Podcast: Digital Engineering News Roundup for Oct. 12, 2018

Transcript of the Digital Engineering News Roundup for Oct. 12, 2018

Siemens plans to acquire Lightworks, finishes Mendrix acquisition

Two noteworthy acquisitions to tell you about – the first one is Siemens’ plan to buy Lightworks Design, known for its Iray rendering software. After the deal the Lightworks brand and Iray product line will remain, just like what happened to past Siemens acquisitions of D-Cube and Parasolid, according to Siemens PLM Software press office. That’s the division of Siemens that will continue to manage Lightworks after the purchase.

Lightworks’ Iray rendering technology is already integrated into Siemens CAD, CAM, CAE package NX because the two companies are longtime partners, so we can expect that iray will be integrated into other PLM products from Siemens as well.

CAD vendors pursuing partnerships with—or acquisition of—visualization and rendering vendors like Lightworks is the offshoot of the growing importance of photorealistic, ray-traced visuals in design reviews and decision making. In the past, Dassault Systemes acquired RTT, resulting in RTT’s Bunkspeed SHOT becoming Dassault SolidWorks CAD’s core visualization engine.

In buying Lightworks, Siemens PLM also gets Lightworks Slipstream, an automated data pipeline to bring CAD models into augmented reality and virtual reality environments.

This week, Siemens also finished its acquisition of Mendix, a company that specializes in low-code enterprise app development and deployment. The synergy between the two is this: The Mendix app-development environment is behind a wide range of apps, from machine leaning, IoT logistics, and AI, to game and sentiment analysis. Siemens, the parent company of Siemens PLM software, has a product called Mindsphere, a cloud-based software and service to analyze IoT-type data. So the acquisition ot Mendix offers new ways to create enterprise apps, manufacturing systems monitoring apps, and digital twin management apps to support Siemens core products and services.

Mendix will become part of Siemens Digital Factory division.

KeyShot 8 Release

This week also marks the release of KeyShot 8, a new version of Luxion’s CAD-friendly CPU-based rendering program. KeyShot 8 was described as “a milestone release” by Claus Wann Jensen, cofounder and CEO of Luxion.

A new feature in this release is the ability to customize, set up and render cutaways. Now, creating cutaways and crossectional views that reveal the inside of an assembly or part is easy to do inside CAD modeling programs, but the difference here is, KeyShot lets do this in the rendering environment itself, so you don’t have to keep going back to your CAD program to export a cutaway view if you choose to experiment with new angles and perspectives.

Other higlights in this release include tools for modeling liquid and scattered materials, like smoke or uncontrolled flying particles.

Keyshot is integrated into many major CAD packages through plug-ins and add-ons. The software is also available as an independent rendering program.

Red Dot Product Design Award

Starting October 15, the Red Dot Product Design Award for 2019 is now open for submission. You have until Feb. 1, 2019, to select and submit product design, communication design, or design concept for consideration.

The Red Dot award dates back all the way to 1955. And the Red Dot award jury includes an international panel of distinguished academics, product designers, and fashion designers, and engineers.

Judging creteria include degree of innovation, formal quality, self-explanatory character, ergonomics, and emotional content, among others.

Previous Red Dot product design winners included a smartphone mount, a children’s desk, and a handheld showerhead.

Award winners are honored at an official award garla, and their works are destined for display in the Red Dot design museum and online gallery.

Onshape on AR

Also this week, at Leap Con in LA (that’s the conference organized by the AR-VR hardware developer Magic Leap), cloud-CAD company Onshape’s CEO Jon Hirschtick previewed an app currently in development.

The app is supposed to let users not just view but edit CAD models live in real-time in virtual space, using the Magic Leap AR headset.

Hirschtick is a familiar name to the CAD community, known as a cofounder and former CEO of SolidWorks. SolidWorks, now part of Dassault Systemes, is also pursuing an AR-VR strategy by introducing the XR (or mixed reality) export option in its SolidWorks 2019 release, to let you export CAD models into AR-VR environments for viewing and interaction.

Leap Con’s keynote presenters included executives from Wacom and Trimble, among others, showing how you might digitally paint and draw or create architectural models in AR-VR.