Products: July 2006

By DE Editors

Hardware, Software, Tools, and Utilities 

Readers' Choice Award.

Pro/Engineer Wildfire 3.0 Out

Pro/Engineer Wildfire 3.0 makes improving your effciency its mission.

Pro/Engineer Wildfire 3.0, a major release from PTC (Needham, MA), targets improving engineering and process productivity.

Wildfire 3.0's Fast Sketcher reduces the number of menu picks required to use and exit the sketch environment, optimizing assembly workflows up to 5X faster than before. Fast Drawings let you add shaded views to traditional 2D drawing. Fast Sheet Metal gives you the capability to interpret design intent and create sheet-metal features up to 90% faster than before while also reducing the number of features by up to 90%. Fast CAM enhances the manufacturing interface and speeds the creation of manufacturing geometry by up to 3x.

Pro/Engineer Wildfire 3.0.

Wildfire 3.0's Smart process productivity features include a new customizable Process Wizard that empowers companies to capture expert knowledge and leverage best practices and recommended approaches for different processes; Smart Sharing, which are portable workspaces that track all changed, new, and unchanged files; and Smart Interoperability with PTC's Windchill and Pro/Intralink for a streamlined process for accessing information.

Pro/Engineer Wildfire 3.0 now also supports Windows XP 64-bit systems. Active Pro/Engineer users will automatically receive 3.0  free of charge under their current maintenance coverage. For details, click here. Click here to read Al Dean's review of Pro/Engineer Wildfire 3.0 in the June 2006 DE.


Wildfire 3.0 from PTC received the most votes in our April 2006 issue. Vote for your favorite product from this issue by going to the last page of the Products section.

ViewCafé 4 Adds Live Document Conferencing and New Format Support

Spicer Corporation (Kitchener, ONT) announced the release of ViewCafé 4, featuring new Live Document Conferencing. When integrated to ECM or PLM systems such as FileNet, Hummingbird, and MatrixOne, Spicer ViewCafé lets users access hundreds of different online office document, CAD drawing, and model formats from a central file repository, add a markup session, and then return the document with annotations and comments for others to review.

ViewCafé 4 provides a real-time collaboration hub where team members can participate in live document conferencing. According to a Spicer press release, attendees can access the same document simultaneously, chat, and share a view-and-markup session. Benefits include quick display and document interaction, an ability to archive Web conference Chat Notes and other markup commentary to be stored and managed within the document management system for audit trail and compliance regulation purposes, an expanded symbol library that includes a new set of ISO standard hazard symbols for detailed document tracking and identification, new measurement tools that help users estimate CAD drawing specifications (even during an online conference), and a new 3D toolbar that allows users to easily switch between display modes.

ViewCafé 4 also introduces support for several new formats, including SolidWorks 2005 Drawings 2D, SolidWorks 2005 Parts and Assemblies 3D, PDF 1.6 (Adobe Acrobat 7.0), JT 2.0 Model, AutoCAD 2005, and AutoCAD 2006.

The ViewCafé Server is available for Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Red Hat Linux 7.2. ViewCafé has pricing options for fixed, enterprise, and OEM licensing. For more information or to try ViewCafé’s online demonstration, visit Spicer's website.

Open Inventor Manages Interactive 3D Data

Mercury Computer Systems (Chelmsford, MA) says version 6.0 of its Open Inventor  3D interactive data visualization software offers new levels of functionality, including crack-free NURBS and full OpenGL support for shaders. V6 includes the Mercury VolumeViz LDM (large data management), ScaleViz, and MeshViz extensions, which provide development tools and enable interactive management and display of extremely large data sets, as well as transparent scalability for increased resolution, quality, and application performance.

Open Inventor V6 Mercury is available for Linux-based systems, including AMD Opteron 64, and Intel Xeon EMT64, Windows 32- and 64-bit systems, as well as major Unix platforms.

For more information, visit click here.

Laser Scanner for MicroScribe Digitizers

Immersion Corp. (San Jose, CA) and RSI GmbH (Oberursel, Germany) have collaborated to offer the MicroScan, an add-on system that transforms 6DOF (six degrees of freedom) MicroScribe G2 and MX series digitizers into non-contact laser scanning solutions. Immersions says that the resulting system is suitable for capturing complex  geometries quickly and with high detail in such environments as reverse engineering, rapid prototyping, metrology, and physical analysis. The dual laser head MicroScan simply attaches to MicroScribe digitizer’s touch probe and connects to the MicroScribe accessory port-no additional power supply is required.

Once set up, you  sweep the MicroScribe’s articulated arm, which "holds" the MicroScan, over your object of interest. The supplied software—MicroScan Tools—provides a real-time preview of scanned data, enabling you to make needed adjustments to point density on the fly.

The MicroScribe and RSI Laser Scanning System.

MicroScan software  converts point-cloud data into your choice of text data or watertight 3D meshes (polygon data) in such industry-standard file formats as STL, .DXF, and .VRML. It also provides tools for processing the raw scanned data, including most of the cleanup for noise reduction, hole filling, triangulation, registration, decimation, and merging of the files. The data is readily accepted by most widely deployed MCAD/CAM/CAE software.

Depending on your MicroScribe base model, the RSI scanner offers detail accuracy ranging from  0.008 to 0.012 inches (0.2 to 0.3 mm). The  scanning rate is up to 28.000 data points per second. The laser scanner unit is a compact, palm-sized device, measuring 6 inches square and weighing about 15 pounds.

The MicroScribe and RSI laser scanning system is available as an option for MicroScribe G2 and MX series purchases. Pricing for a complete unit is less than $25,000. Visit Immersion Corp. for more details.