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The pressure is getting intense—even for you!

As more manufacturers feel the squeeze of the economy, and as businesses probe new methods to become more efficient and improve core products, industrial designers are being pressured to work more effectively. Like never before, the heat is on—not only to get to market quicker than the competition, but also to design more innovative products.

How can industrial and conceptual designers turn out more innovative products faster? In the early conceptual phase of design, this usually translates to:

  • Exploring more ideas in a shorter time
  • Improving design quality
  • Collaborating with others in the design chain earlier to ensure that the brief is achieved accurately and efficiently.

OK, I can already hear you asking how another piece of software can help you overcome these challenges when:

  • You already employ more than enough software
  • Your design teams are spread across multiple sites
  • You now need to include international clients and suppliers in the design process
  • Your CAID (Computer Aided Industrial Design) software is not flexible or fast enough to capture your brainstorming ideas.

Before we address these questions, let’s take a quick look at a typical process for conceptual design today.

A new product design usually starts with a brainstorming process to get ideas out on the table. The trick here is to not only capture all ideas rapidly, but also explore and develop them to expand the range of options available. Historically, conceptual designers have used a wide range of media and methods to capture ideas during a brainstorm session, including:

  • Rough paper sketches
  • More detailed marker rendering
  • Block models
  • 2D CAD layout
  • 3D CAD model
  • Other…

For conceptual designers, the message (i.e., the design) is more important than the medium (i.e., the tools), and up to now, the process has been working. That is, up to now.

What’s slowing things down is that very few of these media are “connected,” As a result, it’s not always easy to move your conceptual data from one medium to the next (a paper sketch to a digital layout; a foam model to a CAID model). In addition, if you could easily and automatically document this conceptual process, you could use it next time around. But it’s usually too laborious to document and store such a disparate set of data from a single process.

Wouldn’t it be better to have a completely integrated process that gives you all the flexibility of the tools you use today?

In the above scenario, you could use any or all of the media you need and are familiar with, yet there are no barriers to moving the concept forward. All the information is together, so it can be used and referenced at any time, by any tool. The workflow is flexible, so you can use just what you need—whenever you need it. This means you can concentrate more on designing and a lot less on moving and managing data.

This is exactly how Pro/CONCEPT™ works. Pro/CONCEPT is PTC’s new conceptual design solution enabling designers to capture, explore, and develop ideas rapidly, from brainstorm onward. Because it is an integrated sketching and modelling tool, Pro/CONCEPT lets you easily move from 2D to 3D, share ideas, and get responses from all members of the design chain. With all your familiar tools integrated into a single environment, you can sketch, create curve layouts, 3D model, and evaluate and present your new concepts—with complete flexibility.

Pro/CONCEPT capabilities include the power to:

  • Create 2D sketches
  • Retouch images/photographs
  • Create curve layouts (2D or 3D)
  • Create and edit 3D models
  • Paint directly on 3D models
  • Input data from Pro/ENGINEER®, other MCAD systems, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, etc.
  • Visualize 3D models in a photo-rendered scene
  • Transfer models to/from MCAD & collaboration

In addition to giving you a fully integrated modelling and sketching environment, Pro/CONCEPT is economical —particularly compared with many “unconnected” point solutions that offer far less functionality. And since the package includes self-paced learning tools, you have everything you need to get up to speed quickly.

An added benefit of Pro/CONCEPT is that it allows you to work with all-digital data. All your conceptual data is available on demand. And because Pro/CONCEPT is integrated with PTC’s ProductView™, it’s easy to collaborate with colleagues either at the next desk or on the next continent. Integration with Pro/ENGINEER means that conceptual design can be an integral part of the full design process.

To recap, the key features and benefits of Pro/CONCEPT are:

  • Integrated sketching and modeling that gives you the freedom to brainstorm with a full tool set.
  • Common look and feel between the sketching and modeling tools. If you are comfortable in one medium, you’ll have no difficulty moving to the other. For example, if you know how to use an airbrush, then you’ll find the sculpt brush offers similar control in applying (and removing) geometry. Or if you can warp a model, you will find very similar controls for warping an image.
  • Ability to share data with the entire project team, either by transferring your concept data into Pro/ENGINEER, or by presenting your proposals inside a web page using ProductView format files.

Pro/CONCEPT 2.0 for the Windows (NT, 2000 and XP) platform will be available in Fall 2003. PTC recently announced that it would also be ported to Mac OS X. Take a closer look at www.ptc.com/go/proconcept and you’ll see a better way to conceptual design.

Tim Harrison is product manager for conceptual and ID solutions at PTC. He can be reached by email at tim@ptc.com.

© 2003. PTC, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.PTC, Pro/CONCEPT, Pro/ENGINEER, and ProductView are trademarks or registered trademarks of PTC. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All other product or company names are property of their respective owners.