NX Design Introduction
Deliver world-class solutions with NX.
Why NX as a Technology Platform?
- NX is built on the most modern architecture of any major CAD/CAM/CAE solution. Every NX release is customer deployment ready.
- NX is an open solution that “plugs and plays” with your existing IT systems.
- NX enables you to use data from previous NX and Unigraphics releases in the current release
- Goes back to the first Unigraphics release (circa 1984)
Breaking Down the Barriers to Innovation
NX is the next generation design platform that removes barriers to innovation, helping you define shapes the way nature does. Seamlessly combining multiple disciplines, NX enables more iterations by both experts and non-experts, and utilizes the latest manufacturing methods to ensure you recognize the value digitalization and deliver the best designs to market faster.
You need a single platform that contains all the tools to break down the barriers between disciplines. NX allows all of your engineers and designers to collaborate and share information across the traditional barriers that exist in a single discipline solution.
The NX platform allows your enterprise a complete solution that takes advantage of the data without having to re-master the data in another system. NX takes your innovation to the next level by removing barriers.
Let’s dive into our Most Productive Modeling Environment and Generative Design & Integrated Validation pillars and review the latest enhancements.
Market Trends
- Digital Twin accelerates time to market of quality products
- Collaborative Design enables simultaneous design across the globe
- Digital Thread ties all the processes together
- Reuse saves time, cuts complexity and ensures quality
- Increase of intelligent, connected products providing instantaneous feedback for a closed loop system
NX Design Strengths
Design more efficiently with NX than any competitive software. Some of the perks of NX are an integrated toolset, synchronous technology, leadership, product stability, and design versatility.
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Integrated toolset – “It was the only alternative where we did not have to buy additional plug-ins or third party products to fulfill the demands”
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Synchronous Technology – “For editing imported or old models and for CAE pre-processing”
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Leadership in Generative Design, Convergent Modeling TM, and Design for Additive Manufacturing
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Product Stability – “Not a single corruption through 100s of major design changes”
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Design Versatility – “You can work in a more innovative way, combining the capabilities of Alias, SolidWorks, and Space Claim in a single tool”
Worlds Most Robust Modeler
- Selection Intent incorporates design intent and allows for robust updates
- Parasolid – Boolean, Blends enhanced with 1000s of customer use cases
- Dedicated Best-in-Class Quality Assurance Team
Selection Intent
Selection Intent allows for optimized and associative collecting of entities following a recipe (Ex: tangency, face edges, feature curves)
- Supports curve, face, edge, vertex, and body selection
- Selection Intent rules are part of a feature’s creation parameters
- Enabled for all modeling commands that require edge, face, body, or curve inputs
Parasolid – Worlds Best Modeling Kernel
Parasolid has 4,000,000 end-users doing heavy-duty model creation and editing each day—that is, using Parasolid-based applications from companies such as SoldWorks, Onshape, Vero, Missler, Vectorworks, Bentley, Fujitsu and, of course, Siemens PLM (NX, Solid Edge, Tecnomatix, SimCenter). It is the world’s leading, production-proven, 3D geometric modeling kernel leverage by over 100 different software vendors and across multiple industries.
- Interoperability and Compatibility – over four million users, Parasolid is the most widely used CAD component in the world
- Flexibility – Parasolid supports analytic, NURBS and facet geometry
- Open – Parasolid is an open ISO standard with 45% of today’s 3D product models stored in Parasolid XT file format
Quality Assurance
The NX Quality Team use the most advanced techniques for enhancement and regression testing to ensuring quality with each release.
- Automated testing ensures issues are caught early to prevent regressions
- Interactive end user workflow testing ensures the desired end user experience
- Multiple layers of testing guarantees enhancements meet requirements and maintain overall quality
- Support various customer test events for early product validation
- Use Root Cause Analysis and pro-actively identify quality improvement initiatives
Flexibility/Versatility
- Surface/Solid – Best-in-Class surfacing tools integrated within a single design environment.
- Convergent Modeling – Enables Facets and B-Rep modeling in a single part
- Subdivision Modeling – Intuitive push-pull methods of defining shapes
- Synchronous Modeling –Simple to use direct editing tools regardless of source and feature history
Surface/Solid Modeling Integration
NX offers the Best-in-Class surfacing tools integrated within a single design environment. Shape Studio tools enable the rapid creation and analysis of designs.
- Built-in surface / solid integration
- Advanced surfacing tools that support up to G3 connections
- No 3rd party application for high-order surfacing
- Surfacing tools support desired modeling techniques
- Surface based, curve based, manufacturing based solid trim/patch, etc.
Convergent ModelingTM Technology
Modeling environment that enables designers to directly manipulate facet bodies and combine facet and B-rep geometry
- Freedom to model with classic b-rep or facet models, or a combination of the two
- Unified set of modeling functions for facet models and classic b-reps
- Work directly with scanned data, eliminating the need to reverse engineer designs
- Quickly optimize and prepare parts for 3D printing
NX Realize Shape
Develop complex shapes quickly with integrated freeform & subdivision modeling
- Intuitive freeform method of creating surfaces using push-pull actions
- Quickly develop produce high-quality, complex shapes in a fraction of the time compared to traditional methods
- High quality results for full downstream reuse without data conversion
Synchronous Modeling
Synchronous Technology is a collection of simple, direct pull/push tools for editing and creating both 2D and 3D geometry
- Create and edit models without long replay times
- Easy and reliable geometry editing regardless of creation approach
- Increasing productivity by reusing more geometry
- Make rapid design changes on imported parts
- Modify a model without knowing creation details for downstream processes like simulation and manufacturing
Demos
Synchronous Technology 2D Demo:
Synchronous Technology 3D Demo:
Collaborative Design within Assembly Context
Product design require management of the relationships between components. NX offers tools to simplify the creation, editing of inter-part relationships.
