Religion, politics, what football team you cheer for, some topics can generate emotions instantly when talking to people of dissimilar thoughts. In conversation with mechanical engineers – this list also includes your favourite CAD software. To us CAD (Computer Aided Design) is just like a religion or a football team. So I will be bold enough and just say it.
Last year PTC announced a new release schedule for Creo Parametric including a major release every year in April. As promised Creo Parametric 6.0 was made available for customers in late March – and man what a release!
Creo Simulation Live
There is no secret that the pressure is building on designers to create lighter, faster and stronger products at lower costs. Simulation is a great way to analyze and validate the product as a virtual prototype before making a physical one. This enables you to iterate more quickly and design with greater confidence – while saving both money and time.
PTC’s newest addition to its Simulation suite is Simulate Live. Built right into Creo Parametric it gives you real-time feedback as you design. The analysis updates dynamically as users edit or create features, or changes other properties of the model. It works for both parts and assemblies and features structural, thermal and modal analysis. This is one of the new features in the new partnership with ANSYS – the global leader in engineering simulation.
Augmented Reality Improvements
PTC is an important player when it comes to AR today. Some of the worlds biggest companies (read Apple, Microsoft, Google) are dependent on PTC and the Vuforia technology in their AR strategies.
Creo Parametric might feel far away from this technology but for creating an AR experience solely within the PTC infrastructure – it is actually a key component as this is where the actual content for AR experiences will be created.
Creo Parametric ModelCHECK
A great functionality that I don’t think gets enough spotlight is the ModelCHECK tool. A configurable framework of checks that can validate your data. It is for example great to use before you check in your models to PTC Windchill to secure meta data quality. With Creo Parametric 6.0 comes with an updated look, added functionality and new check types. If your unaware of what this functionality can do, I suggest that you take a quick look at it – I strongly think that it can improve the quality of your data overall.
User Interface and Experience
Improvement to the user interface is a recurring highlight for any Creo Parametric release these days. In this version the mini-toolbar functionality is incorporated in more locations. For one, it now presents features in the parts and sheet metal design modes. Descriptions, links to the help topics and more logical grouping of sub-actions are added to the feature toolbars.
The model tree has been updated with visibility filters to hide and show additional columns, a new color scheme and a new “insert here” dragger. These small improvements together with the ones added in PTC Creo 5.0 makes it feel more modern, intuitive then in earlier releases.
This is after all a user pane that we work with every day. On an administrative stand point, all customization of the model tree is now stored in the same file, as all other configuration changes to the UI making it easier to maintain and control.
PTC is really showing that they are pushing technology and innovation with all their products whilst at the same time simplifying features used for daily tasks by engineers, and more intuitive. So if your company has invested in PTC and Creo Parametric, I am glad to tell you that our team is winning!
Happy modeling!
Nils
