LEDAS Ltd., the leading provider of variational solvers for CAD developers, announced the program for promoting a new 3D design technology — variational direct modeling — on the CAD market.
The White Paper «Variational Direct Modeling: How to Keep Design Intent in History-Free CAD» (freely available at http://www.ledas.com/group/white_papers/) sums up the basics of the new design technology and outlines the program for its advancement. In the second quarter 2009, all CAD developers will be able to license the software toolkit, which facilitates development of the applications with functionalities of variational direct modeling in the shortest possible time. Endeavoring to make the new technology immediately available to the CAD users, LEDAS is releasing a free add-on application for the popular 3D design system Google SketchUp in October 2008; which will gradually — from version to version — open all opportunities of the new technology. LEDAS has also announced its plans to develop similar applications for other well-known 3D modeling platforms.
«We announce our plans to welcome co-operation with companies and individual CAD developers that can already share their opinions on the prospects of the new technology and participate in financing our project», said David Levin, CEO, LEDAS Ltd. «Unlike some companies that announce new technologies but do not licence them to developers, we are open for co-operation with all CAD vendors without exception».
The end-user paradigm of direct (also called explicit or dynamic) modeling in CAD involves direct manipulation with the boundary elements of a solid model (faces, edges, vertices). It considerably simplifies creating and editing 3D forms, making it easy-to-use by the amateur users and enhancing designers? efficiency. As a practical alternative to history-based modeling, direct modeling in its pure form has a significant shortcoming: it completely ignores the design intent, established in the model by its creator.
«We offer the approach based on the concept of variational modeling combined with direct model editing», explains Dmitry Ushakov, Director, Product Management and Marketing, LEDAS Ltd. «Using geometric and dimensional constraints which are automatically generated according to the topology and geometry of a boundary model (BRep), according to the features, or are directly specified by the users, our solution enables smart parametric modification — preserving the logic, directly or indirectly put in the original model».
A geometric model with constraints is calculated by a special software component — LGS 3D variational geometric solver, which solves the systems with thousands of simultaneous constraints in the on-line-mode. The solver can be successfully integrated with all geometric modeling kernels available on the market and serves as the basis for implementing the new technology of variational direct modeling.
About LGS Software
LEDAS Geometric Solvers (LGS) 2D/3D support creation and modification of the geometric models by means of (explicit or implicit) constraints. Typical geometric objects are points, lines, circles, planes, cylinders, spheres, arbitrary curves, surfaces and swept surfaces. Objects can be fixed in an absolute coordinate system or relative to each other (the latter feature is provided by the so-called rigid sets of objects). Set of geometric constraints includes logical constraints between geometric entities (like coincidence, parallelism, tangency, etc.) and dimensional constraints (that specify the required values for given distances, angles or radii). LGS moves and rotates objects to the positions where all constraints are satisfied by performing minimal transformations of initial configuration. It also renders standard CAD functions — ‘move under constraints? and diagnostics of over- and under-defined parts of a model. LGS 2D/3D is a cross-platform software. It is set of libraries that runs under all Windows, Linux, *BSD, AIX and other OS. Being coded in C++, LGS has a C-based API that allows one to integrate it into a broad range of software applications. LGS 2D/3D are based on the LEDAS? state-of-the-art engine provide affordable solution for those who need a strong variational and constraint-based functionality in CAD, modeling, or engineering software. Through the scalable architecture of LGS, variational and parametric techniques become available in a wide range of the products including desktop CAD/CAM/CAE, and object modeling tools, assembly design and analysis and others. More information about LGS 3D can be found at http://www.ledas.com/products/lgs3d/.
About LEDAS
LEDAS Ltd. is an independent software development company founded in 1999; it is based in Novosibirsk Scientific Centre (Akademgorodok), Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science. A leader in constraint-based technologies, LEDAS is a well-known provider of computational software components for PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) solutions: geometric constraint solvers for CAD/CAM/CAE, optimization engines for Project Management, Work Scheduling and Meeting Planning as well as interval technologies for Knowledge-Based Engineering and Collaborative Design. The company also provides services for PLM market: software development, consulting, reselling as well as education and training.
Contact
LEDAS Sales and Marketing Department
Phone: +7 383 3356 504
fax: +7 383 3356 256
email: info@ledas.com