Due to the rapidly changing world, CAD/CAM/CAE/BIM developers face many challenges. Comprehensive engineering software must meet today's industry requirements. C3D Labs can help your company take the next step and become a leader.
C3DevCon 2023 took place on November 1 in a virtual format. It brought together CAD/CAM/CAE/BIM developers from around the world to become one big geometric kernel community.
Key experts from C3D Labs spoke about the benefits of C3D Toolkit and our plans to create and develop independent and comprehensive engineering software.
Oleg Zykov, CEO of C3D Labs, presented the company's strategy for the coming year and the direction of the geometry core development. The main question is what has happened to the engineering software market so far? The world is changing. We started working in the industry in the period of globalization, but now we see a trend towards regionalization. If we talk about the engineering software market, it is increasingly common to see projects to create new or update existing software in completely different countries.
What does this mean for C3D Labs? More work and more pressure. We are getting high demands on the functionality of all kernel components as our customers' goals get higher and higher. We have started development in several new directions. And eventually we have to get even faster because time to market is becoming critical for all these new projects.
What does this mean for C3D Labs customers? First of all, it's confidence in the stability of our products. We have about 60 customers today, and that number is growing. The second thing is confidence in the high level of the C3D Toolkit SDK. We face all the requirements of our customers.
C3D Toolkit is continuously updated to meet customer requirements. Let's take a look at the main ones for this year:
- C3D Collision Detection has become a separate module of the C3D Toolkit. The reason is very simple: many new customers want to use collision detection in their PLM or BIM applications where they do not use C3D Modeler. More detailed information was presented by Sergey Belyov, Senior Mathematician Software Developer.
- Web visualization is becoming increasingly popular in the PLM and BIM industry. The C3D Web Vision module is one of the main drivers of our business this year. The web component allows you to view geometric models in a browser, and one of the main directions of its development is productivity. Artem Maksimenko, Junior Software Developer, told us about the visualization updates.
- In Multi-CAD environment or when moving from one CAD system to another, it is much more convenient to read native file formats. This allows you to shorten the conversion chain and eliminate unnecessary errors. That's why we started developing plug-ins for C3D Converter that can read native formats. The first of them were NX and SolidWorks. Alexander Spivakov, Head of C3D Converter Team, explained why.
- History-based modeling is not available for imported geometry because there is no history in the models. In this case, the solution is direct modeling. It allows you to edit geometry without history. This is one of the main focuses of C3D Labs this year. A separate team was created to work on this functionality. Eugene Kondratyuk, Mathematician Software Developer, spoke about it in more detail.
- C3D, like all other CAD kernels, uses B-Rep as the main representation of geometry. Today, this is no longer sufficient. Many models come to designers in polygonal format, as meshes. This can be data from 3D scanners, models from online libraries, or the results of generative design. So, we started a new project, the polygonal core. This is a new team in the C3D Modeler division. First of all, we deal with reverse-engineering tools, mesh treatment and modification. Alexander Lonin, Team Lead of polygonal modeling, introduced the new direction.
- Maksim Kulagin, Hed of Support, explained how to communicate with C3D Labs support system and do it in the most effective way.
In recent years, C3D Labs has been developing very rapidly. There are already almost 60 people in the team. More than 10 of them are PhDs. We are one of the best teams in the world working in the field of geometric modeling. The goal of C3D Labs is to become a long-term partner for customers all over the world.
Every year we choose one of our customers to say thank you for outstanding contribution in C3D Toolkit. Selection criteria are:
1. number of requests in the Service desk;
2. complexity of the tasks;
3. new directions for C3D Toolkit development.
This year this award goes to GMPT Company from China.
All presentations will be available on the C3D Labs YouTube channel. Please follow us to stay up to date with new C3D Labs videos.
C3D Labs would like to thank all speakers and participants. See you next year!