Quick Link: Watch a demo of ProductView 9.1
ProductView MCAD Professional has now been released, and can be used with Windchill PDMLink or as a standalone viewer. So far, PTC demonstrations have focused on the ability of ProductView MCAD Professional to handle large data sets. Many demos show several Boeing 777 planes on the screen at one time, or complete oil rigs, or locomotives with hundreds of thousands of piece parts—spinning, dynamic sectioning, etc—all on an old Pentium III laptop!
Yes, this is impressive, but there are many of us that do not work with planes, trains or automobiles on a daily basis. For those of us with smaller data sets, ProductView MCAD Professional still brings some very nice functions to the table compared to ProductView Standard 9.0. Let’s take a quick look at a few of these.
THE LITTLE THINGS
Sometimes it is the little, lesser known enhancements that will make a big difference with ease of use.
-
Capped Sectioning: With ProductView MCAD Professional you now have the option to “cap” the ends of a section through a part or assembly. There are several cosmetic attributes of the cap that you can control, such as the color of the cap, shown in red below. The cap will be displayed when the section is dynamically dragged through the model. (Figure 1)
Figure 1: A “quarter cut” cross section with capped ends
Figure 2
-
Filters: With ProductView MCAD Professional the filter function provides an easy way to turn on and off the display of Planes, Points, Csys, Axes, Surfaces and Cosmetic features that were published into the viewable file (Figure 3). You can even turn off the solid geometry and only show the construction geometry if that suits a specific need.
Figure 3: Construction geometry filters on
-
Product Structure: Although the Product Structure (Assembly Tree) was present in ProductView Standard 9.0, it is not present in ProductView Lite or ProductView Express. This is a very useful way to navigate and manipulate assemblies and is a strong reason to upgrade from ProductView Lite to ProductView MCAD Professional. (Figure 4)
Figure 4: The ProductView MCAD Professional Interface
The Product Structure in ProductView MCAD Professional is an improvement over the Product Structure from ProductView Standard 9.0. For example, parts have blue icons, assemblies have a yellow icon, and a hidden component has a grey icon.
Figure 5: Selecting a hidden component
Figure 6
Figure 7: Measuring between planar surfaces
-
Construction Geometry: Curves, Lines and Coordinate Systems are new in ProductView MCAD Professional. All Construction Geometry types are now created using a dialog box and where you define one or more Constraints for the geometry. This is done in a manner that is comparable to Pro/ENGINEER. For example, Figure 8 shows the process of creating a plane through an axis and parallel to a planar surface. Notice the two References, an Axis and a Face, are listed in the dialog and the Parallel Constraint selected from a drop down list.
Figure 8: Create a construction plane
One other item to note pertaining to Construction Geometry is that the References selected can be edited at a later time, similar to a “redefine” or “edit definition” operation in Pro/ENGINEER. Very nice!
-
Viewing Dimensions: Dimensions can now be displayed using an easy to understand, expandable “tree”, giving you the ability to display one single dimension, dimensions for a feature or all dimensions at one time. (Figure 9)
Figure 9
-
Preset Explode: Explode States from Pro/ENGINEER can be published for easy viewing in ProductView MCAD Professional. That’s right; all of your Explode States are published!
-
Email Collaboration: From inside ProductView MCAD Professional, you can email the model to someone as a single, compressed file. When the recipient receives the email, double clicking the attachment will automatically launch ProductView Express (which is free), ProductView Lite, ProductView MCAD Professional or ProductView Standard, depending on which version of PTC’s viewing solution they are using.
-
Opening Files: Out of the box, ProductView MCAD Professional can directly open Pro/ENGINEER Parts, Assemblies and Drawings. It can also open STEP, IGES and STL files as well as 2D types such as DXF, PLT and DWG. These are some of the more common CAD file types that may come across the desk of a designer or engineer and it is useful to have one program that can be used for general purpose viewing. As a side note, there are hundreds of file types that can be opened by ProductView MCAD Professional!
There are many more cool functions in ProductView MCAD Professional that would not fit into this short, initial look at the new program. We will have to stop here.
SUMMARY
In my opinion, the clean, modern user interface and core functionality in ProductView MCAD Professional will be very popular within the Windchill PDMlink and Pro/ENGINEER user community. However, you will need to work with your Administrators to ensure your Recipe File is set to publish the extra items referred to in this article. For very large data sets, be sure to determine the impact of these settings on publishing time and file size before cranking out viewables for Terabytes of data!
Andrew Burke has been involved with PTC software (product design, system administration, user support and formal training development & delivery) for over 15 years.
If you have any questions or comments about the this article, or if you would like a few sample ProductView files to experiment with, Andy can be reached at: andrew@productview.com
Related Information:
Was this article interesting? Let us know.
