturing. Applecare gives me piece of mind that if I am purchasing a new Mac, at least if it goes seriously wrong (and the chances in my experience are quite high), I'm not left with a useless lump of Apple branded metal. In fact, the very odd thing is even broken Mac laptops sell at a premium on eBay - it's more expensive to buy a broken Apple notebook on eBay than it is to purchase an entry level, brand new (working) Windows laptop. My bag of bits (formerly known as an ibook 12") sold for $600 to a chap in Hungary and my 17" screen challenged PowerBook sold for $1,000. There's money in Mac scrap!

PC industrial design sucks

Looking at the latest Apple iMacs and comparing the design of the boxes to any other PC design, you'd have to be insane not to agree that Apple has the best industrial design in the industry. You have to wonder what the hell the PC companies, like Dell and HP are up to, when it comes to designing their enclosures. Don't these companies employ industrial designers? It seems all they can push out is variations of rectangles. I guess some congratulations to the PC manufacturers are due for escaping from beige but really something has to happen in the land of PC. Apple Macs are Intel PCs and can run Windows too and though expensive, the market share is growing. Probably Sony are the only company to have experimented with aesthetic casing design but really nobody appears to be out there with Apple.

Gadzooks! Inventor LT, for fee!

Autodesk has dropped a bit of a bomb on the MCAD market by releasing a cut down version of its MCAD modelling tool, Inventor. The software has been posted on its labs website. The software is about 1 Gb as a download and the license allows usage of the software for a year.
The concept of Labs is that it's a place where users can try new software ideas for free, to aid the products development, prior to a commercial release. It's relatively new but even then, a years free usage is pretty unique.
We will be playing with the software this week and hope to include something in the issue of MCAD that comes out next week. From what's written, Inventor LT (light), is a part modeller that can import and export DWG, and there's a download for translators to wok with Pro/Engineer and UGS formats.
Autodesk has been struggling to get users to migrate from AutoCAD 2D to its 3D products. Here with Inventor LT, anyone interested in learning and experiencing 3D can just try for free. I am guessing that this is mainly a play for getting those customers interested in Inventor. Of course it's a great demo for their ease of use and interface.
More news when I get it.

Bentley BE 2007 event

Well, it's Monday, I must be in Los Angeles. This is the chosen venue for Bentley's annual jamboree for its customers. At the time of writing, the main VP, CEO and COO keynotes have been given and a competent picture of how the company has faired and where its going was given. As a juror on the awards panel, it's great to see how Bentley celebrates its customers projects and incentivses them to tell other customers what they have been doing. Obviously there's a great deal about pushing the Bentley products and services but the real story in all the categories is how global engineering firms use innovation and apply themselves to solve large scale projects. It's a very inspirational thing to be involved with.
I'll post some thoughts on what was delivered after I have completed my gauntlet of this afternoon's meetings.

