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CREO : new vision for MCAD?

While I don't often discuss Mechanical CAD (MCAD) software, as I'm mostly focusing on Architectural CAD, I want to share the link to CREO and the discussion/description about it on Deelip.com.

PTC owns Pro/Engineer and CoCreate (among others). Pro/Engineer once took the CAD world by force, by introducing several key concepts for CAD that are now common among the major players (e.g. feature based parametric modeling). And with the acquisition of CoCreate, they also had a direct-modeling approach available. If you have difficulties to understand the difference between feature-based and direct modeling, read my older post about it. What they now claim is a new vision that is as revolutionary as was the introduction of Pro/Engineer at the time. In short:

  • they have a more modular approach to everything:
    • choose your modeling concept (2D, 3D direct, 3D Parametric)
    • a rendering module if you need one
    • simulation module
    • ...
  • The former separate products do not exist anymore, they are all modules of the same creo-system
  • They claim to support ANY modeling approach, with ANY CAD data
While this might not shake the Architectural CAD world today, it is no secret that what is getting so much attention today in CAAD (Grasshopper, Generative Components, Revit, amongst others) is closely tied to the approaches in MCAD software. In fact, much of what we now see as "new" in CAAD was in MCAD for some time.
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  1. Anonymous29 October, 2010

    So based on the presentation, it appears that what your now getting from PTC is the same products they had before, with a more common UI, different names, and the ability to share data between them. A lot of lightning, but no thunder.

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