Solid thinking 8.0 Solid thinking inspired
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solidThinking is the industrial design/styling software that is redefining the way design concepts are created and evaluated. It accelerates the concept development process, bringing ideas to life quickly, dramatically and cost-effectively. Brothers Alex and Mario Mazzardo started the solidThinking project in 1991. Since then, solidThinking has grown quietly to become the dominant tool-of-choice for Italian design firms and industrial designers. Its popularity continues to grow worldwide because of solidThinking’s benchmark features that free designers from the limitations of traditional software, enables them more creative time to design and provides an enhanced user experience. With solidThinking, designers easily can try out many alternative sketches and versions of their creations, then quickly and cost-effectively produce photo realistic 3D renderings of their selected designs in striking environments to visualize products and gauge feedback about aesthetics, material usage, emotional impact, etc. Thousands of design professionals currently use solidThinking to create some of the world’s most admired furniture, electronic devices, automobiles, lighting, shoes, jewelry, timepieces, sports equipment, yachts, consumer packaging and other products.
usage
explore, invent, invent present •
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From your sketches to the final surfaces, solidThinking is a comprehensive NURBSbased 3D modeling and rendering environment for Windows and Mac that delivers all the necessary tools for the creation of high-quality, manufacturable models and the power to render them with unsurpassed photorealism. Based on our industry-leading ConstructionTreeTM technology, the modeling process in solidThinking grants you the greatest freedom to experiment with shapes and innovate. solidThinking lets you work in an intuitive and comfortable manner, allowing you to create complex scenes in the fastest way possible. The name of our product itself expresses our aim: designing a tool for you to give shape to your ideas quickly and easily.
matchless NURBS power in a complete modeling environment •
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State-of-the-art NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) modeling and an embedded construction history make solidThinking an unrivaled tool for designers and graphics professionals. The NURBS geometry-definition methods offer the greatest flexibility and precision. NURBS are capable of representing any desired shape, whether analytic or freeform. Algorithms are extremely fast and stable. solidThinking offers a complete set of surface and solid-creation tools, including curves networks, multisweep and railsweep, n-sided patching, blending, fillets, surface intersections in history, automatic boolean operations, interactive trimming of surfaces and solids, trim conversions, rebuilding of curves and surfaces, and many others. The round command allows you to create constant or variable radius fillets, with the construction history to handle even the most complex designs.
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the ConstructionTreeTM: change your design as rapidly as you change your mind The ConstructionTree, one of the most advanced construction-history features available today, is a fundamental structure of solidThinking. It allows you to adjust parameters at any time during the modeling process. When a parameter changes, all the actions down the tree are notified and re-evaluated, propagating the change along the tree without limiting the number of actions or objects involved. solidThinking's ConstructionTree gives you realtime updates when you modify parameters, curves or surfaces. You can freely manipulate your models, experiment with new shapes, and easily evaluate design alternatives . With solidThinking's ConstructionTree, you can switch freely between parameter-editing and local control-points-editing without having to cut the construction history of the model. solidThinking never forgets the steps involved in construction - the entire tree is saved within the file and is accessible at any time. You can browse a graphic representation of the ConstructionTree to identify and select source objects and actions. As shown in the following images, you can replace source objects at will with immediate reconstruction.
comprehensive curve creation •
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solidThinking offers the most complete NURBS curve toolset, with parametric controls for all curves, including seamless support for high order (2-7) curves, weighting, analytic circles and arcs, and interactive "comb plot" curve analysis. Build curves from points using freeform NURBS, continuity-controlled MetaCurves, and multientity curve objects. With solidThinking's advanced curve editing, you can specify position, tangent direction, curve magnitude and curvature radius at any point on a curve, interactively or by numeric input.
surfaces and solids •
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The seamless integration of solid modeling tools and technology into a Class-A surfacing suite further distinguishes solidThinking. Creating and manipulating solids in solidThinking is as natural as working with all other NURBS surfaces and curves, with the added advantage of pointlevel editing and constant construction history maintenance. Showing the true range of unique and powerful tools in solidThinking, the Make Manifold tool seamlessly bridges the gap between a high-end surface modeler and advanced solids creation. The Shelling command allows you to create a shell and define its thickness by just selecting the faces that need to be removed. Wall thickness can be easily changed in the Modeling Tool panel and includes full support for positive or negative offsets. The Solid offset command allows you to offset or inset a solid on all or a few of its faces. With robust options for automatically rounding edges to maintain offset distances, and precise control of solid enclosure tolerances, the Solid Offset provides yet another advanced solid modeling tool to insure easy tooling, molding and manufacturing across a range of design requirements.
