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With Sven Soltmann in Gent

Gent, Belgium

I am in Gent today for some one-on-one meetings with Bricsys staff. Gent is where Bricsys is headquartered. After a short day in the Bricsys office, it was time to party again.

One of my very good friends from Germany and a long-standing client as well, Sven Soltmann and his wife, Fera from Berlin visited me in Gent in the evening. We dined at the BelgaQueen, which is undoubtedly one of Gent's finest dining places by the canal-side.

Designed by Antoine Pinto, it is housed in a former grain storehouse known locally as the ‘Spijker’, and overlooks the canal and bridges of the historical Graslei.

The BelgaQueen had been on my list of things-to-do while in Gent. It finally happened today.

Here are some pictures from the evening.

 

 

Belgian Rosé (From French: rosé, ‘pinkish’) wine. Tried first time. Turned out to be extremely good.

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The Bricsys Party on Day 2

Brussels, Belgium

On the second day of the Bricsys Developer Conference also, we had some post-conference evening fun activities again. The party was at the top floor of the Square Brussels Meeting Centre accessible via the Coudenberg entrance. The top floor had a panoramic view of the city of Brussels and inside, we had the legendary Bricsys band playing music to keep the guests entertained.

Here are some pictures from the Day 2 Bricsys evening party.

 

I could not get a panoramic view of the city outside since it was too dark. However, I managed to get this panoramic nearly 360 degrees view of the party floor with my SONY Cybershot camera.

 
With Arthur Gan, the Bricsys Malaysia distributor and Karol Klimowicz, the CADProfi expert from Poland.

 

With Fernando Castilla, the Bricsys and GeoTools reseller in Spain.

 

The Bricsys band; CTO Luc de Batselier on the left.

 
The panoramic view (but my camera did not get the best of it).

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Direct Modeling Explained

 Brussels, Belgium

The single, biggest announcement in Bricscad V12 that has got everyone talking is direct modeling. Bricscad V12 now offers Variational Direct Modeling (VDM), which is something that was pioneered by LEDAS Corporation back in 2008. On Day 2 of the conference, Dimitri Ushakov, the CEO of LEDAS and  Bricsys Technologies, Russia gave an overview of all the solids modeling technologies that have been in use over the past years. His presentation made the complex world of solids modeling technologies easy to understand by an MCAD layman (like me).

He began by giving a brief history of modeling technologies and followed it up with a slide which compared history-based and history-free (direct) modeling and then went to explain the differences between direct and indirect modeling.

VDM offers the best of both worlds. It offers the best of history modeling and pure direct modeling.

 
Dimitri Ushakov beginning the presentation by talking about the advent of Direct Modeling era.

 
He went on to explain a little about some of the early pioneers and implementations of direct modeling -

• SolidDesigner from CoCreate, the software division of HP in 1992, which eventually became CoCreate and is now Creo Elements / Direct.
• IronCAD from IronCAD LLC in 1998
• CADKEY from Kubotec in 1999 (now known as KeyCreator).

 
In the next slide, he showed some of the important milestones in the modeling world.

 
More technical details about the differences between the two modeling techniques explained.

 
Direct and Indirect modeling explained

 
Procedural vs Variational Modeling. As you can see from the slides, this was an extremely educative, informative yet simple presentation by Dimitri Ushakov.

 
"In direct modeling, data is not lost in translation. Dumb data can get talking again. For instance, data imported via SAT files", said Dmitri Ushakov.

 

This chart summed up the comparative differences between the three modeling techniques.

The next three slides show how the modeling techniques work and which one is be suited for you.

 

 

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Menhirs NV (Bricsys) Acquires Intellectual Property Rights from LEDAS

Brussels, Belgium

During the Bricsys Developers Conference yesterday, one of the major announcements was the acquisition of intellectual property rights from LEDAS. The Variational Direct Modeling(VDM) in Bricscad V12 is based on technology that was developed by LEDAS. This is now owned by Bricsys.

"After this acquisition, the LEDAS team in Russia responsible for VDM will function as a separate subsidiary - Bricsys Technologies, Russia" said Erik de Keyser. Dimitri Ushakov, the current CEO of Ledas will be the new CEO of Bricsys Technologies, Russia..

You can read the full press release here.

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Metso Automation - The First BRX User

Belgium, Brussels

Metso is a multi-disciplinary engineering company with interests spanning power, pulp and paper, mining, construction and mineral industries.

They have been one one of the bold guys to experiment and invest on BRX many, many years back and this started a long relationship with Bricsys. Today, they are perhaps the most extensive BRX users and this is clearly reflected in the extent to which they have customized Bricscad.

Dr. Mika Karaila from Metso gave an overview of Metso corporation followed by a demo by Seppo.

He showed us how a completely customized Bricscad, known as MetsoCAD within the company, was used to automate many of the design and operating processes in their industry.

Here are some pictures from the presentation:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chapoo - Upload, Share, View and Annotate files

Belgium, Brussels

Bricsys today gave us a sneak preview of an upcoming product called Chapoo which is a simple, stripped down and extremely user-friendly version of Vondle. You can use Chapoo to upload, share, view and annotate files. Unlike Vondle, you can use Chapoo to upload and transfer files to outside channels like Facebook, Twitter etc. Chapoo appears to be a simple document management system.

