CAD Data Translator Upgraded

By DE Editors

Elysium Inc. (Southfield, MI) has announced the release of version 10.0 of CADfeature, its feature-based CAD design data translation tool. CADfeature is described by the company as a high-quality featured-based translation system that works with CAD systems to preserve design intent, control remastering, heal workflows, and protect intellectual property (IP). The latest release includes enriched drawing support and associativity for an expanded roster of commercial CAD systems as well as new 64-bit processor support.

Elysium’s CADfeature 10.0 now has the ability to translate drawings from CAD to CAD (Pro/ENGINEER source drawing, left, NX target drawing, right) while maintaining the drawings associativity to its 3D model.

CADfeature, according to the company, is an intelligent, native-to-native CAD translator. It is said to enable you to remaster part and assembly histories, parameters, dimensions, sketches, and constraints as well as relationships among features and thus preserve the design intent of legacy and other source CAD files. Core capabilities include a part-mapping function that consolidates all numbers associated with an identical part within an enterprise; a remastering tool that updates all revisions to feature-based parts and assemblies; an incremental translation checker that identifies and automatically includes previously translated parts into subsequent translations; a scalable metadata attribute mapping tool that provides tracking information for all newly translated and standardized data; and an automated geometry verification process that compares 3D mass properties and point-cloud data between source and destination CAD systems. Supported CAD platforms include Autodesk Inventor, CATIA V5, NX, Pro/ENGINEER, and SolidWorks.

Highlights of the new CADfeature 10.0 release reportedly include:

• Enhanced drawing support that includes detailed view definitions, section view, annotations, fonts, and symbols (user-defined and standard)
  
• More robust associativity when translating dimensions
  
• 32- and 64-bit support for all CAD systems and versions
 

CADfeature can be applied to de-feature full parametric models, leaving a design reference in the form of a feature tree of B-Reps alone. “The tool allows us to control the IP in our models before we export them,” said Bob Deragisch the engineering services manager at Parker Hannifin’s Aerospace Group, which has been using a number of Elysium interoperability products for more seven years, in a press statement. “In this way a supplier who is just providing us with resurfacing work, for example, doesn’t have access to a complete reconstruction of our model.”

“CADfeature is a software quality tool that is of particular value to manufacturers, large or small, who are part of extended supply chains that involve different CAD systems,” said Abdul Shamma, chief technology officer for Elysium. “Vendor-neutral interoperability tools save a great deal of time by correcting models preemptively, thereby heading off a host of downstream problems.”

For more information, visit the CADfeature page on the Elysium website.

Download a technical summary of CADfeature.

See why DE’s Editors selected CADfeature 10.0 as their Pick of the Week.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.