SpaceClaim Professional 2007 Edition

You would have thought that the opportunity for someone to develop a brand new modelling tool for the MCAD market would be pretty limited - there are just so many long-established modelling systems on the market.
You’ve already got SolidWorks, Autodesk, UGS and PTC globally battling it out with their parametric modelling systems and extensive reseller channels. And at the lower-cost end, players like McNeel’s Rhino, TurboCAD, IronCAD and Alibre also settling into building sizable installed bases. You have to wonder who would be crazy enough to throw money and time into developing yet another modelling tool, and establish a channel to sell it and take on the Status Quo?
Well, SpaceClaim Corporation is that company and it’s headed up by industry veteran, Mike Payne. Payne has played pivotal roles in many industry ‘brands’. He once worked for Prime Computer, was co-founder of PTC and central to the development of Pro/Engineer, was co-founder of SolidWorks Corp and got SolidWorks developed in 14 months, then spent time at Dassault Systemes before taking the reins at Spatial (ACIS kernel) as CEO.
The VP of Research and Development at SpaceClaim, Dan Dean, was co-founder of PTC, where he pioneered parametric feature-based modelling. In fact, if you were to look at the CVs of most of the people working at SpaceClaim you would get 30 or so similarly impressive profiles of developers that have been in the industry a long time and know exactly what they are doing and more specifically what the limitations are for previous generations of modelling engines.
The list of the board of directors is also a star studded bunch of CAD veterans, including Steve Walske (ex-CEO PTC) and a number infamous (in the CAD world at least) design-oriented investment celebrities like Jesse Devitte, backed by three established venture partners, Borealis Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.
The credentials don’t really get much better when it comes to developing a new modelling tool, so it’s clear this new company means business. So what’s special about SpaceClaim’s product? Desktop Parametric feature based modelling was a major step forward for the CAD industry and pretty much catapulted PTC into the stratosphere over the previous generation of modelling systems. However, the difficulty with 3D CAD has been the flexibility in creating the end-geometry.
‘Parametrics’ and ‘Features’ are CAD concepts which allow complex geometry to be created and edited by relationship and are stored in what’s called a Feature Tree (like a recipe, it’s a list of commands and functions ordered and applied to generate the geometry). However, there are limitations to this way of modelling, as it creates complex, hierarchical relationships between features and geometry which users have to fully understand and sometimes can’t even be resolved by the CAD system so fail to produce the desired resultant geometric shape. The general consensus I get from talking to all CAD visionaries is that perhaps these concepts have done their job and now a technology more powerful, yet easier to use is required. At an event lunch five years ago, I asked Jon Hirschtick, founder of SolidWorks, what was next in CAD and he explained to me the issue in less technical terms.
Jon picked up a spoon from the table and said, “A spoon is a relatively simple object. To model this spoon in any existing modelling system, even mine, would take a lot of effort. A lot more than is necessary. There has to be an easier way of defining geometry.”
So the challenge is, and has been for quite some time, to build a modelling system that overcomes the limitations of ‘Features’, ‘History Trees’ and ‘Parametric Constraints’ but makes the modelling of complex forms easy. This system would have great flexibility and would be required to deal with real-world issues, as the new modeller would have to exist in a world of millions of pre-modelled CAD parts and assemblies created by these ‘old’ parametric feature-based modellers. Somehow it would have to be able to open these proprietary formats and understand the complex hierarchical relational forms and then offer tools to intelligently edit them. It would have to both accept the old and deliver the new.
There have been a couple of stabs at this in the past. CoCreate’s OneSpace and IronCAD, but these are based on traditional CAD interfaces and concepts. Howie Markson, Product Marketing Manager, SpaceClaim, believes his company’s approach is different. “We allow users full freedom on how they can manipulate the geometry (e.g. no features, no parameters, no constraints). But more importantly, the software provides a very high-level of support to the user when creating and modifying the geometry. It takes the burden off the user to remember design aspects by providing hints, such as snapping to like geometry, or presenting previous selections of geometry to the user. The user can also turn on and off “relationships” as their designing needs change (again, with no constraints).
“We also provide one workspace for parts and assemblies, so geometry can be moved between components no differently than how you may move things within a single part.
“We also must work with imported geometry as well as geometry created natively in SpaceClaim. This added “burden” led us to a very robust modelling environment right out of the shoot. For our target users we also tried to present more of a Microsoft look and feel, rather than what a traditional CAD system provided. So we have stuff like Cut and Paste (as you have in Word, for example) to move geometry around.”
So SpaceClaim’s raison d’etre is to be free of the old paradigms, be flexible and intelligent, work with multiple file formats and above all, be easy to use.

