Really Big News From Dassault Systemes And Spatial – Part 4

<< Part 3

Here is a YouTube video showing what I explained in Part 3 of this series. Ignore the blue ball that keeps bouncing around. Its actually a nag which shows up due to the fact that Spatial is using a trial version of the ActiveX control that serves as a client for their Cloud application. HD is available in full screen. So you may want to click the “Full Screen” button towards the right of the YouTube bar at the bottom of the video.

At the start of the video I highlight a section of text which reads, “The SpaWeb3D modeling operations run remotely on our servers hosted in our offices in Colarado“. Some people were skeptical about the cloud demo shown by SolidWorks at SolidWorks World 2010. They thought that it was a gimmick and that the computers on stage were wired to a server running backstage. Let me say that what you see in the video happened on my computer located half way around the world in India, which I believe is pretty much the the farthest anyone can possibly be from Colarado.

First I open the die sample model and start the “Remove Faces” operation. I select the six faces that I want to remove. Note that as I pick each face a number (the face ID, I presume) is added to a list towards the bottom. That list of Face ID’s is sent across to the modeling kernel running in the Cloud. The kernel removes the faces and sends back the updated model. Or rather, just the tessellation of the model.

Next I proceed to remove a few more faces so that I end up with a sharp edge. I then start the “Blend Edges” operation, set the blend radius to 0.5 and select the sharp edge. This time just one number is added to the list, the ID of the sharp edge. That number and the blend radius is sent to the modeling kernel in the Cloud which adds the blend and send back the updated model.

Just to mess around a little I try to add an impossible blend to the model and the kernel sends back an error, basically asking me to reduce the blend radius. I redo the operation with a smaller blend radius and it succeeds.

I think I just got a technological orgasm. 😉

Part 5 >>