PTC/USER Part 4: Future Enhancements

PTC gave hints of what to expect in future releases of PRO/ENGINEER and other PTC products at PTC World 2006.

• MathCAD will be used to create a tolerance analysis application.
• 3D drawings. Companies are trying to remove 2D drawings from the design process. PTC will facilitate this by allowing dimensions, notes and other information on 3D views.

• Auto-round feature. The ability to automatically round all edges in a part.
  • Example of part took 6 interactive hours for new user and 2 hours for an intermediate took only 9 seconds with auto-round feature.
• Removing surface feature. The ability to remove a surface and have the nearby surfaces meet to fill the gap automatically.
  • Example: user may need to remove small fillets not needed for FEA
• Electrical design visualization, view query ECAD data, increased associativity between ECAD and MCAD applications. [ed. PTC seems to be working hard to be the MCAD application of choice for electromechanical design.]
• Super scaleable visualization.
  • A million part assembly shows in 3 seconds. Example: start from a view of 2 ships and zoom into a stair step on one of the ships [ed. this was not shown live]
• Security. "There's more protection on a 99 cent iTunes song than on a 3D model of your entire product line." Better protection of intellectual property, which is more important than ever with the trend to outsource and distribute design teams.
  • Example: An auto manufacturer may need to send a model of an engine to a subcontractor so they can create an engine mount for it. PTC will let the auto manufacturer hide the internal details of the engine, which form the intellectual property of the company, so the subcontractor only sees the outside. If further security is desired, external details can also be masked using a faceted view of the engine.

• Watermarking views --not models. This is sometime required for defense contractors.
• Product variants -- the ability to create product line with variations in features or parts.
• Manufacturing UI modernization. "We will be 'Wildfirizing' our CAM products."

Comments

[Phil]

I recently attended a demo of Catia v5 they talked about v5 being a new kernel whereas PTC kernel is based on 1988 technology. It seems that it is still the same kernel as 1988. and wildfire is just a new GUI ontop of old kernel. ive been testing wf3.0 and its seems real easy to execute a command that brings up the old interface.
Can someone shed some light on this. Has PTC redeveloped the Kernel