Editor’s Pick: Explicit Modeling Extended with CoCreate 17.0

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

A couple of month’s back, PTC announced that version 17.0 of its CoCreate Explicit Modeling design environment was coming. The time has arrived.

CoCreate was one of the first—if not the first—explicit modelers out there. It has been a technology leader for a long time. Version 17.0 offers more than 560 enhancements, many user-driven, across the product family, which means that there’s a ton of stuff to learn about it. Your best bet is to hit the link to the Showcase video you’ll find at the end of today’s Pick of the Week write-up. But—ahem—never one to use few words when a zillion are possible, let me tell you of a couple of cool things in CoCreate 17.0.

One of the coolest aspects of CoCreate is that it uses the concepts and tools available in 2D yet drives people into adopting 3D. I’m not sure “drive” is really the correct word. Let’s try “gently leads” users into adopting 3D. It does this by not fighting 2D and making you think different, as somebody once said. Rather, it takes your 2D comfort zone and makes it work in 3D. The upshot is that it gets the whole team up and running productively quickly. And for those familiar with 3D, it expands and speeds up what they can do by not imposing the lock steps of traditional modelers upon them.

Version 17.0 also completes the integration of CoCreate and Pro/ENGINEER that you knew was coming after PTC acquired CoCreate. This is big because it’s not just that you can dump a Pro/ENGINEER file into CoCreate and fiddle with it, which you might expect. Nope. We’re talking bidirectional parts and assembly transfers. Associativity with exported geometry is maintained. This means your outfit can use both design environments and leverage the strengths of each without worrying about interoperability issues. Productivity,  that is, enhanced from all angles.

These are just a couple of highlights in CoCreate 17.0. The Showcase video in today’s write-up is, again, where I recommend you start. If you’ve taken a look at CoCreate before, you haven’t seen nothing yet. For that matter, even if you think you know what CoCreate is about, the time has arrived to look again.

Thanks, Pal.—Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s Pick of the Week write-up.