solidThinking 8.5 launched globally today

solidThinking, Inc., has launched the all new solidThinking 8.5 and solidThinking Inspired 8.5 globally today with new advancements for industrial designers, concept engineers and architects.

“Our global team of product specialists, all of whom are experienced industrial designers or architects, paid close attention to the needs of existing and prospective users,” said Robert Little, president of solidThinking. “Their feedback, careful benchmarking of competitive products, and close collaboration with the software development team have resulted in the solidThinking 8.5 releases achieving outstanding levels of improvement.”

solidThinking 8.5 releases introduce more than 900 new features, updates or enhancements. “The fundamental functions behind design are ideation and iteration–the ability to conceptualize ideas at the speed of thought and without constraints,” said Alex Mazzardo, solidThinking’s vice president of marketing and product strategy. “solidThinking 8.5 and solidthinking 8.5 Inspired are our next steps in redefining the way design concepts are created, evaluated and photo-realistically visualized, in real time, and in the early development phase.”

01 - solidThinking Emanuele Rodella used the latest version in beta to develop this creation.

“solidThinking empowers users to explore many different aesthetic variations of a design while maintaining the model’s core function,” said industrial designer and solidThinking user Emanuele Rodella. “For example, the new round tool is truly excellent, and helped me handle some very complex changes; and I often used the environmental visualization mode to review the model’s progress. The faster, more improved modeling in solidThinking 8.5 has developed noticeably higher-quality, smooth and sinuous models, and a more interesting, visually dynamic shape–ultimately allowing me to realize the full potential of my design projects.”

Key New Features – Modeling

• Faster workflow and functional performance
• Simplified user-interface for navigation and scene organization
• New and improved round tool with advanced options for shape control and handling of overflowing/overlapping rounded surfaces
• New Face Extract modeling tool for the creation of new surface objects by extracting faces  of existing objects
• More shortcuts, construction aids, sort and selection filters

Key New Features – Data Collaboration

• New Direct Import for H3D, SAT (ACIS), Catia V4 and V5, Parasolid, Pro/E, SolidWorks and UGS NX–all at no additional costs
• New export capability for Parasolid native format (x_t and x_b)
• Improved import and export for IGES, STEP and STL

Key New Features – Rendering & Presentation

• New realtime photo-realistic rendering option, which integrates with raytracing and progressive rendering to obtain a more photo-realistic representation of lighting and materials
• Enhanced anti-aliasing techniques
• Reflection Catcher
• Enhanced material library with more than 300 new “apply and render” materials
• New “ready to render” lights and interior sets
• Increased selection of background images and environments

Key New Features – Form Generation (Inspired)

• The ability to run morphogenesis form generation on multiple model parts and materials
• Define parts as design or non-design space
• Show design space and morphogenesis results simultaneously for full review of the form generation
• Faster, more intuitive part manipulation through smart snaps
• Simple push and pull capabilities for turning 2D sketches into 3D design spaces
• Measure static weight distribution of parts and assemblies on supports

02 - The new solidThinking 8.5, shown here running on the Mac OS X platform.

Current solidThinking users and members of the creative community are encouraged to further explore the features of the new solidThinking 8.5 and download a free trial version by visiting: www.solidthinking.com.

solidThinking, Inc., is also offering updated tutorials and essential videos, which users can view to get up to speed and running quickly. The videos will be available in 10 languages, including English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.