The SpaceClaim experience
SpaceClaim Professional offers a very clean interface. There’s a tool palette at the top of the screen, with a main modelling area and a ‘structure’ toolbar to the left. The tool palette at the top flips between Design (Sketch tools, orient tools, Edit, intersection and assembly tools), Detailing tools and Display (set the graphics style). The main modelling area can split to have multiple representations of the same model and the side menu contains information about the structure of the model – this would typically be the feature tree but as there are no features in SpaceClaim, there are only trees of Solids, Surfaces, Layers Planes and Axis. From those you can define your own objects for quick access, like bolt, handle etc. that you design in the system. SpaceClaim also support layer definitions – not a typical 3D concept. The main display also has multi-tab capability to quickly flip through multiple views/selections from the model.
Before talking about modelling, it’s worth knowing that SpaceClaim can import geometry from probably the widest range of CAD products on the market and this is all done via each of the vendors’ proper development kits – not reverse engineered libraries, which is the norm. You can import parts or assemblies for display or editing in the SpaceClaim editor. I can’t comment on performance, especially with assemblies as I don’t have the software yet, I’ve only had a hands-off demo with simple parts.
SpaceClaim does not translate the features but intelligently recognises them post-import and provides seamless and intelligent editing. This is very impressive, as you are not left editing dumb faces but working with blends, holes, fillets. However these can not be saved back to the original format while maintaining the original integrity.
If you aren’t importing a part or an assembly from another CAD system, as with most CAD packages you start with a sketch. The tools here appear easy to use and very straightforward. If you are drawing something symmetrical, SpaceClaim will automatically draw the mirrored part of the sketch - so you can instantly create implied relationships if required.
From the sketch you then create a model and as you move your cursor along the faces of the model it automatically orientates itself to work on the face you identify, bringing up a workplane, or a virtual cross section. The software assumes a heck of a lot of your intent and seems to get it right an amazing amount of time. Designs can be grabbed and pulled and quickly manipulated, and blends, fillets, offsets, rounds, even shells can be added. Designs can be segmented up and sketched on any face. It’s almost like working with clay. 2D drawings can be imported by native DWG or ODA (Open Design Alliance) DWG. The reason for supporting both DWG toolkits is that Autodesk’s 3D toolkit doesn’t yet support 64-bit. For large model support this is essential. The system looks like it is designed to be used with little training, although not all the old CAD concepts can be thrown out.
Having an old CAD mindset, looking at SpaceClaim you do wonder where the history tree is and how you would go back and remodel specific ‘features’. But it’s not required - you just edit the model. It’s interesting to model the outline of the whole assembly and then break it down in the same environment to parts. You can copy and paste between parts and assemblies, applying mating conditions within the model ad hoc, apply relationships ad hoc and switch them off when you want. The software will find like geometry for simultaneous editing and due to the assumptions the engine makes as to what operation you want to perform, it won’t take long to learn.
There’s a cool display space for creating ‘traditional’ drawings from these models, adding dimensions, using cross sections and models to produce a 2D looking page – if you twist the view slightly in 3D, you will note it’s actually a complete 3D page. Very cunning indeed.
For a first release of a brand new modeller, SpaceClaim Professional does a hell of a lot. And with the reputation of the team, you know it’s going to be pretty robust as it ships at the end of March. Payne also told me of his intention to make SpaceClaim one of the few, if not only, modeller to be able to read in and edit files created in past and future versions of its format.
SpaceClaim is based on the ACIS solid modelling engine, although the team have had it running on a number of modelling architectures. ACIS makes sense as a first choice, as Payne ran the firm for a number of years.

Conclusion
Without a doubt, SpaceClaim looks to be a very clever modelling tool and effortlessly removes many of the burdens that the previous generation of modellers succumb to. For a year and a bits work, there’s load of capability in here and doesn’t appear like a first release. The licensing of so many toolkits from established CAD developers makes SpaceClaim especially interesting as it’s working off non-reverse engineered model data. It would be very interesting to compare similar products from IronCAD or CoCreate to SpaceClaim.
It has been said that SpaceClaim is the MCAD equivalent to SketchUp, a low-cost 3D modelling tool that has probably given more 3D experience to the architectural community than any other. I could go some way to agreeing with that. There would appear to be very little knowledge required to pick it up and the UI is very straightforward indeed. Furthermore, SpaceClaim is the kind of product you can play with and get immediate feedback. It’s fun and certainly lends itself towards the conceptual phase of the process. The thing is SketchUp cost around $500 when it first came out and is now pretty much free. SpaceClaim comes in at around a seat of full AutoCAD. Payne explained that Autodesk sets the price for 2D with AutoCAD and serious 3D modellers couldn’t cost less than a dumb 2D system.
The question is will it sell? Or will someone buy the company for the technology? So many products today are developed with no intention to market and sell but to be acquired by a big player. It’s hard to work out what the team would prefer to do. It’s making all the right noises to go to market, but it’s crowded out there and the lack of a decent channel to market can strangle even the best products. Targeting the occasional user, or those put off 3D by the complexity of existing systems may be a viable strategy but there are many different ideas as to how many of these users are out there – and as hard as they try the existing CAD vendors can’t find them. It’s a mountain nobody has yet successfully managed to climb.
The company’s pitch is interesting here as it’s not particularly offensive to the status quo. SpaceClaim says there’s a role for parametric experts (read old school systems) and then there’s SpaceClaim’s easy to use solution for the extended product teams. But here I would guess, with enough development time and money, SpaceClaim would be a stronger contender in the traditional parametric market.
I am not too sure the way SpaceClaim is going to be sold is right for the CAD market as the ASP sales model has still to really take off. You either buy one or three years access at roughly $125 per month. After your time period is up the software reverts to view only mode.
While the price might seem a little steep when compared to products such as Rhino or SketchUp, my main concerns lie with the lack of perpetual ownership. However, the student edition will be popular as it’s free! The main limitation on SpaceClaim will be on the translators which, as they are all licensed and paid for, can not be given away.
If SpaceClaim were to be acquired, I wonder how the technology would fit with existing products? The old systems and the new one could never really seamlessly mix they use totally different paradigms. It is possible for an existing CAD company to buy the software to sell through its exiting channel but so much has been invested in selling the old technology. SolidWorks and Autodesk are busy fleshing out the Digital Prototype systems - swapping the core now could be like changing the wheel at 70mph.
Of course the other alternative is licensing the technology and Payne told me that that is definitely on offer. Here you might not know you are using SpaceClaim but it could be incorporated into other vendor’s solution or portfolio.
My last thought goes to formats. Within a week I had seen SpaceClaim’s BREP modeller and Adobe’s Acrobat 3D, which uses a highly compressed BREP format called PRC. It strikes me that we are at a juncture where the problem of CAD file formats may well be consigned to history. The lowest common denominator - an accurate CAD data model can be held in a compressed BREP. Combine that with intelligent ‘next generation’ technology like SpaceClaim and it’s fully editable, and usable, relying on no proprietary vendor’s CAD system. I think the future interoperability and archival standard will be based on BREPS. SpaceClaim is proving that ‘dumb’ may be the new smart.

