However, as other CAD providers added in direct modeling capabilities, that message get muddied. I agreed with them then and I agree with them now. They claimed mainstream parametric feature-based CAD was largely used for documentation, not design. Early on, the story was all about enabling non-CAD using engineers to explore, design alternatives. I’ve been briefed by Spaceclaim a number of times over the years. Offering a single application instead of two could knock down that wall and enable engineers to be far more productive in exploring designs in concept and early detailed design. But trading design iterations back and forth is enough to make any engineer falter in their efforts. That is largely an unmet need today.Ĭan those engineers use a combination of Spaceclaim and ANSYS’s workbench? Perhaps. Furthermore, there is some segment of engineers out there that don’t use parametric feature-based CAD in any way, shape or form. There’s a need for quick and easy design development and simulation of performance.

In Lifecycle Insight’s Simulation Driven Design study, over 80% of the study’s 1,000 respondents are conducting conceptual simulations that occurs prior to financial commitment to the development effort of those products. That’s not necessarily the end of the road, however. Tighter Integrations to Enable Engineers? It’s clear that theme will continue after the acquisition. It could work with other CAD application’s geometry, using direct modeling methods to clean them up. Its not their problem alone, but those providers have felt the brunt of the pain as many a casual user give up on simulation driven design because removing geometric details caused model failures. Spaceclaim addressed that problem very cleanly. For ANSYS, the difficulties in using parametric feature-based CAD to prep models for simulation has always been a problem, much as it has for other simulation software providers. Geometry preparation for simulation has been the key play in the ANSYS-Spaceclaim partnership for some time. We’ll explore both of those in this blog post. But there are also some outstanding questions in my mind. Obviously, there are some moves in this acquisition that makes perfect sense. Monica Schnitger provides a pretty good overview of what exactly is going down, with a full blown history of Spaceclaim and their partnership with ANSYS.

Spaceclaim workbench