ODA World Conference – The Agenda

The main purpose of the ODA World Conference in Leiden, Holland, this April, is to highlight the ODA Software Platform and the technologies of its partner organizations. Take a look at the Conference agenda. One of the presentations caught my attention – the one by Jim Thorpe from Siemens PLM Software about their “D-Cubed 2D Dimensional Constraint Manager” or DCM.

One of the major enhancements in AutoCAD 2010 has been the geometric and parametric constraints, which I believe is not Autodesk’s invention. It appears that they licensed the D-Cubed 2D DCM from Siemens. No, I do not have inside information about this. I simply observed the copyright notices on the AutoCAD 2009 and 2010 about boxes and noticed that the following copyright notice has been added in 2010:

“D-Cubed 2D DCM © Copyright 2008 Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software III (GB) Ltd.”

And now Siemens is presenting at the ODA World Conference. So putting two and two together, I guess the updated DWGdirect SDK for AutoCAD 2010, when it does come out, may have the D-Cubed 2D DCM tied to it. This also means that the new IntelliCAD 7 (or maybe a later version) may have the same geometric and parametric constraint system as AutoCAD.

This seems to be quite similar to how Autodesk initially uses the 3D solid modeling kernel from ACIS and the same found its way into the present day DWGdirect SDK. In fact, a presentation titled “ACIS 3D modeling engine” by Thomas Tillman from Spatial Corporation is right after the D-Cubed 2D DCM presentation by Siemens.

Another interesting presentation that I am looking forward to is by Fabien Chauvire of Redway3D about their Redsdk, an industrial grade 2D/3D graphics toolkit. I first saw Fabien presenting the Redsdk at the IntelliCAD World Meeting in Athens last year. Here is part of what I wrote about it at that time:

“He (Fabien) opened a 2D drawing of map of South Carolina in his test application containing 1.5 million curves and 72,000 text objects. He then zoomed and panned across the drawing and you could not see any time lag. He mentioned that he was using a medium performance laptop. Next he opened a model of a car designed in CATIA V5 containing 40 million triangles. He zoomed, panned and rotated and the performance was simply mind blowing.”

Fabien will demonstrate a successful DWG integration of his Redsdk. I am not quite sure what that means, although I have a good idea. In Athens an ITC programmer showed me a build of the new IntelliCAD 7 running the Redsdk, effortlessly navigating around a 3D model of a car having 100,000 triangles. I expect to see something more fascinating in Leiden.

Interestingly, earlier the same day, there is a presentation by Ron Fritz and Ken Royall from Tech Soft 3D on HOOPS, their development platform for high-performance applications. Here is something I wrote in the same post I mentioned earlier:

“A year ago, the ODA and Tech Soft 3D announced an integration between ODA’s DGNdirect libraries with the HOOPS graphics components from Tech Soft 3D. The ITC watched and waited for the ODA to extend the integration to the DWGdirect libraries, the foundation of the IntelliCAD. Since this has not yet happened the ITC is now looking at other options. One option is Redway3D.”

So this is going to be interesting. With the ODA consisting of over 2000 members, I am not surprised that these 3D graphic technology companies are interested in its members.

There are a bunch of other presentations that I also look forward to. One called “Mobile DWG” by Wilfried Graebert from Graebert Gmbh, the company that has some fantastic CAD software for the handheld devices. The keynote will be delivered by buildingSMART co-CEO Bjørn Stangeland, where he will explain what his organization does and how it can work more closely with the ODA. There will be a presentation by Mauritz Botha of IMSI/Design on using the DWGdirect database as a common platform for file import and export filters, something that I know only too well about. I first met Mauritz at COFES 2008 last year and had an interesting conversation with him over lunch.

There will also be presentation by the ODA staff, people that I have been conversing with for many years now and look forward to meeting in person.

The third day is reserved for the annual ODA board meeting. There will also be a couple of courses on building a DRX application and an introduction to DWGdirect.NET. If you want to learn how to build a DRX application but cannot make it to the conference, buy my book “OpenCAD – A Step by Step Guide to Developing a Professional CAD Application“. There is an entire chapter dedicated to developing DRX applications.

When time and technology permits I will be reporting the happenings of the ODA World Conference on this blog.