intuitive scene organization and management •
Whatever the complexity or simplicity of a project file in solidThinking, the hierarchical browser system keeps track of everything. Drag-and-drop simplicity sets the standard for scene organization, and the World Browser supports this intuitive method of organizing for objects, layers, and groups. The ConstructionTree graph illustrates the flow of creation for every object, and allows for easy subselections of source objects and actions with OpenGL "ghosting" to show manipulations to hidden objects.
analyze and improve the quality of your design •
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solidThinking includes a full suite of advanced analysis tools to calculate area, volume, length, and curvature, as well as a real-time, shaded surface analysis display system. Surface curvature display, reflection lines and environment mapping can be used to visually analyze smoothness, curvature and other important properties of your models while you edit them. The Curvature Plot command displays a white graph attached to curves showing how the curvature varies. The Tolerance Check modeling tool detects any gaps between surface patches. It checks point-to-point possible openings, non-parallelism among tangent plans, and differences of curvatures. Thanks to the ConstructionTree, tolerance can be adjusted to make the model "water tight" at any point.
access to industryindustry-leading rendering techniques •
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Once you've created your models, you can take advantage of solidThinking's comprehensive rendering system. It integrates industry-leading rendering techniques, including wireframe, hidden-line, flat, Gouraud and Phong shaded, scanline, ray-tracing and hybrid rendering, for the integration of radiosity with ray-tracing. Sketch rendering allows you to make compelling stylized presentations, from artistic representations to product illustrations used for printed catalogues. Among the many sketch rendering styles available are cartoon, color wash, pencil, ink, paint effects and more. Feature-following anti-aliasing (FFAA) brilliantly performs extra anti-aliasing around features in the image. Adding image postprocessing effects, such as lens flares and depth of field, is effortless.
global illumination and advanced materials •
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Global illumination combines the final gather technique with hybrid radiosity for calculating indirect illumination, enabling accurate lighting simulation and increased realism at maximum speed. HDRI (High Dynamic Range Image) can be used for image-based lighting to create more realistic images. With shaded rendering methods, the appearance of an object is derived from the combination of independent components, called shaders, which define color, reflectance, transparency, displacement and other material properties. This model provides a highly flexible and versatile environment for representing even the most complex properties.
animation and thirdthird-party renderers •
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Designers can build and render animations directly within solidThinking. An easy-to-use, yet powerful, key-framing animation technique is available to create animated presentations of products or show how a product can be assembled. solidThinking's open architecture supports third-party commercial rendering systems - including Maxwell Render and PhotoRealistic RenderMan - providing seamless integration to deployed or preferred rendering applications.
associative dimensioning and plotting •
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solidThinking offers 2D and 3D automated dimensioning of horizontal or vertical aligned linear dimensions, arcs and circle radii, curvature radii of NURBS curves at any given point, diameters, edges and angular dimensions. A Leader command enables the rapid creation of leaders. The power of Dynamic Associative Dimensioning is realized when a revision to a drawing is required or when a design changes. Using Associative Dimensioning on your model, you can edit your entities and have the dimensioning change as well - in real time.
efficient data exchange and CAD collaboration •
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Continuously updated import/export plug-ins include IGES, STEP, VDA/FS, DXF, DWG, 3DS, 3DStudio Max, Lightwave, Maya, RIB, SolidWorks, STL, VET, VRML and many others. solidThinking's Plug-Ins Development Kit (PDK) contains documentation for developers and users that want to create their own modeling tools and rendering plugins. Included in the PDK are code samples that serve as a reference guide for your programming.
discover, interpret, innovate •
A breakthrough in digital product development, solidThinking Inspired adds new computational capabilities to solidThinking's traditional capabilities NURBS-based surface and solid modeling, best-in-class ConstructionTreeTM technology, and fast and high-quality photorealistic real-time rendering - including the new morphogenesis form generation technology, which allows product designers and architects to explore virtually countless forms and shapes that would be created by nature.
