CAD Insider

CoCreate CAD Give Away

With CoCreate Personal Edition (PE), CoCreate joins the ranks of CAD vendors who give away a version of their CAD product. Over 50,000 copies of PE have been downloaded and registered. However, it is not known how many are in active current use.

The program file is about 90MB (which is small relative to the size of most general purpose CAD programs). To download it, you have to fill out a short questionnaire but it's fairly painless. After the survey, CoCreate shoots you a link via email to activate the product. After initial activation, the program must be reactivated every 72 hours. Geoffrey Hedges, the man behind the program, tells me the reactivation can happen often without the user knowing it. So why keep CoCreate PE users bound to the Internet? I'm still trying to figure that out.

Pluses

• up to 50 part assemblies
• no time limit
• no ads
• full 3D

Minuses

• users must logon on every 72 hours or program stops working.
• does not have advanced surfaces, threaded holes or hole wizard, sheet metal, CAM, FEA or other add-on modules
• data files cannot be read by commercial version. However, if customer upgrades to commercial version, they can upload all PE files and CoCreate will convert them to commercial version.
• no telephone support, no live support of any kind. tutorials are available online and a user forum.

You can download CoCreate Personal Edition for free here.

CoCreate Follow Up

CoCreate origins go back to the 1980s when HP took its in-house CAD system and spun it off, selling it under the names ME10 (for 2D) and ME30 (for 3D). It was reinvented as CoCreate a few years later, its name emphasizing collaboration. In fact, users in different location could work on the same model simultaneously.

That did not catch on, explains Ulrich Mahle, who heads CoCreate's marketing and R&D. "We found designers did not want to continually show their changes. They would rather just show the finished design."

So without the unique selling point suggested by its own name, CoCreate seeks to differentiate itself by another way and now seems to have found it. They call it "dynamic editing," the ability to change  a solid model without constraints, unencumbered by its history. Given that the current crop of popular solid modelers (SolidWorks, Pro/E, UGS, more) are all history based. clearly CoCreate has a challenge in convincing potential customers.

CoCreate is also different from other CAD companies in the following ways:

• Its product development cycle is characterized by quick 3-week iterations in which a task (like a new feature) is created and tested, rather than the more conventional one long development phase after which are code base are gathered up. In addition,  programmers work in pairs, each complementing the other. Daily show and tells keep the whole team aware of individual and total progress.
• CoCreate has no large overseas development staff. A main reason is the interplay that the above-mentioned iterative development process demands. According to CC, overseas development offers a false economy and its onsite developers are each worth multiple offsite developers.

Six week vacations are the norm. But when they are working, they put in the hours. "Nobody works an 8 hour day." Food at the very nice cafeteria is subsidized. I should have asked if CC is accepting applications.

An Introduction to CoCreate

Unlike most other user meetings, the CoCreate user meeting did not start until 11:30. I took the opportunity to get in a morning run through Sindelfingen, Germany, past a beer garden, through the quaint old town center, with shops, bakeries with pretzels, cafes and then to its outskirts past Daimler-Benz' largest manufacturing plant. Mercedes, headquartered in nearby Stuttgart, spreads its factories and offices around Sindelfingen as well, and I am told is also the town's biggest employer. However, the town does not seem to suffer too much from its industry, as do American cities. In fact, only once did I hear the clanging of metal. Certainly, my lungs appreciated the crisp, clean air.

William Gascoigne, CoCreate CEO, addresses the crowd of over 360 users in Sindelfingen, Germany.

I asked if Daimler-Benz was a CoCreate customer? Not even one seat, said Dr. Thomas Roser, CoCreate's Europe Marketing Manager and the emcee to the one-day user meeting. "Not our type of customer." CoCreate's niche is high tech electronics firms, a specialty that harkens back to its birth, when it was an in-house tool of Hewlett Packard. But even within such firms, CoCreate counts most of its 11,500 customers (and over 100,000 seats) in Europe and Japan. Though CoCreate maintains a small office in Ft. Collins, Colorado, the US market is still one that needs to be cracked. Only 15% of its users are in the western hemisphere, compared to 47% are in Europe, and 27% in Asia

Consequently, its user meetings are held only in Japan (650 attended the last one) and in Germany, where on this day over 360 were present.