SpaceClaim Professional 2007 Edition

You would have thought that the opportunity for someone to develop a brand new modelling tool for the MCAD market would be pretty limited - there are just so many long-established modelling systems on the market.
You’ve already got SolidWorks, Autodesk, UGS and PTC globally battling it out with their parametric modelling systems and extensive reseller channels. And at the lower-cost end, players like McNeel’s Rhino, TurboCAD, IronCAD and Alibre also settling into building sizable installed bases. You have to wonder who would be crazy enough to throw money and time into developing yet another modelling tool, and establish a channel to sell it and take on the Status Quo?
Well, SpaceClaim Corporation is that company and it’s headed up by industry veteran, Mike Payne. Payne has played pivotal roles in many industry ‘brands’. He once worked for Prime Computer, was co-founder of PTC and central to the development of Pro/Engineer, was co-founder of SolidWorks Corp and got SolidWorks developed in 14 months, then spent time at Dassault Systemes before taking the reins at Spatial (ACIS kernel) as CEO.
The VP of Research and Development at SpaceClaim, Dan Dean, was co-founder of PTC, where he pioneered parametric feature-based modelling. In fact, if you were to look at the CVs of most of the people working at SpaceClaim you would get 30 or so similarly impressive profiles of developers that have been in the industry a long time and know exactly what they are doing and more specifically what the limitations are for previous generations of modelling engines.
The list of the board of directors is also a star studded bunch of CAD veterans, including Steve Walske (ex-CEO PTC) and a number infamous (in the CAD world at least) design-oriented investment celebrities like Jesse Devitte, backed by three established venture partners, Borealis Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.
The credentials don’t really get much better when it comes to developing a new modelling tool, so it’s clear this new company means business. So what’s special about SpaceClaim’s product? Desktop Parametric feature based modelling was a major step forward for the CAD industry and pretty much catapulted PTC into the stratosphere over the previous generation of modelling systems. However, the difficulty with 3D CAD has been the flexibility in creating the end-geometry.
‘Parametrics’ and ‘Features’ are CAD concepts which allow complex geometry to be created and edited by relationship and are stored in what’s called a Feature Tree (like a recipe, it’s a list of commands and functions ordered and applied to generate the geometry). However, there are limitations to this way of modelling, as it creates complex, hierarchical relationships between features and geometry which users have to fully understand and sometimes can’t even be resolved by the CAD system so fail to produce the desired resultant geometric shape. The general consensus I get from talking to all CAD visionaries is that perhaps these concepts have done their job and now a technology more powerful, yet easier to use is required. At an event lunch five years ago, I asked Jon Hirschtick, founder of SolidWorks, what was next in CAD and he explained to me the issue in less technical terms.
Jon picked up a spoon from the table and said, “A spoon is a relatively simple object. To model this spoon in any existing modelling system, even mine, would take a lot of effort. A lot more than is necessary. There has to be an easier way of defining geometry.”
So the challenge is, and has been for quite some time, to build a modelling system that overcomes the limitations of ‘Features’, ‘History Trees’ and ‘Parametric Constraints’ but makes the modelling of complex forms easy. This system would have great flexibility and would be required to deal with real-world issues, as the new modeller would have to exist in a world of millions of pre-modelled CAD parts and assemblies created by these ‘old’ parametric feature-based modellers. Somehow it would have to be able to open these proprietary formats and understand the complex hierarchical relational forms and then offer tools to intelligently edit them. It would have to both accept the old and deliver the new.
There have been a couple of stabs at this in the past. CoCreate’s OneSpace and IronCAD, but these are based on traditional CAD interfaces and concepts. Howie Markson, Product Marketing Manager, SpaceClaim, believes his company’s approach is different. “We allow users full freedom on how they can manipulate the geometry (e.g. no features, no parameters, no constraints). But more importantly, the software provides a very high-level of support to the user when creating and modifying the geometry. It takes the burden off the user to remember design aspects by providing hints, such as snapping to like geometry, or presenting previous selections of geometry to the user. The user can also turn on and off “relationships” as their designing needs change (again, with no constraints).
“We also provide one workspace for parts and assemblies, so geometry can be moved between components no differently than how you may move things within a single part.
“We also must work with imported geometry as well as geometry created natively in SpaceClaim. This added “burden” led us to a very robust modelling environment right out of the chute. For our target users we also tried to present more of a Microsoft look and feel, rather than what a traditional CAD system provided. So we have stuff like Cut and Paste (as you have in Word, for example) to move geometry around.”
So SpaceClaim’s raison d’etre is to be free of the old paradigms, be flexible and intelligent, work with multiple file formats and above all, be easy to use.