nature inspires design •
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Designers have always drawn inspiration from nature, particularly from biological forms. These forms tend to be aesthetically interesting, efficient and highly functional, because they are the product of environmental conditions. Bones are remarkable examples of nature's ability to create structure in response to environmental stimuli. In fact, the micro- and macro-level morphology of a bone are the direct results of the dominant forces that the bone experiences over time. Research into the mathematical modeling of bone growth has allowed scientists to develop algorithms that are capable of generating shapes much the same as bone tissue does in response to applied forces. The shapes or forms produced by these algorithms can be used to design efficient and lightweight structures in a wide variety of applications, including aircraft, ground vehicles, medical implants, buildings, electronics and even toys. Until now, this technology has not been made available in a way that is convenient and integral to the ideation phase of product design and architecture. solidThinking Inspired, however, draws on nature's patterns to help initiate the design process.
morphogenesis: computational inspiration for product designers and architects •
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Drawing on the principles of biomimicry, solidThinking Inspired mimics processes and physical laws in nature to help designers and architects generate forms and structures in response to environmental conditions, and leverage the results to stimulate their designs. Users "seed" the morphogenesis algorithm by creating a 3D solid model of the outer boundary of the object to be designed. This boundary volume is known as a design space. The form that emerges from the morphogenesis algorithm will be contained within the design space.
define the environment •
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Working within a visually simple and inviting environment, a designer can learn to use the new tools in a few minutes thanks to large literal icons. Mini contextual toolbars and tactile 3D gadgets provide ready access to all of a tool's controls with minimal mouse travel. Thoughtfully worded tips guide the designer when help is needed. After choosing the type of material from which the object will be made, selecting from a wide range of basic solid substances, such as metals, plastics, glass, ceramics, cements, etc., the user specifies the dominant supports, forces and other constraints to which the object is subjected in its environment. Supports are defined as walls, clamps, pins, the ground, etc., that hold an object from moving in a particular way. A force is a push or pull in a particular direction at some point on the object. A torque is a twisting force applied to the object. Pressures can also be applied to create the effect of distributed forces, like air or water pressure. For large objects like buildings and bridges that must support their own weight, the effect of gravity also can be applied.
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Beyond supports and forces, you can engage several additional controls to govern the overall characteristics of the form to be generated. For example, symmetry planes can be defined within a design space to specify that the resulting form should be symmetrical about those planes. Cyclic repetition can be used to generate repetitive features, like those of a starfish, a propeller or a spoked wheel, by specifying an axis and the number of repetitions desired. A parting direction can be used to specify that the form generated must be molded and therefore cannot contain voids or negative draft angles that would cause locking when the halves of the mold are separated. In addition to the minimum thickness of a structural form, it is possible to specify the fraction of the total design space that the algorithm should use when generating a form. Smaller fractions of the design space can be requested, resulting in more slender features. Requesting higher fractions of the design space results in thicker, heavier features. Cross sectioning tools and X-ray visuals are other valuable tools for seeing into the organic shapes
run morphogenesis •
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After defining environments around the models, the user executes the morphogenesis form-generation technology to grow efficient shapes in response to various environments and controls. Results from the generated forms can be interpreted as loosely or literally as desired.
be inspired •
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Users can then formalize their design and further style it using solidThinking's powerful modeling and visualization tools. Through a highly exploratory ideation process, designed to generate as many different conceptual approaches to a problem as possible, morphogenesis formgeneration technology ultimately acts as a complementary idea generator and source of computational inspiration for designers and architects. By using solidThinking Inspired to put nature to work for you, you will be able to discover forms that are: Aesthetically interesting, unique, often unexpected Well-adapted to their intended structural function Efficient, because they economize the use of material Conducive to manufacturing processes like extrusion, casting, and stamping Less likely to be radically changed by downstream engineering
solidThinking Key Features • BEST-IN-CLASS CONSTRUCTION HISTORY • ADVANCED NURBS MODELING • POLYGONAL MODELING&SUBDIVISION SURFACE • ANALYSIS AND REAL-TIME EVALUATION • REVERSE ENGINEERING • DIMENSIONING&DRAWING • PHOTO REALISTIC RENDERING
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REAL-TIME RENDERING SKETCH(ARTISTIC)RENDERING THIRD-PARTY RENDERERS ANIMATION QICKTIME VR MOVIES OUTPUT WEB AUTHORING ENVIRONMENT • DATA EXCHANGE • PLUG-INS DEVELOPMENT TOOLS • MORPHOGENESIS FORM GENERATION
interface
perspective
Build a box
shaded
Launch to inspired
Inspired openned
Create supports
Create different kinds of controls
Adjust data we need
Got the result
Adjust data able for different result