Development of a product where the underlying components are authored under multiple CAD systems is not new to most of you. It has been done for some time by converting CAD using neutral formats to combine it with other data. Back in my design days, this effort to merge design data wasted a fair amount of time in the design department. Each revise of the design would often have you push data in and out of neutral formats to keep all stakeholders up to date. An individual designer was rarely working with the latest information within their specific CAD environment. In the world of 3DEXPERIENCE where our goal is “one version of the truth,” this methodology would of course not be viable. 

The following methodology continues to evolve to support all of our existing POWER'BY solutions.

3DEXPERIENCE currently provides integrations to eight file-based 3D MCAD & ECAD solutions along with our database-driven solutions from CATIA and SOLIDWORKS. The ability to “structure” all the CAD designs together in a design effort involves the incorporation of 3DEXPERIENCE “nodes” where the different CAD designs meet. Hybrid design structures are built using the role 3D Product Architect where the user can build an initial skeleton structure using design templates for the various design sub-structures or existing CAD components.

Working on a subsystem of a large product design is useful, but you often need to see the “big picture.” Everyone in design needs see the complete design effort, or at least those components that “touch” their design or interact with it in some way, at some point in the development. To create this ability, the various CAD connectors that integrate these CAD systems to the platform, create neutral data or what we call “derived formats”. These derived formats are automatically linked and stored with the native CAD data from each CAD design. This action allows the NX user, for example, to see the surrounding elements of the design and position to them. Other designs are seen as read-only and therefore are protected from change.

When a user opens a hybrid structure in a particular CAD system, the system determines the appropriate-derived formats associated to the other CAD models in the hybrid structures. The files are then downloaded. If no compatible format exists for a particular component, the user is notified, but the opening of the complete design is still done.

In parallel to the needs of the designer, numerous applications that view 3D data (3DPlay, 3D Compare, 3D Navigate, and so forth) use a CGR view format that is also created as a derived output. This has the benefit of allowing all these tools to review, markup, compare and validate these hybrid structures in a common way. Subsequently, democratized data, both 3D and 2D, form the basis of the methodology driving collaboration forward on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.