While design complexity on its own isn’t necessarily a problem, it can create problems for a company. Most notably, as a design becomes more complex, and as systems are added to a product, designers often look to third-party providers to deliver critical components and fully functional systems. Although a third party can make it easier for a company to focus on the core functionality of a product, if the third party and the company aren’t using the same CAD software, confusion and poor interoperability can hinder any product’s design timeline.
To avoid this stumbling block, design teams require a robust multi-CAD translation tool that is agnostic with respect to any vendor’s choice of file format.
Based on the Dassault Systèmes XCAD infrastructure, Theorem’s Multi-CAD allows designers to incorporate parts from a variety of popular CAD packages, such as NX, Creo and others, directly into a CATIA V5 or V6 workspace. Once imported, multi-CAD can validate the geometry of a part model to ensure that no data is lost in the translation process. Lastly, multi-CAD rounds out its translation ability by leveraging CATIA’s native “Insert Existing Component” command to capture product structure directly associated with an assembly in its original CAD package.
In addition to fluency with translation, multi-CAD can also read any model-based definition annotations attached to a model, which can be helpful for manufacturers looking to understand the design intent of an assembly.