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View an e-Training demo webinar! Feb. 7, 2012

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Our innovative e-Training solution provides a viable and important complement to the traditional MasterGraphics classroom training. In addition to the comprehensive and accurate content consistently offered through MasterGraphics, e-Training students can also enjoy the following benefits:

  • Flexible scheduling to ensure work schedules remain the priority
  • Interactive and engaging methodology for increased retention
  • All learning methods are accommodated: visual, auditory and hands-on
  • Competency-based progress to ensure understanding of topics
  • Cost-effective, as courses are not limited to class sizes or start dates
  • Enterprise and Individual Pricing Available!

Attend our upcoming webinar to learn more!

  • Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 at 12pm Central

Contact your MasterGraphics Account Manager at (800) 873.7238, who will then send you the webinar information via Outlook appointment.

Posted in Building / AEC, Civil, General, Manufacturing | No Comments »

Is Virtualization Viable for Vault?

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Autodesk Vault and Virtualization
By Darren Hartenstine
1-19-2012

In nearly every discussion with IT professionals, we are being asked if Autodesk Vault runs (or is supported) in a Virtual Environment.

The Short answers is Yes - with a slight SQL disclaimer.

Here’s a page I found from the support team at Autodesk on this topic. It describes the limitation with a particular feature available with SQL called Snapshots . It seems that Microsoft is providing the disclaimer, not Autodesk.

http://crackingthevault.typepad.com/crackingthevault/2011/04/autodesk-vault-and-vmware.html

Now, let’s talk about our experiences (MasterGraphics and DataWorks).

Is this supported - yes. Have we installed this in a production environment - yes? If you want to run your Autodesk Vault within a Virtual Server, go for it. Understand this; if you have any kind of database glitches, errors, system crashes, or something catastrophic - and Autodesk needs to get involved - the first reply will be this:

Can you replicate the issue on an actual piece of hardware and not a virtual environment?

From a support stand-point, if you removed the virtual environment from the equation; it becomes easier to diagnose and potentially fix the issue. However, if the issue remains, then you have provided enough proof to Autodesk to take the next steps - sending and evaluating your Vault Backup. And honestly, I can’t recall any clients that are using a Virtual Server that have needed to escalate issues to this level.

So, you can do it…now, what can you expect from performance and stability?

Before I go on, I have to state some obvious assumptions about Virtualization. If you have 10 Virtual Guests running on an old Pentium 4 Server with 1 GB of RAM - this is not the best scenario. We assume that your Virtual Environment is setup properly and your Host Server has enough resources to support another Virtual Guest.

My personal experience is that there is a threshold of users and data that will cause performance issues within a virtual environment. If you have more than 15 users (+/- 5) and less then 30K (+/-20K) CAD files stored in your Vault, then I would not be pursuing a Virtual Server setup. You will be creating a performance bottleneck and the end user experience will be poor and potentially unstable.

For those smaller user environments, Virtualization seems to be a perfect fit for supporting the Vault Server. We do hear of issues here and there, but the overall performance and user experience seems to be favorable.

Some basics settings with Virtualization are RAM and Processors. At a bare minimum, I would give the VM as much RAM as you can spare - like 4-8GB. SQL likes RAM and it will help with performance of the Server.

Processors - again, give the Virtual Server as much as you can spare on your Host Server. Vault is not just one application, and the more resources you can provide, the faster the experience will be for your users. I would recommend 2 Cores with 2 Processors - for a total of 4 Processors. You can always adjust the settings during the life of the VM.

If at all possible, do not let the CAD Files, or Filestore as it is called within the Vault Admin console, live within the Virtual Server environment. Attach a drive to the Virtual Server from a SAN or NAS device. This will drastically increase performance for your environment.

DataWorksMGI Lab - Yep, we have a lab containing a Vault Server living in the Microsoft Cloud. Besides letting our clients have all the fun, we have been testing Virtual Environments and utilizing the Microsoft Azure Server Cloud environment. Our intent is to beat this technology up as much as we can, since we feel it is definitely the next-step after Virtualization becomes mainstream (which it basically has).

I have tested both VMWare and Micrsoft’s HyperV and both seem to be equal in their setup and configuration. As to their performance versus each other, I can’t (at this moment) give any feedback as to which we prefer.

I plan to write more blogs on our tests and results coming out of the Lab on this topic, so come back for more.

Posted in Building / AEC, Civil, General, Manufacturing | No Comments »

Meshing… Meshing… 1..2..3..

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

By Eric Schubert, Manufacturing Application Engineer

My last post mentioned going into the topic of meshing when it comes to simulation.  So, here we go… a bit about how to mesh parts to prepare for running a stress analysis.

Meshing is a huge topic in and of itself, when it comes to simulation products.  So this post may be a bit general or vague on some areas.  But, hopefully, I’ll cover all of the major points about meshing.

