Simulation. It’s everywhere.

These are exciting time at Tech Soft 3D because, well, these are exciting times in our industry.

Beyond the steady shift to cloud-based architectures, we’re seeing an explosion of 3D development related to Industry 4.0, AR/VR, Generative Design, Additive Manufacturing, Digital Twin, Manufacturing as a Service, IoT, digital construction and more.

One macro trend cutting across pretty much all sectors is the importance of integrated Simulation & Analysis, which many refer to as computer aided engineering (CAE). For years we have been seeing CAE coming closer to CAD. This has always been important to help a designer iterate through options and it’s especially critical in the world of generative design, where software creates hundreds (or more) design options. Having built-in analysis is critical to helping a designer sort through the many viable options to find those that are optimal from a form, function and material selection standpoint.

We also see CAE playing a role in software for additive manufacturing to ensure the model can indeed be produced with given materials without deformation and within tolerance. Measurement applications, too, are using CAE visualization techniques to illustrate the variance between the designed part and the produced part. Finally, 3D viewers – the kind found in all PLM systems -- are needing to display not only parts & assemblies, but also the rich CAE results data associated with them.

It’s no surprise that for many years, there has been a movement to push CAE closer to the design phase and add value across all parts of the broad manufactured product or building and construction lifecycles. One barrier to achieving this ‘holy grail’ was computer power, given the intense computational needs of CAE. Another was the different types of visualization needed in the design and analysis phases. As we continue to see a shift toward cloud-based architectures, the compute power issue is being dealt with. That leaves the visualization issue.

As we looked at our growing portfolio of SDK’s, we asked ourselves how we might help developers to better handle the visualization of CAE data. Our answer was to join forces with undisputed leader in this area, Ceetron AS, and bring them into the Tech Soft 3D family. We couldn’t be more excited about the Ceetron people, products, partners and possibilities.

We believe the existing Ceetron components are a great addition to our broad portfolio of SDK’s because they give us a market leading solution that wonderfully complements our HOOPS technologies. The HOOPS Visualize technology is an engineering visualization engine for many types of applications, with particular strength in handling CAD-type applications and models. Ceetron AS offers market-leading capabilities to handle the unique and advanced visualization needs of CAE applications.

We’re also tremendously excited about the possibilities we have for combining our respective strengths in new ways to create robust offerings that include the key elements developers need, including CAD data import, modeling, CAD-type interaction, CAE visualization and data publishing.

We look forward to collaborating with our new colleagues on a solution which combines the strength of our technologies to address the needs of any developer who needs to deal with visualization CAE results data in a variety of contexts and application types.

Watch this space for more news on our expanding portfolio of SDK’s!