COFES-Russia Seminar – Intelligent Methods of 3D Modeling in CAD

David Levin from LEDAS today announced on his blog the names of the moderators of the working groups at the COFES-Russia seminar to be held next month in Moscow. A working group is a round table discussion where participants hold a discussion on a topic which is kicked off and moderated by a someone knowledgeable in that particular field. I have taken part in many such round tables at COFES 2008, 2009 and 2010 held in the Scottsdale Plaza Resort in Phoenix, USA. And yes, there are actually big round tables where people sit around. Some of these discussions can get quite lively and sometimes heated as well. The point is to exchange your views and experiences with others.

Working group 2 at the COFES-Russia seminar is titled “Intelligent Methods of 3D Modeling in CAD” and is going to be moderated by yours truly. This working group is basically about Direct Modeling. I definitely don’t consider myself an expert in Direct Modeling, quite simply because I haven’t been involved in the creation of any Direct Modeling CAD system. However, I do consider myself a proponent of Direct Modeling, and as a result, happen to have some views on the topic, which I express on this blog from time to time.

I have heard people say that geometry is a solved problem. In my opinion, nothing is further from the truth. If geometry was indeed a solved problem, then all the CAD programmers should have been working on projects that deal with PLM or some other three letter acronym. The truth is after all these decades we still find users asking for new and better ways to create and edit geometry and CAD vendors trying their best to fulfill those requests. I intend to center the working group around this basic question of whether geometry is a solved problem or not. If it is not solved, then how far are we from the solution? If it is solved, then how good is the current solution?