- Product Interfaces defines geometry that other components can reference
- WAVE Geometry Linking associatively copies geometry between components
- WAVE tools simplifies the process of creating and editing inter-part relationships
- Relations Browser, Sync Links
- Replacement Assistant
Product Interfaces
Clearly communicating design intent through published interfaces to ensure the correct geometry and expressions are being referenced.
- Product Interfaces define what data is appropriate for inter-part referencing
- Embedded design rules ensures the correct data is being referenced
- Interfaces can be edited and remapped at the source enabling design changes to be propagated downstream references
Interpart Modeling
WAVE enables interpart relationships to be created, edited and robustly updated.
- Geometry and Expressions can be associatively copied between components
- Interpart relationships can be automatically created during feature creation
- WAVE Interface Linker simplifies creating WAVE links by selecting from a list of published elements
- Synchronize Links enables out of date interpart links to be viewed and updated in a single interface
- Status information of WAVE features indicate when relationships need to be updated or repaired
Interpart Modeling Management Tools
Managing interpart relationships enable designers to understand and manage the impact of design changes
- Interpart relationships are displayed and managed in an intuitive graphical, user interface
- Design change are managed and propagated when desired
- Sync Links simplifies the process of propagating design changes enabling all out of date interpart links to be remapped and updated in one dialog
Remapping
Remapping downstream dependent geometry ensures robust updates
- These tools search replacement geometry for matching candidates
- It offers tremendous flexibility including the ability to revise feature selection rules on edit
- View synchronization simplifies mapping of geometry
- Display emphasis simplifies remapping by emphasizing what geometry requires remapping
- Objects with downstream dependencies are identified enabling efficient remapping of only essential objects
Demo
Assembly Context Design with AWPC:
Design Reuse
Design reuse is the key to achieving engineering targets … delivering the right product, on schedule and at cost.
- Copy / Paste – quickly reuse design features
- User Defined Feature – define and manage standard design features
- Geolus – 3D Shape/Attribute based search engine
- Product Template Studio – define and manage reusable assemblies
Copy-Paste
The Copy-Paste enables sketches and features to be easily reused and adapted to a new design context.
- Reuse of 2D geometry (sketch features or a portion of a sketch) is done via copy-paste or saved in a 2D Section Library
- Robust feature reuse is achieved by clearly presenting feature references for remapping
- Geometrically similar feature references are automatically mapped during Paste making feature reuse simple and robust
User Defined Features
User Defined Features enable customized design features to be created and managed for efficient reuse.
- The UDF wizard is used to define the user interface, user-prompts and selection rules
- User Defined Features are managed in libraries enabling designers to search and filter for the correct design features
- Product and manufacturing rules are embedded to ensure designs meet requirements
Template Design
Product Template Studio is a module for creating and packaging Parts or Assemblies for reuse. PTS users report +80% gains in productivity over just reusing traditional parametric models.
- Templates can be created with pre-packaged with CAE, PMI, Kinematics, or Drafting data to eliminate the repetitive building of analyses, animations, and drawings.
- Consistency and reliability increases as the potential for manual error is reduced.
- Simpler than ever to package a broader spectrum of designs for reuse using the codeless Product Template Studio tools.
Demo
Product Template Studio:
Modular Design
Complex designs can be simplified by breaking them up into modules based on function or region. Part features are organized within isolated groups and can be distributed to multiple designers and worked on concurrently.
Part Modules enables 2 key capabilities:
- Local Edit / Update enables designers to effectively work with parts with 1000s of features
- Team Design enables multiple designers to design complex parts concurrently
Part Modules – Modular Design
Part Modules enables features to organized into a hierarchal tree structure and preserve modularity between design elements
- Organizing features improves understanding of the design construction and simplifies model editing
- Interfaces ensures isolation and modularity
- Local Edit / Update enables users to perform multiple edits and propagate updates when desired
- Modules are easy to reuse and replace
- Edit features in context of the final model
Part Modules – Team Design
Part Modules enables designers to share and work on designs concurrently
- Complex designs are broken into isolated, self-contained functional elements that evolve independently
- Designers collaborate by publishing their work for others to visualize and reference
- Design work can be merged together into a single part file simplifying data management
- Reusing modules improves productivity and quality
Strengthening the Core
Building on our core foundation and architecture.
- Every release, the NX development team implements 1000s of customer enhancement requests 1000s of new features/enhancements delivered in each release
- There are more new product extensions than ever before
- There has been a major focus on customer deployment
- We are continually investing and enhancing the existing, core capabilities of NX such as part modeling, sketching, assembly modeling, rendering & visualization and industry specific applications such as ship building, tooling etc.
- There has been a large investment in the upcoming release on architecture and assembly load process improving the assembly load performance to better support large assembly workflows in NX
Summary of Benefits
- Increase in 3D data usage for design reviews
- Concentration on industry based workflows not just picks and clicks
- Enables a multiple person approach to assembly models and seamless switching between assembly components
- Edit models regardless of where they come from with Synchronous Technology
- Design Automation and Reuse with Product Template Studio
