Marking the first release of a CoCreate product since PTC acquired CoCreate late last year, the product lifecycle management software provider has announced CoCreate 2008, the latest version of its CAD, product data management, and collaboration software suite.
Specific enhancements in CoCreate 2008 consist of revised pattern capabilities, including an improved user guidance feature and new options for irregular patterns and selective suppression of features within a pattern; a flexible work-in-progress capture feature with which users can save work and “what if” scenarios daily, including multiple revisions of locked parts and assemblies; and shaded and rendered drawing views that enable 3D designs to be represented in two dimensions.
Other enhancements include improved surface editing capabilities, including the ability to automatically maintain curvature tangency, coincidence, and continuity during design modifications; and a faster cross-sectional modification feature that reduces the number of repetitive steps necessary to modify components with cylindrical geometry. Some modifications can be performed in a single operation.
A new “co-pilot” feature lets users increase or modify the geometry of a design through a point-and-click interface, enabling rapid edits to curves or surfaces in the design, said Sandy Joung, PTC’s product marketing senior director, in an interview. In addition, a new “task agent” feature handles back-processing of compute-intensive tasks, such as printing, saving, moving, or copying files, remotely on a separate server.
The suite’s enhanced sheet metal module includes design for manufacturing capabilities, with which users can simulate and automatically update their models after making material thickness or other specific manufacturing changes, Joung said.
In addition, the latest release of CoCreate’s 2D Drafting module adds support for the DWG and DXF file formats.
“Based on their design strategy, many discrete manufacturers can be better served by an explicit design approach” than by a traditional parametric-based design model, Joung said. This applies to manufacturers that produce a lot of specialized, one-off designs, or that operate in competitive markets with short time-to-market cycles, including high tech, electronics, and industrial equipment makers, Joung said.
Several CoCreate customers have tested and validated the enhancements in CoCreate 2008, which is scheduled for general availability by the end of the month. Customers include small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and larger companies alike, Joung said. Companies can choose from approximately 30 individual modules.
“The enhancements in CoCreate Modeling 2008 will help increase the productivity of our design teams and reduce the risk of misinterpretation of drawings,” said Nan Battaglia, CAD specialist at PTC customer Carl Zeiss Meditec, Inc., in a statement. “The software … lets us focus on the design, versus the modeling technique or constraints.”
CoCreate 2008 is available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish versions, PTC said. CoCreate customers with active maintenance agreements will have access to the new release at no additional charge.