The SpaceClaim experience
SpaceClaim Professional offers a very clean interface. There’s a tool palette at the top of the screen, with a main modelling area and a ‘structure’ toolbar to the left. The tool palette at the top flips between Design (Sketch tools, orient tools, Edit, intersection and assembly tools), Detailing tools and Display (set the graphics style). The main modelling area can split to have multiple representations of the same model and the side menu contains information about the structure of the model – this would typically be the feature tree but as there are no features in SpaceClaim, there are only trees of Solids, Surfaces, Layers Planes and Axis. From those you can define your own objects for quick access, like bolt, handle etc. that you design in the system. SpaceClaim also support layer definitions – not a typical 3D concept. The main display also has multi-tab capability to quickly flip through multiple views/selections from the model.
Before talking about modelling, it’s worth knowing that SpaceClaim can import geometry from probably the widest range of CAD products on the market and this is all done via each of the vendors’ proper development kits – not reverse engineered libraries, which is the norm. You can import parts or assemblies for display or editing in the SpaceClaim editor. I can’t comment on performance, especially with assemblies as I don’t have the software yet, I’ve only had a hands-off demo with simple parts.
SpaceClaim does not translate the features but intelligently recognises them post-import and provides seamless and intelligent editing. This is very impressive, as you are not left editing dumb faces but working with blends, holes, fillets. However these can not be saved back to the original format while maintaining the original integrity.
If you aren’t importing a part or an assembly from another CAD system, as with most CAD packages you start with a sketch. The tools here appear easy to use and very straightforward. If you are drawing something symmetrical, SpaceClaim will automatically draw the mirrored part of the sketch - so you can instantly create implied relationships if required.
From the sketch you then create a model and as you move your cursor along the faces of the model it automatically orientates itself to work on the face you identify, bringing up a workplane, or a virtual cross section. The software assumes a heck of a lot of your intent and seems to get it right an amazing amount of time. Designs can be grabbed and pulled and quickly manipulated, and blends, fillets, offsets, rounds, even shells can be added. Designs can be segmented up and sketched on any face. It’s almost like working with clay. 2D drawings can be imported by native DWG or ODA (Open Design Alliance) DWG. The reason for supporting both DWG toolkits is that Autodesk’s 3D toolkit doesn’t yet support 64-bit. For large model support this is essential. The system looks like it is designed to be used with little training, although not all the old CAD concepts can be thrown out.
Having an old CAD mindset, looking at SpaceClaim you do wonder where the history tree is and how you would go back and remodel specific ‘features’. But it’s not required - you just edit the model. It’s interesting to model the outline of the whole assembly and then break it down in the same environment to parts. You can copy and paste between parts and assemblies, applying mating conditions within the model ad hoc, apply relationships ad hoc and switch them off when you want. The software will find like geometry for simultaneous editing and due to the assumptions the engine makes as to what operation you want to perform, it won’t take long to learn.
There’s a cool display space for creating ‘traditional’ drawings from these models, adding dimensions, using cross sections and models to produce a 2D looking page – if you twist the view slightly in 3D, you will note it’s actually a complete 3D page. Very cunning indeed.
For a first release of a brand new modeller, SpaceClaim Professional does a hell of a lot. And with the reputation of the team, you know it’s going to be pretty robust as it ships at the end of March. Payne also told me of his intention to make SpaceClaim one of the few, if not only, modeller to be able to read in and edit files created in past and future versions of its format.
SpaceClaim is based on the ACIS solid modelling engine, although the team have had it running on a number of modelling architectures. ACIS makes sense as a first choice, as Payne ran the firm for a number of years.

