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May 13, 2015
Engineers change the world, but they’re not known for their love of change. Change is disruptive, and the last thing design engineers need is their workflow disrupted while they’re trying to meet tighter product development deadlines. On the flip side of that coin: Change is necessary, especially if design engineers want to continue to innovate in an increasingly complex product development environment.
That’s the tightrope engineering software vendors face. They have to update their software to help engineers to tackle human-centric design, the Internet of Things, and new materials and manufacturing processes via simulation-led design, optimization and high-performance computing. They have to do it all without ostracizing their core users who have invested the time and money to learn their existing software inside and out.
Altair Chairman and CEO James Scapa walked that tightrope as he took the stage at the Ford Motor Company Conference and Event Center in Dearborn, MI, a town that knows something about the need to change with the times.
Ease of Use
“The right way to design is to start with a technology that really lets humans be creative, but allows all the simulation technology to play with optimization methods to really drive and evolve and synthesize the design,” he said. “Inspire is really that for us.”
Jim Scapa, CEO of Altair kicks off the #altairtechconf 5000+ customers, 2500+ employees, $290M co. in 2014 & growing. pic.twitter.com/OYpleaoVnr
— Desktop Engineering (@DEeditor) May 6, 2015
solidThinking Inspire helps product designers conceptualize optimized structures by generating a new material layout within a package space using the loads as an input. Acquired in 2008 by Altair, solidThinking’s Inspire and Evolve applications are known for their ease of use thanks to a simplified user interface. That’s in stark contrast to Altair’s “big guys,” as Scapa called the company’s HyperMesh finite element pre-processor and HyperView post-processing and visualization environment.
That’s why Altair began developing a new user interface for all its products many years ago. Products like solidThinking Inspire and HyperWorks Virtual Wind Tunnel were the first to roll out the new user interface.
“It’s really a dramatic shift in terms of how you work with this tool,” said Scapa. To minimize the disruption such a shift could cause, Altair is using the same database under the hood so all the panels that make up the current user interface will still be accessible and any existing scripts will still run. The end goal, however, is ease of use and a consistent environment across Altair’s HyperWorks suite of software tools.
Dagg: Context-sensitive help appears as needed in new HyperMesh UX to guide user through workflows. #altairtechconf pic.twitter.com/XEeMxnEF56
— Desktop Engineering (@DEeditor) May 6, 2015
“We’ve done a lot of thinking over the last year or so on how to make these things connect and put them into a common environment so you can move really cleanly between different types of models,” said James Dagg, chief technical officer, Modeling/Visualization for Altair. “We’ve been going product by product in reinventing the entire user interface into one consistent ... elegant and simple workflow across all the products.”
HyperMesh has been around for more than 20 years. Dagg said he knows it is the “bread and butter” of many engineers’ daily lives, so he says Altair is treading carefully when it comes to changing it. Here is the video showing the new user interface of what Altair is calling HyperWorks Next Generation:
Altair plans to release HyperWorks Next Generation in stages to gather user feedback, beginning in the last quarter of this year as a 14x “on request” release and adding functionality approximately every three months after that until it is completely introduced over a two-year cycle.
“In the past we were designing things so they performed well, but aesthetics were a bit of an afterthought, especially to a lot of engineers,” said Scapa. “Companies like Apple have kind of woken everyone up to the importance of the human-centered design as well and that’s true even in our software products, by the way.” (See user-centric design related article here.)
Future Focused
User experience is just one of the trends driving the company, according to Scapa. He said the company is also focused on design synthesis, electronics and communication simulation, visual analytics and machine learning, and simple solutions to leverage the cloud.
The top news on the design synthesis front is what the company is calling PolyNURBS, which can be seen in the new solidThinking Evolve release where it allows users to convert a polygonal model to an organic NURBS surface with a single click.
“If you want to get your results out of OptiStruct and you want to turn them into CAD, the way we do it today is pretty pathetic,” Scapa said. “The way we’re heading with the polyNURBS technology we’ve created is a very flexible technology that can create NURBS surfaces and NURBS solids.”
The company is also “taking topology optimization to the next level,” said Scapa, by making it possible to create lattice structures on part interiors to make them even more lightweight. The lattice structures are complemented by 3D printing technology for additive manufacturing applications.
When it comes to new materials, Scapa highlighted the company’s recent acquisition of Multiscale Design Systems, LLC, developer of MDS, a family of products focused on micromechanics, microstructural optimization, and life prediction of complex materials.
“We’re mad for what this guy is doing,” he said. “You can model any composite with this technology, run the simulation and then it homogenizes material properties down so you can put it into finite element code and run it.”
Likewise, Scapa called FEKO a “fantastic acquisition” that it is investing heavily in. Applications for the FEKO solver include antenna design and placement, electromagnetic compatability analysis, bioelectromagnetics, radio frequency components, 3D electromagnetic circuits, radomes design and analysis and radar cross-section analysis. Learn more about the growing importance of electromagnetics in design and simulation here.
On the Cloud computing front, Altair has released HyperWorks Unlimited — Virtual. Like its physical appliance, the virtual solution wraps up everything needed for CAE high-performance computing into one easily accessible package via Amazon Web Services.
The company is also working on a Cloud-based visual analytics system it plans to release later this year. Scapa said Altair has been working on it for three years from the ground up.
As the company celebrated its 30th anniversary with a Back to the Future reception — a nod to the movie trilogy that began in 1985 and leapt back and forth in time, including a “future” trip to 2015 — Altair isn’t changing its roots as an engineering software company founded by engineers, but it is changing with the times and looking to the future.
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About the Author
Jamie Gooch is the former editorial director of Digital Engineering.
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