Alas no, it's a soft very integrated inside big company workflow like : Boeing, Airbus, Eurocopter,
US Navy, Frank Gehry ,Michelin, Renault, BMW, Toyota, Honda,Porsche, Audi, Goodyear, Renault Truck.
Alstom, Bombardier, Swatch ,Cern and of course Dassault
But from seen at the screen ergonomy with the graphic pen seems very fluent at the beginning of the second video ;)
Maybe the he most expensive system on the planet ! ;)
Don't know if the "3D Sketch" part can be used alone

http://www.youtube.com/user/3dsCATIA and then Shape Surfacing
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6E9A105A0693A01F&feature=plpp (bottom page)

Hi Pilou,

> But from seen at the screen ergonomy with the graphic pen seems very fluent
> at the beginning of the second video ;)

That's the problem though - it is absolutely impossible when watching a video like that to determine whether the fluency you see there is actually some hard-won skills that the operator has gained through many months or even years of practice, (in which case possibly you would need to invest the same level of time and practice to equal it), or whether it is actually fluent like that to a beginning user.

So it's wise to take such demo videos with some healthy level of skepticism until you can test the actual operation yourself to see if it suits you or whether there are too many rules or special kinds of gestures or things of that nature that are required in order to actually make something with it.

- Michael

Yes without personal try it's very difficult to know :)

By hands it's more easy to see! ;)

Thank you so much for all 3D world news you always post !
I knew Catia is the most expensive,but i also discover it has a good render engine integrated ??...

Looks super smooth,

But yes, totally agree with Michael there,... Even after testing it yourself it can be hard to judge whether it's efficient or not in "real life".
I bought a so called "haptic device" some years ago (i wont't say which one), just based on how cool it was to use when i tried it one time.
It turned out it's precision was to low to be useful and that it also demanded a super-fast computer, which I couldn't afford after buying the Haptic device :)
This gives me a bit of a similar feeling...
Luckily Catia is out of the question i any case for my part :)

This type of software has its place: To be used by larger companies and design firms that specialize in the fashion and consumer-end industries.
It appears to be just visualization software at the most, allowing marketing and focus groups to get instant feedback and immediate creative influence in items that would take days, weeks and months of real time to develop with traditional methods.

- Cars, shoes, apparel and the like.

I'm no expert in the manufacturing field, but wouldn't designing a pair of shoes from a working prototype to a full-blown production model require all kinds of industry specific design processes, ending with exact moulds, tooling and CNC fabrication? Marketing executives would probably like to know before that kind of work if a product is going to function well as well as sell.

Sure that app looks fun and easy, but Michael has to be right, there has to be some learning curve.
I saw splines and control points!!! You can't break the laws of math, them suckers are only as accurate as the user can make them.

Like I gathered, it's best advantage would have to be with a pre-design marketing-based conceptualization that needs to whip up a sketch in seconds allowing things to be changed at the whim of the client.
Hey!, didn't they used to hire guys that could take pencils, chalk and watercolor to an art board? I could go down to Bill's Art City back in the day and snag some good supplies for a few bucks, now you need a super-computer and a Haptic Device.


Not to sound the trumpet of MoI (of course I am ;-) ), but I'd say that MoI holds its own as an application that combines intuitive ease and simplicity along with power and accuracy.

Catia is the big brother of Solidworks. What you are seeing in the video is only a tiny fraction of what it can do. Mould and press design, stress testing, flow analysis, etc. Aerospace and car manufacturers use it. You can start with the free form design shown, then go back and create the engineering parts and tools to make the thing.

As far as I know, Daimler changes to NX.

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/about_us/newsroom/press/press_release.cfm?Component=117697&ComponentTemplate=822

RUdl

Scary. ;-)

I think I asked a former boss about this CATIA V5 plugin about 5 years ago. He hinted to ~$26K USD price tang with ~$10K+ USD year maintenance. Needless to say, I never got to try it :-)

Michael T.

Whoa... I image your company would also have to fly you to France for special certified training the colleges can't give. (oh, l'élite.)

Bonne chance, mon ami! ;-)

Cool piece of software...

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)