Shapr3D
Canvas Category Software : Engineering : Additive Manufacturing
Shapr3D is an innovative 3D modeling toolfor industrial designers, engineers, product managers, manufacturers, and other design professionals. But it’s much more than that. Shapr3D is on the mission of reinventing the CAD industry that got stuck in the past. We’re building a 3D modeling app that works for the users, instead of holding them back. We want people to be able to design anywhere they want, the way they want.
Assembly Line
What is CAD: the technological foundations of CAD software
In 3D Computer Aided Design systems, the most important building block is the 3D geometry. This is created by a 3D geometry kernel, which is a software component, responsible for geometry calculations. Some examples of the operations that a geometry kernel can provide are boolean operations, extrusions, sweeps, lofts and many more. Typically, a geometry kernel has thousands of geometry operations implemented. By the ’80s, boundary representation or b-rep became the industry standard mathematical model for 3D manufacturing applications. While it would be great if standard meant not just a standard for mathematical principles, but a standard implementation, this could not be further away from the truth. Over time different CAD vendors implemented plenty of different boundary representation engines (aka. geometry kernels), which is one of the main reasons for poor compatibility of different CAD systems even today.
Geometry kernels are not easy to write nor to replace. One of the most expensive software issues in history was when Dassault Systemes replaced CATIA’s kernel upgrading from V4 to V5. The incompatibility issues that this version introduced cost Airbus an estimated $6.1 billion due to delays in production.
CAD programs usually use different tricks to display a huge amount of geometry. One of the typical tricks is called LoD (Level of Detail). LoD simply means that when you look at something from further away, a lower resolution mesh is going to be rendered, but when you zoom in, the CAD system will load a higher resolution version of the geometry. This way when you zoom out and look at a large assembly, the rendering performance will not degrade. It’s worth mentioning that this tessellation data is responsible for a significant amount of the memory consumption of CAD systems - sometimes more than 50% of the memory that a CAD system is using is allocated to the tessellation data.