Creo users attending LiveWorx 2017 in Boston were challenged to compete with each other in a modeling contest. The invitation showed a deceptively simple part—the kind that might be assigned to you on the first day of a 3D CAD class. But could contestants make the part in 20 minutes or less in front of a live audience? Many participants finished the part, which was checked for volume and center of gravity to ensure that it was dimensionally accurate. The fastest of the finishers were pitted against each other in a showdown on the final day of the conference.
Jomichael Porter, a principal engineer (BSME, Stanford University) from Texas, and a veteran Creo user, was ready. Creo Battle Royale, as this contest was called, was not his first CAD competition. That was PTC’s Top Gun in 2000, when the CAD product was called Pro/ENGINEER. In 2014, Porter finished as a finalist with Creo, and narrowly missed being the overall winner. This year, he was taking no chances. He shut himself up in his hotel room to practice making the part on his laptop, running through various methods, again and again, timing himself…until he got it down to 5 minutes and 45 seconds.
But the contest was being run with Creo 4.0. Porter was most familiar with Creo 3.0. The UI is different in the latest version. And the input device was not what he had been using. It took him 8 minutes 8 seconds to finish the part. The winner had finished over two and a half minutes earlier.
Still, Porter’s part had come in second, so he was able to advance to the final competition. At the end of the day on the show floor, PTC’s Paul Sagar (VP of Product Management) issued a set of changes that had to be made to the part. And the contestants were off, but before Porter could finish making the changes, he heard a contestant—the one who beat him in round one (who unbeknownst to Porter was also the winner of last year’s Battle Royale)—announce that he was done. Luckily for Porter, the announcement was premature. A detail was missing. Porter went on to finish—and win!
Porter received an HP Z2 mini workstation for his win. The diminutive workstation is more powerful than his existing computer, so he will be putting it to good use as soon as he gets back home to Texas, he says. All finalists also received the 3Dconnexions CadMouse.
What’s Next
“Had any of the finalists known [they] were able to use Flexible Modeling Extension (FMX), they could have done the change [the final challenge] in two minutes,” said Sagar.
FMX was introduced as an option to Creo in 2012 as a way for users to make changes directly to the parametric model—without having to worry about the order in which the part is made. Users can push and pull on edges and surfaces and features. FMX is able to recognize features in geometry imported from other CAD programs, or even just “dumb geometry” that results from IGES and STEP files.It can also snap several planes into alignment—a move that would have vaulted any of the finalists into the lead—had they only thought to use it.
You can bet that Jomichael Porter will have studied FMX by the time he has to defend his title at LiveWorx 2018.