Conclusion
Without a doubt, SpaceClaim looks to be a very clever modelling tool and effortlessly removes many of the burdens that the previous generation of modellers succumb to. For a year and a bits work, there’s load of capability in here and doesn’t appear like a first release. The licensing of so many toolkits from established CAD developers makes SpaceClaim especially interesting as it’s working off non-reverse engineered model data. It would be very interesting to compare similar products from IronCAD or CoCreate to SpaceClaim.
It has been said that SpaceClaim is the MCAD equivalent to SketchUp, a low-cost 3D modelling tool that has probably given more 3D experience to the architectural community than any other. I could go some way to agreeing with that. There would appear to be very little knowledge required to pick it up and the UI is very straightforward indeed. Furthermore, SpaceClaim is the kind of product you can play with and get immediate feedback. It’s fun and certainly lends itself towards the conceptual phase of the process. The thing is SketchUp cost around $500 when it first came out and is now pretty much free. SpaceClaim comes in at around a seat of full AutoCAD. Payne explained that Autodesk sets the price for 2D with AutoCAD and serious 3D modellers couldn’t cost less than a dumb 2D system.
The question is will it sell? Or will someone buy the company for the technology? So many products today are developed with no intention to market and sell but to be acquired by a big player. It’s hard to work out what the team would prefer to do. It’s making all the right noises to go to market, but it’s crowded out there and the lack of a decent channel to market can strangle even the best products. Targeting the occasional user, or those put off 3D by the complexity of existing systems may be a viable strategy but there are many different ideas as to how many of these users are out there – and as hard as they try the existing CAD vendors can’t find them. It’s a mountain nobody has yet successfully managed to climb.
The company’s pitch is interesting here as it’s not particularly offensive to the status quo. SpaceClaim says there’s a role for parametric experts (read old school systems) and then there’s SpaceClaim’s easy to use solution for the extended product teams. But here I would guess, with enough development time and money, SpaceClaim would be a stronger contender in the traditional parametric market.
I am not too sure the way SpaceClaim is going to be sold is right for the CAD market as the ASP sales model has still to really take off. You either buy one or three years access at roughly $125 per month. After your time period is up the software reverts to view only mode.
While the price might seem a little steep when compared to products such as Rhino or SketchUp, my main concerns lie with the lack of perpetual ownership. However, the student edition will be popular as it’s free! The main limitation on SpaceClaim will be on the translators which, as they are all licensed and paid for, can not be given away.
If SpaceClaim were to be acquired, I wonder how the technology would fit with existing products? The old systems and the new one could never really seamlessly mix they use totally different paradigms. It is possible for an existing CAD company to buy the software to sell through its exiting channel but so much has been invested in selling the old technology. SolidWorks and Autodesk are busy fleshing out the Digital Prototype systems - swapping the core now could be like changing the wheel at 70mph.
Of course the other alternative is licensing the technology and Payne told me that that is definitely on offer. Here you might not know you are using SpaceClaim but it could be incorporated into other vendor’s solution or portfolio.
My last thought goes to formats. Within a week I had seen SpaceClaim’s BREP modeller and Adobe’s Acrobat 3D, which uses a highly compressed BREP format called PRC. It strikes me that we are at a juncture where the problem of CAD file formats may well be consigned to history. The lowest common denominator - an accurate CAD data model can be held in a compressed BREP. Combine that with intelligent ‘next generation’ technology like SpaceClaim and it’s fully editable, and usable, relying on no proprietary vendor’s CAD system. I think the future interoperability and archival standard will be based on BREPS. SpaceClaim is proving that ‘dumb’ may be the new smart.