solidThinking intros new solidThinking Inspire 9.5

solidThinking, Inc., today has announced solidThinking Inspire 9.5. This latest version of their 3D design software for Mac and Windows allows designer engineers, product designers and architects to create and investigate structurally efficient concepts quickly and easily.

Structurally Assistive Design

The company notes that traditional approaches entail structural simulations by engineers to check to see if a design will support the required loading of a given structure. Inspire 9.5 assists this process by generating a new material layout within a package space using the loads as an input. While this involves structural understanding and some computation, solidThinking Inspire 9.5 is easy to learn and use by various designers regardless of their background and affords them the ability to design more efficient structures and products. The benefits are faster product or design development times, reduced costs and material consumption and reduced product weight.

01 – solidThinking Inspire 9.5 has lots of excellent new features to allow engineer designers, product designers and architects to create dramatically lighter concepts.

“solidThinking Inspire changes the way product designers and structural engineers approach design. It enhances human creativity by proposing designs that can be evolved into a finished product and easily exported to your preferred CAD tool,” says Andy Bartels, Program Manager for solidThinking Inspire. “The new features in this release will allow customers to apply Inspire to an even larger set of their designs than before and make better early design decisions.”

Key New Features in solidThinking Inspire 9.5

• Minimizing Mass — When running an optimization users can now choose to either maximize stiffness or minimize mass
• Stress Constraints — A global stress constraint can be applied to limit the maximum stress in the model during optimization
• Displacement Constraints — Displacement constraints can be applied to a model to limit deflections in desired locations and directions
• Extrude Draw Direction — The new extrusion shape control generates constant cross-sectional topologies in a specified direction
• Localized Language Support — Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish are now all supported

solidThinking Inspire 9.5 also includes an updated user interface (UI) as well as other minor new improvements.

“Inspire demonstrates solidThinking’s innovation and profound understanding of how companies develop products,” says Dr. Keith Meintjes, Practice Manager for Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc.. “It is a tool that precisely addresses the needs of product-responsible design engineers. The straightforward user interface is easy to learn and use and helps designers quickly create efficient and often dramatically lighter structures.”

02 – Another view of the solidThinking Inspire 9.5 user interface.

To learn more you can visit solidThinking online to get details and pricing. There is also a large collection of new videos showing solidThinking Inspire 9.5 in action, including a tour of the new user interface.

solidThinking Inspire 9.5 runs on Mac OS X version 10.6 or higher on an Intel-based Mac with an OpenGL graphics card with at least 64 MB of onboard dedicated memory. It requires 512 MB of main board memory and 1 GB of free hard disk. Wacom tablets and 3Dconnexion input devices are also supported. You can learn more here. 

Architosh Analysis

Back in 2009 solidThinking acquired the underlying technology that they branded morphogensis, a topology optimization software. The goal with this technology is to generate an ideal design for a specified given “package space,” with material properties and loading being addressed by the software.

The software now utilizes Altair’s industry-leading OptiStruct technology and provides that capability within the simplified user interface of solidThinking.

The company is planning to introduce the 9.5 version of solidThinking Evolve very soon. Evolve is the heart of the technology that was purchased by Altair from the Italian-based solidThinking a few years ago. Evolve is unique in its field for its combination of parametric and direct-modeling features combined within very robust History Tree technology, allowing a vast array of quick iteration design possibilities. We look forward to seeing more on that after recently been shown how Evolve 9.5 is coming along.

We are aware that solidThinking continues to gain ground in industrial design departments in colleges across the US. One aspect of that is that the tool runs cross-platform, reaching a huge design-oriented student base in various technical design-oriented academic disciplines who favor the Mac, including architecture and civil engineering. We really look forward to reviewing this software formerly soon.