Dynamic Modeling

If CoCreate had a company face, it would be grinning ear to ear. Recent media coverage has been favoring history-less solid modeling (the chief practitioners being CoCreate, who calls it "dynamic modeling," and Kubotek) and quotes from well known industry writers lit up the big screen. Customer presentations were also on message as customers extolled the "flexibility" CoCreate gives them and the ability to quickly change existing designs. One customer (Xenon) explained how designing a new assembly machine from an existing design made them ever so thankful of having CoCreate to do it with, as opposed to the (far more common and way less flexible) history-based solid modelers.

The House of Payne: SpaceClaim

During the lovely dinner as we floated down the Siene, most of the journalists were happy enough at being invited to Autodesk's press event in Paris that the conversation stayed light and pleasant. But one among us could not be contained. What do you guys think about SpaceClaim, he asked of Autodesk.

What followed was a round of product and company bashing. They won't amount to anything. The revenue model is flawed. Blah, blah, blah. That was typical, you can expect any competition to be trounced in such a context. But what interested me was that everyone at the table had heard of SpaceClaim, a company in its infancy, one with scarcely a customer. It was like an elephant noticing a flea.

What make SpaceClaim so noticeable? I've seen the product early on, before its release. Sure, it looks easy enough to use--but so do many others. It puts out a inordinate amount of press releases, for sure. It seems to have created some interesting relationships among CAD vendors, ostensibly partnerships, even to the point of finagling a booth at the upcoming Autodesk University -- a venue in which Autodesk has strictly forbidden competition. No, it has to be more than all that for the entire industry to take note...

I think the  buzz is due to Mike Payne, CEO of SpaceClaim. You see, Mike has the enviable pedigree of starting PTC. He followed that with SolidWorks. Is SpaceClaim the Third Coming?

The 3D Jackpot, Part 2: MCAD is Powerful, Easy to Use, Or Cheap (Pick Any Two)

Las Vegas, where entirely too many CAD shows are held, is the only city I can identify by sound. The second I enter the airport I am greeted with the jangling disorienting musical tones of the slot machines, a perpetual background. Every now and then, the sound changes as some lucky player is rewarded and coins spill from machine. Still, the big jackpot, the giant dollar sum in blinking lights above, still taunts and beckons. Players move from one machine to another, but the jackpot stays just out of reach.

For the CAD industry, the jackpot is the conversion of millions of 2D CAD users to 3D. Though there have been some small payoffs as hundreds of thousands have converted, but the big jackpot awaits the player who can convert the millions. That jackpot is worth billions of dollars. CAD companies mill about wondering how to get the jackpot.

Yet, from a user standpoint, the answer is ridiculously easy. All that is needed is 3D software that is powerful, easy to use and cheap.

Currently, you can only get 3D design software that is powerful, easy to use OR cheap. Pick any MCAD software and it will satisfy one or two of the requirements. Nobody's software is at once powerful, easy to use AND cheap.

• Next: Who You Calling Cheap? - a definition of terms.
• Still to come - Where current MCAD programs fall short.

The 3D Jackpot Part 1 -- the Perfect Storm

TUnder the perfect blue skies of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, Bob McNeel wonders if a perfect storm is brewing. He is speaking figuratively: the perfect storm being the confluence of conditions that would support a 3D design world, a universal acceptance of 3D design software.

Bob is founder and CEO of Robert McNeel & Associates, makers of Rhino. Rhino 3D modeling software is the beloved choice of 150,000 industrial designers, boatmakers, jewelers and so on. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Why isn't that 1.5 million users?

If you know Bob, you know this is not just corporate greed talking. If Bob was just after the filthy lucre, he could have sold his company many times by now and retired. He could be sailing one of the many yachts that ply the warm waters just past the smooth sandy beach and swaying palms under which we sit and chat.

The more I talk to Bob, the more I think he is the real thing. The DIMe conference, which Bob's company is sponsoring here in Mexico, is for college students learning industrial design. It’s more a labor of love than a commercial enterprise, entry is a mere $100US. Sure, Bob's Rhino software is being demoed on stage but it's not a hard sell. Besides, many of the kids seem to already be users of the Rhino. I asked Bob how he would advise younger kids seeking a profession. "Solve someone’s problem. They can do it through architecture, industrial design, whatever..."

Current wisdom would indicate the correct tool to use in order to solve the customer problem is 3D design software. Still, millions cling to 2D design software.

Perplexed, Bob asks me what I think.

Oh, Bob, don't get me started....

Next: The 3D Jackpot, Part 2: Powerful, Easy to Use Or Cheap (Pick Any Two)