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More on Ralph Grabowski's "Trends in hardware and Software" post

Bangalore, India

During the Bricsys International Conference 2011, Ralph Grabowski was one of the guest speakers and he talked about some of the new trends in CAD hardware and software industry - he expressed his views about Smartphone Strategies for CAD Vendors.

On the request of one of our readers, I am providing a link to his presentation notes.

http://www.upfrontezine.com/2011/upf-707.htm#b



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Bricscad V12 is FREE for Students and Educational Institutions

Bangalore, India

During the recently concluded Bricsys International Conference, Erik de Keyser announced that Bricscad V12 is soon going to be available free of cost for students and educational institutions.

The nuts-and-bolts of how exactly this is going to be implemented is still awaited. Erik said there would be a webpage where the students and/or the universities/educational institutions can register, provide some kind of authentication and then get approved for a free license.

This is certainly good news, especially in a country like India, where most universities/engineering colleges have Linux as one of their operating environments. Being the only complete CAD software that can run on Linux, Bricscad can hope to certainly derive an advantage in this space and hope to gain some attention in the educational sector. With this move, Bricsys joins market leaders Autodesk, ESRI , PTC and others who have had a long tradition investing in eductaional institutions and offering their software for free.

Erik also announced a contest for students where the best original idea and application developed using Bricscad would win a prize of 15000 Euros, out of which 10000 Euros would go to the student and 5000 Euros to the school.

He also announced the Bricscad dime-store where students and individuals can create Bricscad applications that should cost less than EUR 20 and sell/support it via this interface. This is again a very good initiative and reminds me of the Autodesk appStore that was launched earlier this year.

Indian universities, engineering colleges and serious developer students from India wishing to build a relationship with Bricsys and Bricscad can contact me for more updates or if you have questions.

In this context, educational institutions means those that offer CAD as part of their mainstream curriculum leading to a diploma or degree. It DOES NOT include training centers where CAD is taught for a fee on a commercial basis. Such organizations who are in the ommercial training business can qualify to apply for an Authorized Training Center for Bricscad status and purchase Bricscad licenses and the training kit at discounted rates than commercial licenses. The ATC status is on a yearly renewable subscription basis. VK Design Techniques in Bangalore is our first Authorzied Training Center for Bricscad and offers piping, structural, HVAC and other domain specific CAD skills using Bricscad as the training platform.

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Bricsys International Conference - Coverage from other Bloggers

Bangalore, India

The recently concluded Bricsys International Conference had other bloggers like Ralph Grabowski and Deelip Menezes as well covering the proceedings via live posts, twitter feeds etc.

Here is an index of some of the posts from them:

Ralph Grabowski:

In upFront.eZine this week: Bricsys, Bricscad V12, and Smartphones

Wrapping up Bricsys Conference 2011 & What will happen to Architecturals?

Exclusive Q&A: What it means, now that Bricsys bought IP from Ledas

Juicy details from Bricsys Conference 2011

Photos from Brussels, Belgium

Report on the status of Open Design Alliance

Day 2: Bricsys Conference 2011

Blogging live from Belgium at the Bricscad 2011 Conference

 

Deelip Menezes:
 

 Bricsys Acquires Intellectual Property Of Ledas

Bricscad V12 Direct Modeling Video

Direct Modeling In Bricscad V12 – Part 3

Direct Modeling In Bricscad V12 – Part 2

Direct Modeling In Bricscad V12 – Part 1

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Bricscad Grows & Evolves Everyday - A look at V12 & V11 life-cycles

Bangalore, India

In one of my last posts titled  What's new in Bricscad v12 , I wrote about the new features in Bricscad V12. In the same post, you also read about the disclosures made by Bricsys about the additional new features we can expect to see during the life-cycle of V12 i.e in the next one year.

Looking at the changes during the life-cycle brings us to an interesting observation. Bricscad is a software that evolves throughout its life-cycle. In many ways, Bricscad is like our GeoTools software which grows incrementally, often with a weekly or fortnighly update that introduces a new feature or provides an enhancement to an existing tool. With most other CAD software, you get new features with each release and only fixes and patches during its life-cycle, but not with Bricscad and GeoTools.

If past experience can be a basis for future expectation, look at the previous version - Bricscad V11, there were a whole lot of new features introduced during its life-cycle. I have listed a few of the important ones:

• 3D Navigation: A number of new commands were created and some existing ones rewritten. See Slide...
• Improvements and new features in the drawing GRIDs feature. See Slide...
• The Platinum version of Bricscad which features X-Solids and X-Hardware was released in December 2010. See Slide...
• The support for the TABLE object was also a major milestone in June 2011. See Slide...
• Support for the 2010 DWG format also happened during the reign of V11.
• The FLATSHOT and SOLPROF commands were some of the most latest significant changes we saw in V11 prior to the V12 release. See Slide...

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Chapoo and Bricscad

Brusssels, Belgium

In one of my last posts, I spoke about a new Bricsys product - Chapoo. Here is a little more info about it with some slides.

Chapoo is nothing but the new name for Vondle project management software. The full-fledged Vondle product will be called Chapoo Bizz and a stripped down, lean version of the same is going to be called Chapoo. I asked Erik what Chapoo meant and he said "Nothing". It is just a name that they believe is nice and easy to pronounce.

Here are some more slides about Chapoo and its user-interface.

This is what it is primarily intened to do. 

Connects using various channels.

 

The BIZZ version brings in all the functions of the former Vondle product into the Chapoo platform.  

 
 

 

Chapoo is under development on other mobile OS platforms like Android, iOS etc.

The product is expected to release by end-2011.

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Bricsys - Past, Present, Future - A Movie

Bangalore, India

The Bricsys Developers Conference last week opened with a 3 minute clip showcasing the various Bricsys milestones, juxtaposing it with events from around the world from that time period.

You can watch the Bricsys movie here:

  

Following the opening movie clip was a detailed presentation of the 10 years of history of Bricscad.

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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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