Engineers and designers are under constant pressure to design innovative products. They are also under the gun to get these new products to market faster than ever. In order to empower them to accomplish these goals, design and simulation software tools are being increasingly used to optimize products early in the conceptual phase of development, when ideas can be vetted and changes can be made easily and at less cost than late-stage design changes.
One such software tool is latest version of SolidThinking’s Inspire software, which enables users to create and investigate structurally efficient concepts quickly and easily, leading to reductions in cost, development time, material consumption, and product weight. SolidThinking Inspire is used by design engineers, product designers, and architects in multiple industries including aerospace, automotive, heavy industry, architecture, and consumer products.
New to Inspire 2014 are geometry simplification tools, linear static analysis, concentrated mass parts, and smoothing options, including the ability to export solid geometry. One focus of this release was increasing the software’s ease of use, making it easier for users to set up models for analysis to validate concepts, and improving the concept development phase.
“With solidThinking Inspire 2014 we focused on enhancing the concept development process by proposing designs that can be rapidly iterated and easily exported to the user’s preferred computer-aided design (CAD) tool,” says Andy Bartels, Program Manager for solidThinking Inspire. “We put a strong emphasis on improving the usability of the software while adding new features like geometry simplification tools for easier model setup and analysis to help users verify their concepts, all directly in the Inspire interface. These new features will allow customers to apply Inspire to a much broader set of design problems.”
To make it easier to visualize the improvements in features in Inspire 2014, the company created a series of videos, which include a tour of the user interface, a comprehensive overview of the latest features, and an overview of how the software fits into the product design process. In addition, customers may access tutorials created specifically for the solidThinking Inspire 2014 release, product demos and an interactive infographic. To watch the videos, click here.
Earlier this year, solidThinking released solidThinking Evolve 2014, which enables industrial designers to develop forms faster, using either a Windows PC or Mac. Evolve captures an initial sketch, then allows exploration of styling alternatives and the visualization of products with high quality renderings generated in real time.
The software combines both the modeling freedom of organic surfaces and the control of parametric solids with its unique ConstructionTree history feature. Evolve releases designers from the constraints of engineering-oriented CAD tools, while allowing the export of digital models required by others in the product development process.