When you work up a new simulation, prep work makes all the difference.  And the most-prominent piece of this work is creating a good mesh for your part or assembly.  The image at the top of my blog shows a part that has been meshed.  The idea of a mesh is to approximate the shape of a part by breaking it down into small blocks, called elements.  In the image above, most of these elements are simple cube shapes.  But elements can be cubes, tetrahedra, wedges, thin rectangular blocks, or a combination of these.

But meshing requires a fine balance between accuracy and simulation time.  On one hand, the smaller we make the mesh size, the more accurate our model will be represented.  Curved surfaces or edges will be closer to reality, because the more small flat facets we put around a curved face, the smoother it begins to look.  (Again, we’re only approximating shapes using elements.)  And stresses will transfer more smoothly through the parts.  But if you make the mesh really small to get nice, smooth faces and edges, you create a LOT more elements.  Each element uses equations to calculate how stress moves from element to element (or, more correctly, node to node…  nodes are the points where corners of elements come together… the intersections of the lines of the mesh, if you will).  Each element that neighbors other elements, requires several equations to be solved.  So it stands to reason that an increase in elements will cause a very serious increase in equations to solve.  But let’s take this one step further…

Let’s say you have a cube…  you cut that cube in a 2×2x2 mesh, meaning you now have 8 elements.  If we even go to a 3×3x3 mesh, we now have 27 elements.  Each time you decrease the mesh size, you create an exponential increase in the number of elements, and also equations to solve.

So, simply taking an overall average mesh size of 1-inch, and making it 1/2-inch, will figuratively make the number of elements we have to solve for explode.  And our solve time goes up dramatically.  It’s common for simulations to take hours to solve.  But something as simple as decreashing the mesh size could take that time and make it days!  So, we need to keep in mind the balance of accuracy versus time to solve.  At some point, decreasing mesh size will only very-slightly increase accuracy (say, by an additional 0.01%).  If my answer is 100psi of stress or 101psi of stress, does it really matter that much?  If the answer is no, there’s no reason we need that additional accuracy.

Here are a few examples of mesh sizes:  one that’s too large to be accurate, one that’s a good size, and one that’s too tiny to be beneficial.

Too large to be accurate:

Too small to be beneficial to accuracy or solve time:

Just about right:

Both Autodesk Inventor and Autodesk Simulation products have what’s called a “convergence” utility.  The way that it works is it takes your simulation and runs it twice, once at the normal mesh size and one at a slightly-reduced mesh size, and compares the two results.  If the difference in results is small (you set what “small” means), the program will stop there.  If the difference is too large (say, over a 10% difference in the results), the mesh size steps down again and the simulation runs once more.  Again, it compares results from the last two runs to check for difference in stress.  It continues this process until the results “converge” toward a specific value, or until it runs out of the number of tries that it is allowed to run before giving up.  (Any more than around 4-6 mesh reductions and it probably won’t converge anyway.  Plus, this means it would need to solve repeatedly for each time it reduces mesh size, significantly increasing solve times.)  If the stresses do converge on a value, it means our mesh size is small enough to be reasonably accurate.  So, it’s best to start with a larger mesh size than you’d think is appropriate and work smaller from there.  If you start with a tiny mesh size, you may just be wasting time waiting for the program to solve.

To finish, a good mesh size for general stress analysis would be one where you have at least 2-3 layers of elements through the thickness of the material.  Again, start a little bigger, if you think you’ll end up with too many elements.  You can always test a second run with a smaller mesh size, or use the convergence utility to see how accurate your results are.  Otherwise, you could be waiting for hours or days for results that aren’t even useful anyway.  And every FEA package should have a way to refine the mesh in specific areas to increase accuracy only where you need it most.

Hopefully the idea of mesh size makes a bit more sense now.  Particularly the idea of how to set a mesh size appropriate for a simulation.

Posted in Manufacturing | No Comments »

MasterGraphics Specialists to Present at Upcoming Autodesk University

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

Three technical specialists from MasterGraphics have been invited to present at Autodesk University, the nation’s largest gathering of software design professionals in the design, engineering and entertainment industries, November 29 through December 1 in Las Vegas.

“Our technical experts are among the most talented in the country,” said Michael Wilkes, MasterGraphics president. “Not only do they possess a keen understanding of the latest industry solutions, but they are dedicated to educating themselves and others on practical applications of those solutions. Autodesk University is an ideal venue for them to continue this commitment.”

The presenters include:

Dan Banach, 3D Mechanical CAD Consultant

Dan Banach is a nationally recognized author and educator in the Mechanical CAD field and co-author of 15 books on Autodesk Inventor software. Banach is also an Autodesk Inventor 2012 Certified Professional and Autodesk Certified Instructor. He has presented at every Autodesk University since 1997 and this year will be leading a hands-on lab titled Inventor Publisher: Some Assembly Required.