Chapoo will run on Android devices also and Bricsys expects to find use for this product beyond CAD users.

Expected to release by end-2011. Stay tuned for more info.

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LightWorks Artisan - A Presentation by Clive Davies

Brussels, Belgium

Lightworks Artisan is a specialized product that offers rendering solution for photo-realistic rendering and real-time ray tracing. It is evident from the presentation that the the company focusses on pure rendering technology and are experts at it.

Clive Davies demonstrated the features of this product as a standalone application as well as demoed some rendering of a CAD data from Bricscad.

"A full commercial release is expected in a few months from now", said Clive in response to a question from the audience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ODA and Bricsys - A presentation by Arnold Van der Weide

Brussels, Belgium

ODA stands for Open Design Alliance - the creators of Teigha .DWG libraries.

Arnold Van der Weide, of ODA spoke about ODA and its activities. He touched upon the relationship ODA shares with Bricsys, important milestones achieved, testing procedures implemeted and used by ODA.

Arnold's talk was informative and educative. Not many would have known much about ODA and how it impacts Bricscad and vice-versa. ODA libraries are an important underlying component of any .DWG compatible software like Bricscad. It is the code that allows a DWG file to be opened when you start Bricscad and saved before you exit Bricscad.

Arnold also highlighted the various OS'es which Teigh would run on. An Android version is expected by the end of this year. PDF reading capabilities are also available.

He also showed a couple of slides detailing some of the plans for the future (like multi-core support, cloud etc).

Some slides from the presentation:

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
What ODA and Bricsys have done together has resulted in a mutually win-win situation to create a powerful Teigha library that is today multi-platform and OS-independent. During the coffee break, I had the opportunity to meet Arnold in person and learn more about ODA and their activities.

 
Arnold Van der Weide, President, ODA with yours truly.

 

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What's New in Bricscad V12

Brussels, Belgium

Hans de Backer, Head of Product Development at Bricsys started off his presentation giving a brief run-down of what was added in Bricscad V11.

He then moved on to new features in V12 and the first slide showed the quad menu. The QUAD is the central feature and the most visible icon of all direct modeling operations in Bricscad v12.

Here is a list of some of the new stuff that has been added to V12:

• The QUAD cursor menu is central to many editing operations in direct modeling and constraints.
• Direct modeling is now possible in Bricscad.
• Menus re-organized to make it more intuitive and shorter - to prevent Up and Down arrows from appearing in long pull-down menus.
• Tool palettes are now available in V12
• Teigha 3.5, the new ODA library was used, migrated from the older 2.6 version - It took 10 developers 8 months to do it. A significant improvement that also resulted in over 1800 fixes to the libraries being reported back to ODA.
• New SECTIONPLANE command that is dynamic and updates the results upon change in source (unlike the old SECTION command). Section planes can be saved to blocks.
• Visual Styles and Page Setups will save a lot of time in drawing management and plotting operations.
• New PDF library based on FlySDK engine
• Trimming of hatch patterns
• New raster engine, based on the multi-resolution Vondle viewer - allows to import much larger bitmaps, mush faster.

 

 
 

A comparision of the user interface between V12 (L) and V11 (R) 

 

 

The Tool palettes menu in Bricscad V12.

 

Teigha 3.5 is the name of the new ODA library that V12 uses.

 

Parallelization is still work in progress and expected to be fully functional during the life-cycle of V12.

 

 

 


 

 

 

The slide above shows redraw times on a large bitmap. About 1 second in V11 (R) and 0.046 seconds in V12 (L)

 

 

 
Hans concluded the presentation by showing some slides that highlight features that are still work in progress and will be implemented during the life cycle of Bricscad V12.

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Constraints based & Direct Modelling in Bricscad V12

Brussels, Belgium

CTO, Luc de Batselier, demonstrated the 2d and 3d direct modeling capabilities in Bricscad V12. The direct modeling capabilities in Bricscad uses the new QUAD cursor menu, which offers a very intuitive, idiot-proof and user-friendly interface that seems to guess what you want to do next. The QUAD menu highlights an edge, face or the entire solid depending on where you move your cursor. Accordingly, options like fillet/chamfer or push-pull operations on faces appear on the screen depending on what is selected.

I am not an MCAD specialist and reporting this as a novice but from what I have seen, it appears to me that these tools make the operation appear extremely simple. You can touch the face and push, pull, fillet or chamfer an edge with ease. You also have the tracking cursor and edit box making its appearance each time a numeric input may be required. So, this allows for both touch-based as well as numeric entry of data.

The Design Intent recognition toolbar provides a number of options to manipulate faces of solids using conditions like parallel faces, perpendicular faces, coaxial faces and the like.

Luc explained that the direct modeling tools make it easy to manipulate and edit solid geometry that have been imported from external systems via SAT files etc. 

Some UI images and screen grabs from the presentations:

 

 

 
 
 

 

 

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