IronCAD has announce the first update to its Design Collaboration Suite 2016. In this latest release, IronCAD has focused on improving designer productivity across the design spectrum by including tools to enhance fabrication and assembly design. In addition, IronCAD has singled out sheet metal designs as an area of improvement, assigning new tools to make sheet metal solutions easier to create.
In Update 1, IronCAD’s sheet metal has been improved with a number of new features. Now, users will be able to apply standard cut features that can affect the bends ordered for a sheet metal piece, the blends on that sheet, stock corners and, of course, chamfers as well. Other features like a new “Trim” command will allow other model objects to cleave a sheet metal piece to avoid assembly collisions.
To further its sheet metal abilities, IronCAD will also feature a sheet metal loft tool for square and ellipse transitions.
With this new tool, users will be able to quickly create transitions from square to elliptical geometry, which is important, as many of these types of transitions use angled planes to create their lofts, which can complicate the fold-out phase of sheet metal design.
Another intriguing update to IronCAD is its new chamfer tool. With this new feature, users will be able to sweep variable radius chamfers across the length of an object by defining different distances and angles along a specified path. With this new tool, not only can chamfers take on radical new looks, it can also provide a completely new way to sculpt lofts from basic geometry like rectangular and polygonal extrudes.
Finally, Update 1 includes a UI improvement, and with it, users will be able to employ the TriBall tool more effectively.
Usually, when moving geometry around with the TriBall, users have to drag objects to the exact point where they’d like to drop the selected geometry. Now, IronCAD users will be able to grab the TriBall’s center point and hit the Shift key. With this enabled, an option to “snap to nearest” will be available, making geometry much easier and quicker to move.