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.