Materialise Wins 2nd Place in "Change the World" Challenge

Desktop Engineering magazine announced today the winners of its first annual "Change the World" Challenge, a contest for engineers, inventors, innovators, designers and companies creating products or processes that will have a major impact on our lives.

Winners were chosen in each of the four categories of design, simulation, rapid technologies and computing IT.

FISHER/UNITECH would like to congratulate its business partner, Materialise, on winning 2nd place in the Rapid Technologies category!

Materialise won 2nd place for its Mimics Innovation Suite (MIS), which makes it possible to go from CT/MRI data to 3D, revelaing internal human anatomy in a non-invasive way.  The solution has been used by Abiomed, Inc., to design an artificial heart and by FluidDA to develop improved respiratory medical treatments and device design.

Click here to read the full Materialise submission

Watch the Mimics Innovation Suite Video

Dimension Palette

The dimension palette appears when you insert or select a dimension so you can easily change the dimension's properties and formatting.

You can change the tolerance, precision, style, text, and other formatting options in the palette without going to the Property Manager.

In the Style portion of the palette, you can select any of the formatting settings that you applied to other dimensions in the drawing, which saves you time when formatting dimensions.

If you select more than one dimension, the properties and formatting that you set in the palette apply to all of the dimensions.

Locating Components for a Sheet Metal Flat Pattern

The design process may require components of a Sheet Metal assembly to be shown in the finished and flat pattern position. The key to maintaining the component positions is to utilize mates that allow the components to “move” when the flat pattern is selected.

In this example, the fixed face is the 2nd tier as shown.

Here’s how the mates were applied.

Tier 1, Apply a Coincident and (2) distance mates

Tier 2, This is the fixed face. Apply a Coincident and Distance mate.

Tier 3, Face to face (Coincident). The “trick” on Concentric mate consists of placing a very small hole (.0001mm Diameter) on the Sheet Metal. This will allow you to align the component with the Concentric mate.

Tier 4, Utilize a Point on the component and a Point on the Sheet Metal

Once the mates are established, you can then Unsuppress the Flat Pattern feature.

Thogus to be Featured at EuroMold 2009

Thogus Products Company is going to be featured at "The Future of Additive Manufacturing" conference at EuroMold 2009! Terry Wohlers (who organizes and chairs the conference) is going to use Thogus as an example of a company leading the way into the future of additive manufacturing (AM) in his kickoff presentation.

What makes Thogus unique is their approach to AM. With two Fortus 400's, and 5,000 sq. ft. of space dedicated to Stratasys products, they have been able to position themselves as a "boutique" manufacturer capable of meeting very specific needs, but at the same time they are large enough to handle high volume part orders.

They are also installing (today actually) the first Vapor Smoothing Station in North America. Just another example of the forward thinking and leadership that Thogus is presenting in the AM movement.

For those who are not familiar with the EuroMold trade fair, it is considered by many as one of the most important AM events worldwide. Pairing up the annual Wohlers Conference with it only made sense.

The fair itself will run from December 2-4th at the Exhibition Center Frankfurt in Frankfurt, Germany. There should be some really good information at this conference for anyone considering new 3D Printing or Rapid-Prototyping systems.

"The Future of Additive Manufacturing" conference will take place on Friday, December 4th.

Michigan to get share of $4 million Dept. of Labor grant

 - from Crain's Detroit Business (2:40 p.m., Nov. 18, 2009) By Amy Lane

Good news for Michigan, Ohio and Indiana's displaced workforce!  If your local workforce agency has announced they are out of grant funds, please check with them again regarding this latest news piece.

The U.S. Department of Labor has awarded Michigan, Ohio and Indiana a shared $4 million grant for their state workforce agencies.

The grant, funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will help entities like the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth collect data on where job growth is occurring and what skills are needed to obtain those jobs, according to the office of U.S. Rep. Sander Levin, D-Royal Oak.

The grant’s emphasis will include identifying career path opportunities for displaced auto workers, in energy efficiency and renewable energy industries.

The tri-state grant is among $48.8 million in state labor market information improvement grants announced Wednesday by the Labor Department.

SW 2010 SP1.0 EV is Available for Download

2009 SolidWorks 2010 SP1.0 EV (Early Visibility) is available for download - This service pack is now available to Subscription Service customers. To download, log into the SolidWorks Customer Portal Link

SolidWorks SustainabilityXpress Donation Program

SolidWorks has announced that they will donate $1 (up to $10,000) to Formula Hybrid for every download of Solidworks SustainabilityXpress. Formula Hybrid is an international competition of university engineering students who develop high-performance fuel-electric hybrid vehicles.

The SustainabilityXpress software was created to help engineers create more environmentally friendly designs and products. By encouraging the download of this software, SolidWorks is hoping the current generation of engineers will teach the next generation that it is possible to create products with a low carbon footprint, and put tools in their hands to begin creating "green" designs today. SolidWorks' goal is to prove that any product can be designed with very little environmental impact.

For more info you can read the press release HERE.

"Hide Edge" Line Option isn't Available in a Drawing

Often times we like to hide edge lines in a drawing to clean up views, make areas of interest more outstanding or just make the drawing more understandable. When you right click on a line, you should receive a "Hide Edge" option.

What can I do if the "Hide Edge" option doesn't show up?

This is often cause by one of two things.... or both combined. If you want to hide an edge, you need to:

1. Click the view itself and check the "Display Style" setting. If it is set to "Draft Quality", the "Hide Edge" option will not display. Make sure to set this to "High Quality."

2. Set "Tools\Options\System\Drawings\Display Style\Display Quality for New Views," to "High Quality." This will prevent step 1 from being needed in newly created views.

3DU Instructors - Question of the Week (10-10-09)

Beta users, having trouble getting 2010 SP0 installed?

I went through the usual steps to uninstall Beta 3 of SolidWorks using the installation manager. I then went through the C-Drive and the registry to delete all traces of SolidWorks. In the Uninstall or Change a Program area, no traces of SW Beta 3 were there.

I then went to the SolidWorks website and downloaded the first portion needed, the installation manager. It’s a 16.2MB download. Once this was finished, I ran it and for my 2010 installation type, I chose to download the DVD contents to my hard drive. For my type and all the options I chose to download, it was about 6.2 Gig in size. I selected the setup.exe file in the download location once it was finished. I came up with the following errors right in succession after about 2% was installed.

 

 

What was the issue? Beta 3 of SolidWorks had not uninstalled properly. Per the suggestion of a SolidWorks Support Tech, I used the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

It was a bit confusing to use at first because there was no obvious places to start the utility up. (In Vista) Click on Start; All Programs; Windows Install Clean Up. Looking through the list of programs, I found SolidWorks Beta3 was still there. Once I had the utility pull Beta 3, the install went through without a hitch.

Hope this helps for the Beta users!

Rod Harper
3DU Instructor

Easy Way to Share Your 3D CAD Designs

In this quick video, Cliff Medling of 3DVIA, shows us all how easy it is to share 3D models within every level of a company imaginable.

When designing a new product or concept, and need to show the concept to other members of our team (Marketing, Management, Graphic Design, Sales, Customers, etc.) we often have to deal with exporting many formats, both 3D and 2D images. However, downloading your 3D models to 3DVIA is a “one-stop shop”, as everyone on the team can access 3DVIA.com from almost anywhere. This includes those who are not 3D users.

Using a SolidWorks design, I show here how easy it is to upload a design that all team members can access.

Here is the Power Painter 3D Model I Published from SolidWorks in the video. I also need to give credit to the SolidWorks team for the design–nice work!