“Our goal was to dramatically reduce the time spent by end-users in their CAD software trying to make rapid NURBS surfaces usable,” said Marc Soucy, President of InnovMetric Software. “At the moment, competing rapid surfacing solutions create NURBS models that contain twisted patches, unusable patch layouts, and an excessive number of surfaces. Even after long hours of editing work, the continuity and smoothness of the resulting surfaces restrict their use to applications where surface quality is not important. With PolyWorks V9, we took a different approach that will enable users to easily create CAD-ready NURBS models of a wide variety of parts within minutes,” he concluded.

For very quick surfacing applications, PolyWorks offers a fully automatic surfacing method. PolyWorks proposes a novel approach based on the automatic tracking of natural curvature lines all over the input polygonal mesh. The tracked feature lines are intersected to each other and delimit the boundaries of NURBS patches. One key advantage of the PolyWorks method is its ability of self-detecting areas where it cannot do a good job. As a result, users no longer need to visually identify and delete incorrect patches. They can directly create the missing curves in order to finalize their curve network and fit a NURBS surface. As a result, NURBS surfaces of complex shapes can be generated in record time.

For several industrial applications, such as automotive design, customers need very precise curves in their rapid surfaces. These curves could be feature curves bounding a fillet, boundary curves, or symmetry curves for mirroring the part. Other applications may require the presence of special curves that can be either picked by hand, imported from CAD, or digitized with a probe. PolyWorks V9 is the first rapid surfacing solution that can use any pre-defined curve for constraining the results of its automatic surfacing algorithm, in order to directly generate high-quality rapid surfaces.

Additional major V9 enhancements include:

• Triangular patches for simplifying the definition of the patch layout and making it possible, along with T-junctions, to connect a large patch to many small ones, without creating dozens of unnecessary quadrilateral patches.
• G2 continuity.
• A rigidity factor for mimicking either a flexible material such as plastic or rigid material sheet metal.
• Symmetrical NURBS surface fitting for ensuring G1 continuity at the mirror plane.

“The release of this new NURBS technology will mark a turning point in the history of the rapid surfacing software industry,” said Marc Boulanger, Director of Worldwide Sales at InnovMetric Software. “For many years, I have heard users complain about the tedious task of creating NURBS surfaces. These new surfacing tools will come as a relief for many of them”, he concluded. 

PolyWorks Version 9 will be released in April 2005.