Imagine that you have no mouse.  Your thought processes, not your hands or fingers, drive the product design process.  It's a closed loop between your intuition and your CAD software.
 

We're not there yet.  But we're getting closer, thanks to the much-anticipated enhancements in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0.  With Pro/E Wildfire 2.0, your life is simpler.  You need fewer clicks on shorter menus to get things done.  Your work goes faster, your development costs drop, and your designs get to production quickly.

How is this possible?  Check out the new features in design, simulation analysis, and manufacturing, and find out.

Design: Simpler is better.  For design engineers, the focus is on greater simplicity of use.

Top-down design is improved by adding associativity to features created by sketched datum curves, and by adding support for multiple undo/redo commands for all operations on features and drawings.  This means your CAD operations are more intuitive, allowing you to make changes more easily and follow them more closely. Ultimately, this gives you the freedom to experiment with new designs -- and, of course, removes some of the burden of concentrating on the tool itself.

To reduce mouse clicks, the new user interface eliminates the traditional menu manager for some common detailing activities and, in general, employs more intuitive tools and dashboards.  For instance, you can quickly place views in a drawing and in a single dialog box, modify all the attributes associated with the view. While changing the view, you can apply the settings immediately before exiting to ensure the view is defined as expected.

Improvements in design tools further help remove complexity and extra mouse clicks from numerous operations.  You can now pattern features around any axis, in any direction, without having to select any dimensions from the original feature.

Also, round features are more sophisticated with this release, making it possible to create rounds on complex geometry and ensure they can be machined easily.  This improves your design-for-manufacturing capabilities, and eliminates the time that might be wasted in re-designing a part at the manufacturing engineer’s request.

Simulation: Speed, power, and usability.  The numerous improvements in Pro/ENGINEER Structural and Thermal Simulation will have a big impact on your work.  They include:

Usability and performance - User interface enhancements for Simulation include new top-level menus (no more cascading menus), a new search tool, improved selection, and an automated workflow that smoothes and speeds the transition between simulation and modeling.  Also, simulation modeling information is now displayed in HTML, making it easier to include in documents and reports. The result of all this: you'll spend less time jumping from tool to tool, and application to application.

New functionality - The addition of bolt fasteners, mirror symmetry, and the ability to apply loads from MDO directly to your structural model, now make modeling easier and more powerful.

Meshing – New features include display enhancements, performance improvements, higher success rates for AutoGEM meshing, and a new AutoGEM control that lets you ignore small features on large models, such as forgings and castings.  Also, users of FEM mode will benefit from the new FEM tetra mesher that is now fully integrated along with other enhancements such as automatic proximity and curvature-based refinement.

Results - The biggest news in Results is the ability to define results windows from templates, thus saving you time, and improving your intuition-to-design connection.  Other improvements include the ability to display loads and constraints in the results window. Also, results are now more informative, allowing additional modeling entities to be displayed in results windows. And dynamic viewing performance is improved by more than 50 percent, and memory usage is reduced by more than 10 percent. Lastly, results reporting enhancements add substantially to the HTML capabilities first presented in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire Mechanica 1.0.

A new look for NC processing.  The most profound upgrade in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0 goes to NC processing, representing the greatest makeover for NC in the last 10 years.

Leading the way is a new, XML-based user interface called the Manufacturing Process Manager.  This interface packs many operations into a very clean, intuitive presentation.  Among other things, it lets you create NC paths from scratch or from an XML template, allowing you to modify steps individually or all together, and easily re-order, merge, optimize, document, and simulate toolpaths.

Combined with the introduction of start parts for manufacturing, and new direct manipulation capabilities on the manufacturing model tree (i.e. play path and submit job), this new interface improves your productivity, letting you focus on the best process for machining parts, rather than on the control software.

In mold making, Pro/E Wildfire 2.0 adds substantially new functionality.  This includes a new finishing toolpath, based on slope machining, that contributes to your shop's high-speed machining strategy and minimizes programming time.  Other examples include direct machining of STL data as well as combined facet, solid, and surfaces data, allowing your shop to go directly from concept to prototype.

The new NC software also improves production machining with support for multi-tip tools and special attachments, such as right angle heads. 

Coming full circle.   For now, these enhancements promise to help you, and your company, excel in product design and development by giving you more ways to be creative and ultimately, successful.  The bottom line is whether you're a design or manufacturing engineer, Pro/E Wildfire 2.0 has brought you a few steps closer to relying solely on your instinct and intuition by removing common design obstacles you’ve become accustomed to.

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