IntelliCAD World Meeting – Day 2 Afternoon Sessions

The first session after lunch was a presentation by Redway3D, a french company that offers a real-time 2D/3D graphics visualization software with photo-realistic rendering extensions. Redway3D was founded by CTO Renaud Deparis, who was a 3D Visualization Manager at Dassault Systemes and designer of the graphical component for CATIA V5.

It is a known fact that the AutoCAD graphics system is far superior that that curently employed by IntelliCAD. Open a fairly large DWG file in IntelliCAD and you will notice the severe drop in perfromance. The ITC is now exploring solutions to help eliminate this problem.

Some history. A year ago, the ODA and Tech Soft 3D annnounced 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 happenned the ITC is now looking at other options. One option is Redway3D and Lionel Schmitt, the CEO of Redway3D, is here to showcase his technology and introduce a royalty-free business model that his company could offer to ITC members.

First the CTO showed us what his Redway3D engine can do. And I must tell you it can do a lot. He 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 the performance was simply mind blowing.

So here is the deal about the royalty-free business model. If the ITC chooses to use the Redway3D engine, it would cost each member [snip] (Upon request from Redway I have removed the financial information of the deal). Cedric Desbordes, the Chairman of the ITC, pointed out to the ITC members that if they were complaining that IntelliCAD was slower than AutoCAD, now they had a chance to make it faster. I am curious to see where this is headed.

The ITC has already started integrating the Redway3D engine into IntelliCAD 7. A couple of Russian ITC programmers in the audience showed me a huge car model containing 100,000 triangles loaded into IntelliCAD and being rotated, zoomed and panned around very smoothly. I will be posting a few images and videos later on IntelliCAD.net.

The next session was a presentation by DP Tech given by Cedric Desbordes on their Project Management solution called Iplus Concept. The solution consists of plug-ins for IntelliCAD, AutoCAD, Word and Excel that synchronize data from the user’s local computer and a web server. Drawing files are automatically named and versioned and title blocks automatically updated. If you have an outdated drawing file, the plug-in downloads the latest version from the server and later publishes it back to share the file with others. Linked drawings can be grouped, quite similar to assemblies. The server side is equipped with a rights management system which ensures that the right people get access to the right information. There is also an online comparison tool whereby a project manager can open two files in two windows and see the differences between the two in a third window.

The last open session of the day and of the World Meeting was a customer testimonial by Charalampos Kovras from Elxis, 4M customer who used the 4M IntelliCAD verticals to build the some of the stuctures for the 2004 Athens Olympics. As a sample case study we were shown how Elxis used FineHVAC for Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning design the International Broadcasting Center for the Games.

Tommorow is the last day of the IntelliCAD World Meeting and is meant only for ITC members. I have meetings with a few ITC members this evening and tommorow morning and leave in the afternoon back to India. That’s if a Greek cab driver does not get me killed on the way to the airport.