PTC’s annual conference LiveWorx took place this week in Boston, and though PTC has been very focused on the Internet of Things in recent years (and remains so), the company gave some much-needed love to its CAD platform, Creo.
The most exciting announcement was the result of a partnership between PTC and ANSYS that will see ANSYS’s real-time simulation technology, Discovery Live, integrated directly within Creo. Though the capability won’t be available until late 2018/early 2019, an onstage demonstration of the integration wowed the Boston crowd. Ryan Thompson, head of PTC’s CAD business, showed how easy—and quick—it will be to see simulation results in the design environment.
“FEA [finite element analysis] results are now like a display choice,” Thompson said.
ANSYS AIM, the simulation company’s high-end CAE tool, is also set to be integrated within Creo. This will, at least for the moment, complement PTC’s CAE add-on Creo Simulate.
Though there weren’t any other announcements quite as big, PTC did spend some time highlighting its future roadmap for Creo. One interesting note is the company’s projected model for future releases. Creo will get an annual release every March, but only every third release will have extended support (see picture below). The idea is to provide a balance for smaller companies who only upgrade once every few years and larger organizations that may upgrade with every release.
There were six key areas slated for future Creo enhancement: analysis-driven design (powered by the ANSYS partnership), design for additive manufacturing (expanded type and complexity of lattice cells), multibody design (introduce multibody support within parts), model-based design continuation (expand semantic architecture for symbols, surface finishes and notes), productivity (advanced offset, expanded 3D sweep, cable ties and markers and more) and, lastly, usability (model tree improvement, better drag handles and—a big one for the LiveWorx crowd—support for long filenames).
Another clear area to look out for in Creo is augmented reality (AR), which got a big spotlight at the LiveWorx keynote. PTC is really putting its weight behind AR in product design, and Creo users should expect more and more tools to help enable this. One example is AMD’s Radeon ProRender tool for the creation of real-time photorealistic content, which is launching a beta plug-in for Creo 4.0 and 5.0 that will be free for all users.