By Ping Fu, CEO, Geomagic
Part II of the two part blog series, reprinted with permission from TCT Magazine where it was originally posted.
As a child I always loved to touch things – and when I grew up I loved anything that engaged my senses: gardening, cooking, Legos, machinery – even gauges. Maybe it was because I didn’t go to school. Chairman Mao had said we needed to be re-educated by the workers, farmers and soldiers. I spent my childhood in an abandoned field of an aeronautics campus; airplane wings became slides and scraps of metal were our toys. I learned through making radios for people, speedometers for cars and sheet metal for airplanes.
By Mary Kae Marinac, for Geomagic Sensable
If airline pilots must log hours on flight simulators annually to be certified to fly, why do surgeons only do their practice directly on people?
It’s the core question at the heart of the medical simulation movement and it’s creating an evolution in medical practices worldwide: With better technology at hand, commercial entities as well as clinical subspecialties are now rapidly creating ultra-realistic virtual environments using 3D graphics, audio and haptics so that physicians can better prepare.
By Tom Kurke, COO & President, Geomagic
An explanation
It has been a little while since my last blog on IP issues in the capture-create/modify/make ecosystem and I apologize for that. As many of you may know, Geomagic develops a wide range of software solutions to capture, modify and inspect 3D digital models of physical objects.
President Obama gave a speech in Milwaukee last Wednesday that highlighted the support needed to bring Manufacturing back to the US.
My phone rang at 3 pm yesterday and even before I picked it up, 3 text messages came in
By Karl Matthews, Vice President of Product Management, Geomagic
With the 2012 launch in full swing, it is easy to think of Geomagic from just the perspective of our software. Great though the software is, sometimes it is important to remember that the strength of our organization depends fundamentally on the people who work here. Not only do we have fantastic people, but we periodically fine tune team roles and responsibilities to enhance the level of service we provide our customers and partners...
By Kevin Scofield
Today marks the end of a long journey for me and the development team, as we get to launch the latest version of our flagship 3D reverse engineering and polygon modeling software, Geomagic Studio 2012 (note: technically, it is the thirteenth edition of the product, but for obvious reasons, we chose not to call it version 13!). After over a year of design and development, I am particularly proud to release this edition to our customers, as it contains some real noteworthy improvements, many of which are the result of hard work and long hours.
One of te overarching themes of our Beta feedback was that this new version "just feels faster". Well, that's because it is! We increased the speed of processing by employing more multi-threading, while also allowing the system to use more points and polygons. The net result is anywhere from 30% to as much as 90% improvement in processing time and capacity (actual mileage may vary). Go ahead...throw some large data at it. Let me know your opinion.
Since one of the real growth areas of 3D scanning is the long-range scanning market (i.e. Surphaser, Leica HDS, Faro Focus, etc), we focused on doing a better job of importing and filtering these large data sets. A key addition was a new Walk Through mode which lets the user "see" the data from the perspective of the scanner, and move through the scene, which makes editing that much easier. Now, you can view the data, chop out some interesting portions and make a sketch through it in CAD in a matter of minutes. Nice.
Last but not least, I ask you...no, I order you to try out the Patch tool. This is one of those "why didn't we think of this before" tools that is unique to Geomagic and is getting rave reviews from our testers. Sort of a mashup of hole filling, Rewrap and smoothing, it lets you use geometry from a similar area of the polygon mesh to fill a hole. Since a lot of objects that are scanned have repetitive features (heck, a cube has 8 corners), all you need is good scan data on one of them, and you "patch" missing areas using this new tool. Oh yeah, and it will deform the patch to fit the area perfectly. Very nice.
I hope you enjoy Geomagic Studio 2012. It represents alot of hard work, and is based, once again, primarily on feedback from our users. Now, I gotta get back to work...version 2013 already seems right around the corner!
Download a free trial of Geomagic Studio 2012 now.
By John Lockhart, Product Manager, Geomagic
Soon, I’ll be blogging about the many very cool but less-than-obvious features that will be available in Geomagic Qualify Probe 2012. But, given that most folks are just getting their first look at this new product, I want to hit the highlights and talk about some new capabilities and workflows you get to dig into when you first get your hands on this new software.
Probing Workflows - The new capabilities that we have developed for tactile probing solutions - particularly for users of portable CMMs - are so complete that we have been able to respond to our partners’ requests to publish Geomagic Qualify Probe as an entry-level probing solution with a cross-grade path to Geomagic Qualify.
When you get your first look at the Home tab in Geomagic Qualify Probe, here is a workflow you can use to hit a few of the highlights:
- Pick a part to inspect and open up its associated CAD file if you have one.
- Align the device coordinate system to the part using the new Iterative Alignment method. Iterative Alignment provides a fast and accurate alignment method that is easy to use on non-prismatic parts.
- Once you are even just roughly aligned, use ‘Quick Probe’ to quickly probe features using the automatic feature recognition based on the aligned CAD.
- Quick Probe creates the nominal along with the measured features. So, you can immediately go to Feature Base alignment or Compare Features annotations.
- Launch Real-Time Deviation to get instant CAD compensated deviation with a go/no-go window in the new digital readout.
Integrated CAD translators and PMI support – Direct CAD translation for CATIA, NX, SolidWorks, Inventor, and Creo Elements/Pro (formerly Pro/ENGINEER) are built into every copy of Geomagic Qualify Probe at no additional cost. Even better, the translators will import nominal features and GD&T from CAD.
GD&T Support – Geomagic Qualify Probe allowed us to continue to enhance our Geometric Design &Tolerance (GD&T) support with true position callouts for 2D features, concentricity, and straightness of surface…just to name a few.
Scripting Interfaces - We have exposed new scripting interfaces that provide access to point and polygon functionality as well as features. Besides automation, these interfaces provide access to properties of objects. So, you can access the properties of objects such as features you create in python code. What you can do this these interfaces is open ended and well beyond the scope of this post, but if you are interested, I encourage you to check out the new script editor which is now a new tab in the graphics window, and the documentation and examples located in the \help\platform subdirectory of the product installation.
Engineers and manufacturers interested in trying out a free trial of Geomagic Qualify Probe can pre-register here: http://geomagic.com/en/products/geomagic-qualify-probe/overview/
We hope you enjoy the latest measurement software tool from the Geomagic portfolio!!
