ST6 Favorites

Dan Staples delivered the ST6 new stuff in this morning’s session. He said if there was a “theme” for this year, it was geometry creation tools. This is of course good news for anyone who uses CAD professionally. There was so much to see, that I can only touch a small portion of it here and now. I’ll be sure to add more detail for some of these enhancements later on. Here is a list of some of my favorite additions:

Steering wheel grows a third leg. This is useful, since I always seemed to struggle with turning the steering wheel around. It just makes sense.

Intersect surface is essentially a mutual trim/extend up to a chain of faces from a solid or surface body or a plane. Nicely done. This was a badly needed tool, and I think exceeds what I was hoping for from it.

Redefine surface is going to be a sleeper. People may not recognize the benefits right away, but this replaces multiple native or imported faces with an ordered Bluesurf. I’ll spend more time with this later.

There were a lot of enhancements in sheet metal. You can deform across bends, do much more with deep drawn parts with the new Emboss command, and even put sheet metal features into regular parts.

Goal seeking, or optimization is now available. Sounds great More on this from other sources.

Solid Edge Mobile Viewer is now supposed to be available for Android. I’ll report back when I get that installed.

Lots of great stuff in assemblies. You can create a frame from the edges of a solid body.

It seemed like there was even more stuff in drawings that were added, and the drawings erm…. excuse me… draft…sorry, bad habits die hard. DRAFT got the most applause of anything. Especially the balloons that attach to lines. It just looks very flexible. New dimension spacing and alignment tools are also now available.Solid Edge is intent on maintaing their superiority in this area, its clear.

This release will be available soon. I’ll follow up with how soon, but it is in the final testing stages at this point. Dan Staples told me and some others over beers last night that with every release, they strive for 15% fewer bugs carrying over from the previous version. From my point of view, it’s refreshing to talk to people who can be open about things like that.