Shawn Wasserman: Hi. I'm Shawn Wasserman, simulation editor at ENGINEERING.com. I'm here with Shaun Kroeger from solidThinking, and we’re here to talk about Inspire and Evolve.
Shaun Kroeger: So Evolve is an industrial design application that really focuses on allowing someone to freely create their designs from either surfaces or solids. It also has construction history.
We've also added new capabilities that allow people to seamlessly move between poly meshing and NURBS modeling.
We're also introducing brand new rendering technology, so you can very easily create photo-realistic images directly inside of Evolve, all on the same platform.
Shawn Wasserman: Perfect. So there's a new release for Evolve coming out. Can you tell us about that?
Shaun Kroeger: Sure. That release is scheduled here very soon, probably the next month.
The poly mesh technology is brand new. So you can now model in polys, and seamlessly move into NURBS surfaces.
Just free-form — push and pull those design points around. So it works very well for when you don't have the exact dimensions in your models. You can quickly come in and make design changes on the fly, and just push points around to figure out what shape you want.
And then, like I said, the rendering technology is also brand new, so we've completely overhauled what we do on the rendering side, and leveraged both CPU and GPU processing. ... It's a very powerful tool for Mac users as well.
Shawn Wasserman: Interesting. So what brings you to SOLIDWORKS, then?
Shaun Kroeger: We work with SOLIDWORKS very well, because we're based in Parasolid. Evolve, actually, is a partner product, so it has a plugin that allows you to read and write SOLIDWORKS models.
And what we found is, most people today start their concepts by opening up a blank sketch in SOLIDWORKS, and sketch something out. And the question is: How do you know where to put light-weighting holes, or pockets, or fillets and features like that?
Inspire helps you come up with a concept. So instead of starting with a blank sheet, it gives you a good starting point, and it accelerates the design process. So you can cut down on the design iterations between detailed design and validation. And ultimately, it's getting to market as fast as possible. That's what saves people money.