Introduction

Collaborative Designer for CATIA V5 (UE5) role enables CATIA V5 users to manage their data within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform through an immersive user interface within the CAD session. This interface provides data management, product lifecycle management, and enhanced collaboration between design and all other stakeholders involved in a development effort. Numerous enhancements continue to be developed for this role due to the popularity and broad use of CATIA V5. In this blog, we will take a closer look at two of these enhancements that were developed in the R2025x release.

Highlights 

Polyhedral data visualization 

Designers who utilize the  UE5 role have the capability to create and handle hybrid structures with Products/Parts coming from different CAD systems resulting in MultiCAD assemblies. Prior to 25xFD01, non-CATIA V5 CAD data was emulated into CATIA V5 through an Exact Geometry CATPart file generated by the Derived Format Converter tool. However, some MultiCAD geometric data cannot be converted to the CATIA format, such as polyhedral data. This enhancement addresses that by offering an alternative to having the system provide an additional format, known as cgrv5, which is the established CATIA V5 CGR format most of us are familiar with but in a format the system can consume automatically if the precise format is not available. Here is an example of this enhancement in action.

Drawing Stamping

Drawings (2D) continue to be part of the development and contractual process that drives the design side of business. Product conception is validated internally and/or externally thanks to drawings. Once 2D is validated (RELEASED state) its content can be shared to all contributors. Currently, when switching Drawing to Released maturity state, there is no way to stamp the drawing, subsequently, there is no visual clue indicating it is released through the platform viewers such as 3DPlay. In addition, you may even see wrong information in the drawing tables or title bock populated with a PLM property since it reflects the value streamed in the file and not the  ‘drawing object’ data in the platform. This enhancement will stamp dynamic information into the Drawing preview to ensure up-to-date information when opening this preview in any DS web viewer (such as 3DPlay). 
This enhancement supports both basic attributes and extended ones (computed). When saving a drawing from 3DEXPERIENCE, dynamic information will be stamped into the generated UDL derived output to ensure up-to-date information when viewing the Drawing in 3DPlay or other platform viewers, regardless of maturity state on the platform. Here is an example of this enhancement in action.

Summary

Numerous enhancements are made to support CATIA V5 throughout a particular release. These two particular enhancements stand  with both improved integration for multi-CAD scenarios along with the ability to eliminate numerous steps previously required in the valdation of drawings.