Possible later suites or packages?

[vasdrakken]

I have used everything from Vue to Maya to 3DS Max to create set extensions and build iges model data for cnc routing. I was looking through the packages and Max creates non manifold surfaces. This is fine if your are simply rendering an appropriation of the triangulation of the model data. This is worse that useless when creating step diagrams. It means what is exported has to be rebuilt in solid works or inventor or what ever package is going to create the data for the water cutting, laser cutting, or grinding stock removal process. If the parts have to be able to stand hard vacuum, they have to have two things, one a non-manifold surface, that means flat surfaces between four points. If there is a bend that is were the air applies pressure then blows out the piece of ceramic or metal. Then decompression. So a general modeling package is needed to get the silhouette of the mechanical parts. This speeds up the layout and design process. Max's lighten engine is a thing to be hold but for modeling what physical surfaces are it fails. The packages all seem to have a general lighting or primate based approximation software and a package designed to final pieces of geometry. It is like using cad for rooms to build a bridge by drawling the bridge on it side, which people have done in the past. It is a kludge at best and if we need to license a bunch of different software we may as well al carte it anyway. What we need for mechincal design is something that can give us fast line in orthograph format preferable with colors to tell us how close or far it is away from the camera, make those camera never change perspective so we can lock them to always match so when we swap views the perspective can fly or what ever but front-back, left-right, up-down view points are always to the same scale and can be selected in a hurry so I can switch to those views and scale them in a out not zooming but simply how much is in view, I know cad used to have this ability. The modeling camera needs to be a fixed zoom and always able to focus on what ever you click in the outliner so that when there is the ablity to quickly snap to point and work on that. I can do this will maya but I often times have to turn wire frame on and if max is the preferred then we may as well spell out what we all use and let autodesk focus on building what ever that tool is. When building a scene or car, or airframe, you need to be able to have the electrical parts show up only, or the control surfaces, then turn on what either of those connect to. I use may over max because most of max's interface simply is designed to edit existing assets. I know ILM used maya and rebuilt the interface for each department so when an animator sat down and logged in they saw tools that let them move control curves and not interact with the geometry. When a modeler sat down they have everything in case they had to fix something and have to follow down every piece to see what it would impact, most modellers are simply called technical artists these days, for that reason.

But in working an air frame I find that when the scene does not move a billion plus polygons load fine but separating the surfaces that are not merged but simply built as a single piece of geometry the program can not access enough memory. I am running the 64 bit version on windows 10 profession 64 bit and other programs can access more memory and thread lock less.

But in build the parts what every mechanical engineer needs is to be able to model in a view with what they are pushing and pulling verts to get the shape they need then to see what it impacts then to see everything those impact. We need different colors of wire frame for different systems be it electrical, mechanical, hydrolic, gas lines (both pressurized gas and flammable liquids and explosive liquids), and conductive and non conductive surfaces. I work in maya and have an outliner that takes up space on the screen, a hypershade, and channel view all of which are used for seventy percent of work. Most designers I know work with a high quality center monitor for the modeling space they have in the main window, and two side monitors that have things like the hypershade so they can quickly look at what colors they need to apply to parts so when looking at the wire frame and wireframe on shaded they can tell at a glance what is part of what system and if it is connected to what it needs to be. The outliner is almost always a mess as you mesh and unmesh objects changing names and hyarchy of where they are supposed to be. As a designer I tend to have to build nodes that contain geometry so that I can edit the geometry and put the modified piece back in and match it to the careful naming convetions I am using so when part 353485738945678937698 shows up as broken I can say that is not one of mine, mine would be part 3X-780-1A200350001-78 and that 3X group is eletrical the 780 series is the reactor or mother board, the 1A200350001 is port wiring harness the 2 in the second set of wires the 003 is it is wire instead of socket the 5 is a the 5 wire in sequence and 0001 is the part, which means it is supposed to be a piece of plastic coated wire of certain gauge with a Color Code 5 color code of Green - Orange Strip. This is what makes actually using the data work, so when I export all the parts to the program to be built or remodeled the parts can then be re-imported and rendered with lighting and they are the same part.

Then the boss will want to see in an environment, to see if it looks appealing. The mechanical engineer is not responsible for making it look pretty only getting the parts to work in an physical environment. Production takes the design and have the electrical engineers optimize the way they work then they pass back a new scene file that has to be imported with new names and both designs have to be compared in wire frame one above the other to see the impacts moved or changing the mass of the objects will cause. Then if there are issues it is handed to production to set new guide lines for both. The electrical engineers look at the parts they have based on mass and power requirement and optimization with a mechanical engineer who explains how the different changes impact the physical functions. Basically you eat a lot of pizza while looking at a bunch of drawling on paper because you don't have the ability to do it in any of the software packages right now. I have papers scatter all over my office to do this function. We need a way to take parts using set drive keys or such and see how swapping in different parts changes the power requirements and the weight of the parts, even in a car changing the weigh on the pistons on a brake can cause a car's wheels to go out of alignment. Which causes the driver to think something is wrong with the car but not know what. Changing the weigh or shape of the radar section can cause the nose to be too heavy when landing and have the pilot put the nose into the ground instead of the above the run way because the digital altimator tells him that his airframe is level when it leaning more but the software does not know this because some where in the design the weigh of the parts was hard coded and the radar swapped for another part that does the same job but has a different weight and shape or maybe more weight on the top verse the bottom because the lip bolting in place uses two bolts at the top and one at the bottom. But stuff like this none of the programs have a way to over view the mechanical work flow every company has to built these tools on top of one of the packages, and max is the worst for building stuff on top of. We need something that we get a scene file of what ever format that lets us over view the physical aspects of the file. Most people use vue or maya because they can handle the polygon count when trying to look at what everything in the scene file is but if autodesk is going license a design package then we really need something that is for design the over view that can store files so we can go back if their is recall and check to see if the part that was exported looks like the final design that was signed off on. I think most companies doing production would kill for something that lets them look at the model data and see that everything is were it needs to be snap down to any part at random and follow the wiring diagrams to every connecting system. Then turn on render to see what the outside looks like which is what the enduser sees.