Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

30 Aug 00

Mac3D News: Gestel ships solidThinking 4 for Mac!

The Italian software company, Gestel, located in Vicenza, has announced solidThinking 4.0, their latest release of the popular NURBS-based surface modeler and rendering program for 3D professionals.

Coming for a NeXT/OPENSTEP and Unix background, Gestel promises that solidThinking is coming to OS X as well. solidThinking has been previously available on Windows NT and Win95 and is now on the Macintosh (OS 8.5+). As mentioned in our previous report, Gestel has been busy porting the code to the Mac OS as well as preparing the code base for Carbon compliance under Mac OS X.

From the press release:

With over 200 new features and improvements, solidThinking 4.0 sets a new productivity standard for surface modeling and photorealistic visualization.

solidThinking 4.0 will be available on Windows 95 / 98 / NT / 2000 as well as on Macintosh 8.5 and later. GESTEL has already committed to delivering solidThinking for Mac OS X.

"Thanks to our customers feedback, solidThinking Release 4 is today the most productive software for product styling to work with." said Alex Mazzardo, GESTEL's managing director. "Moreover, solidThinking is today the only true CAID (Computer Aided Industrial Design) solution available on both Windows and Macintosh operating systems and this is exactly what most designers are waiting for."

solidThinking 4: Features

This new release, aside from being newly written for the Macintosh and future OS X platform, has over 200 new features. Here are a few highlights:

Primatives:

• The NURBS Cylinder tool now allows you to specify number of sections and order along the cylinder axis.
• The NURBS plane tool now allows you to specify number of sections and order along U and V.
• The Helix tool now allows you to create a spiral by setting height to 0.

Curve Editing:

• Construction Tree is now extended to curve point editing.
• Real-time adjustment of curve tangency and curvature at any given point. Any curvature radius can be set.
• Silhouette. Extracts the silhouette curves from a set of NURBS surfaces given a direction and a viewpoint. Silhouette curves can be created by parallel or perspective projections.
• Section. Extracts any number of sections from a a set of NURBS surfaces along a specified direction. Distance between sections can be optionally specified.
• Un-edit. Allows to remove any editing from the selected points of the curve independently from any other successive modification of the curve.
• UN-edit all. Allows to remove any editing to selected curves.

Deformations:

• SurfDrape. Drapes a NURBS surface over another surface.
• DynaMatrix. Dynamic matrix copy with Construction Tree.
• DynaStep. Dynamic step copy with Construction Tree.

Transformations:

• Align to axis. Aligns a set of objects along X, Y, or Z directions with spacing options.
• Align to curve. Aligns a set of objects along a curve with spacing options.

Polygonal Modeling:

• Smooth. Applies a smoothing filtering on a polygonal object. Very useful for 3D scanner data processing.
• Edge welding. Merges coincident edges.
• It is now possible to calculate the volume also of polygonal objects.

Analysis:

• Tolerance check. Detects any gaps between surface patches. Thanks to the Construction Tree, tolerance can be adjusted to make the model "water tight".
• Tools for evaluating draft angles of mold designs.
• Interactive curvature display. Interactive visualization of surface curvature while editing. The following methods: mean curvature, gaussian curvature, absolute curvature.
• Interactive reflection lines display. Allows to analyze surface smoothness and curvature by using zebra stripes.
• Interactive environment mapping display. Allows to analyze the surface curvature by using environment mapping.

Reverse Engineering:

• Minolta Vivid 3D scanner front-end. Remotely controls (via SCSI interface) Minolta Vivid 3D scanner. Data can be imported as a point cloud or a polygonal object together with a camera image bitmap and a range image bitmap of the acquired model.
• Cloud from PointMesh. Creates a specified number of point clouds lying on parallel planes from a given point cloud. This command can be useful to simplify a point cloud derived from 3d scanning. Beside section planes direction, the user can specify either the number of planes or the distance between planes.

Texture Mapping:

• Interactive transformations (translation, rotation, and scale) of textures and materials in the views.

Rendering:

• Enhanced analytical anti-aliasing, while using minimal processing time and resources.
• Highly realistic simulation of a wide range of wood surfaces, for ease of visualizing furniture, doors, cabinets, and even parquet floors.
• Anisotropic reflectance shader for woven materials, to produce physically based simulations of the anisotropic reflectance properties of woven textiles and materials, such as satin.
• Multi-layer paints, to simulate the multiple highlight and color shift effects of multi-layer paints used in the automotive industry. Designers can specify the composition of each paint layer to simulate a wide range of paints and finishes, including metallic. Expanded physically accurate lighting range.

New Plugins:

• RenderMan into the solidThinking 3D environment.
• SolidWorks plug-in for importing/exporting solidThinking scene files from/to SolidWorks.
• Various IGES I/O enhancements.

There are more new features. To read all about them go to Gestel's solidThinking website.

US price for this professional CAID software for the Mac/Win is $2,495. A functioning downloadable demo is available for taking solidThinking 4.0 for a test drive.