The White Paper «Variational Direct Modeling: How to Keep Design Intent in History-Free CAD» (freely available at http://www.ledas.com/group/white_papers/) sums up the basics of the new design technology and outlines the program for its advancement. In the second quarter 2009, all CAD developers will be able to license the software toolkit, which facilitates development of the applications with functionalities of variational direct modeling in the shortest possible time. Endeavoring to make the new technology immediately available to the CAD users, LEDAS is releasing a free add-on application for the popular 3D design system Google SketchUp in October 2008; which will gradually — from version to version — open all opportunities of the new technology. LEDAS has also announced its plans to develop similar applications for other well-known 3D modeling platforms.

«We announce our plans to welcome co-operation with companies and individual CAD developers that can already share their opinions on the prospects of the new technology and participate in financing our project», said David Levin, CEO, LEDAS Ltd. «Unlike some companies that announce new technologies but do not licence them to developers, we are open for co-operation with all CAD vendors without exception».

The end-user paradigm of direct (also called explicit or dynamic) modeling in CAD involves direct manipulation with the boundary elements of a solid model (faces, edges, vertices). It considerably simplifies creating and editing 3D forms, making it easy-to-use by the amateur users and enhancing designers? efficiency. As a practical alternative to history-based modeling, direct modeling in its pure form has a significant shortcoming: it completely ignores the design intent, established in the model by its creator.

«We offer the approach based on the concept of variational modeling combined with direct model editing», explains Dmitry Ushakov, Director, Product Management and Marketing, LEDAS Ltd. «Using geometric and dimensional constraints which are automatically generated according to the topology and geometry of a boundary model (BRep), according to the features, or are directly specified by the users, our solution enables smart parametric modification — preserving the logic, directly or indirectly put in the original model».

A geometric model with constraints is calculated by a special software component — LGS 3D variational geometric solver, which solves the systems with thousands of simultaneous constraints in the on-line-mode. The solver can be successfully integrated with all geometric modeling kernels available on the market and serves as the basis for implementing the new technology of variational direct modeling.

Learn more at LEDAS white papers and LGS 3D web pages.

This looks very interesting. I currently work with BIM, KML, IFC from Oslo, Norway. And all technology that aspires to enhance the common and open knowledgebase connected to this is interesting for me. I could not download the app from your website. I would like to check it out.,

sincerely

frolich

Dear frolich,

Thank you for the interest to our solution. These days we are launching the web site and the application, so some technical problems still exist. I hope you and other our guests will be able to download the application starting from tomorrow.

Rather the helpful information