Louisa Holland, E.I.T., LEED AP, Application Engineer - Civil Industry

Holland is an accredited professional of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) as well as an AutoCAD Civil 3D Certified Professional.  She has been training customers on CAD-based products since 1997, and this will be her 2nd year presenting at Autodesk University with a session titled AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012 for Beginners.

Russell Nicloy, E.I.T., LEED AP, Application Engineer - Civil Industry

Nicloy is an AutoCAD Civil 3D Certified Professional with more than ten years of experience in the civil design industry and eight years of experience in consulting and instruction. This will be his 1styear presenting at Autodesk University with a session titled Importing the Most Useful Data Into Survey in AutoCAD Civil 3D

About MasterGraphics Inc.

MasterGraphics is an Autodesk Gold Partner for the manufacturing, architecture and education communities and is headquartered in Madison, Wis., with offices in Milwaukee, Appleton, Chicago and Minneapolis. Serving as a trusted advisor to its clients, MasterGraphics helps to streamline the design process and utilization of CAD data through an integrated mix of software, hardware, professional services and digital imaging and distribution offerings.  For more information, please visit www.mastergraphics.com.

Autodesk, Autodesk Inventor, AutoCAD and Civil 3D are registered trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., in the USA and/or other countries.

Posted in Building / AEC, Civil, General, Manufacturing | No Comments »

Inventor - Working with Large Assemblies

Friday, October 21st, 2011

By, Dan Banach

In an effort to help you manage large assemblies Autodesk has created a WIKI help page specifically about working with large assemblies. This site has a lot of valuable information in getting you the best performance when working with large assemblies. With the WIKI site you are also encouraged to add information that you have found valuable when working with large assemblies. Click on the URL to access the WIKI help page: http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/Inventor/enu/2012/Help/0073-Autodesk73/0460-Assembli460/Work_with_Large_Assemblies

Posted in Manufacturing | No Comments »

Suite Thoughts…

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Since Autodesk released their 2012 lineup back in April, there have been many questions regarding the new “Suites” that are available.  The suites are simply a bundle of software meant to take an individual or company from conceptual design all the way through production and documentation.  Since this is the manufacturing blog here at MG, let’s take a look a the Product Design Suites as an example:

Product Design Suite comes in three variations: Standard, Premium, and Ultimate.  Which one you choose is really based on the work needed to be done.  For most users sticking with AutoCAD Mechanical for most work, the Standard suite is sufficient.  But those users looking to do 3-dimensional modeling should look to the Premium or Ultimate suites, which include Inventor or Inventor Professional.

The main differences with suites versus the individual AutoCAD Mechanical or Inventor packages is the addition of Sketchbook Designer, 3DS Max, Alias and Showcase.  And here’s where those products fit into the workflow.

Sketchbook is for 2D conceptual drawings, usually meant for consumer products.  You can use a tablet (or your mouse, if you don’t have one) to hand-sketch 2D views of your concept, using both vector and raster tools.  The vector tools create what’s essentially CAD geometry, which can be reused later to make a 3D object in Inventor.  But the ease and speed with which these images are made is it’s biggest asset.  Then we can move our sketches to Inventor, and build a 3D model.

Alias is another tool for conceptual design.  However, it’s a 3D surface-based modeler.  Its power lies in being able to quickly construct flowing surface models, with the ability to tweak and edit those surfaces however the user wants.  This tool is used mostly for consumer product design, rather than manufacturing.  You can see the results of Alias every single day.  Just take a look around:  cars and trucks, aerospace, computers, even things like shampoo bottles.  It’s extremely powerful and effective in creating gorgeous, organic, contoured shapes.  These models can also be reused in Inventor for manufacturing.

Then there’s Showcase.  Showcase is used for real-time rendering of parts and assemblies.  It can demonstrate different color/paint schemes, configurations, and even do some animations to pull the whole thing together.  It’s meant for decision-making meetings, both internally and with customers, to demonstrate all possible solutions that are being considered.  Just click on the option you want, and the configuration and colors/textures change.  It’s quick, and very easy to learn.

Inventor is the 3D design platform, to create your models and document them with 2D detail drawings for the shop floor.  It’s not really the focus of this post, so I’ll leave it at that.

You can then use 3DS Max to create incredibly detailed renderings of your models, importing textures and paint, lighting and scenery to make it look realistic.  It’s a powerful tool that can be used to help win bids, or to draw in new business with marketing support.

Last, but not least, Vault is used for document management and revision control.

So, that’s the Product Design Suite in a nutshell!  Of course, there’s more to it than this.  But it gives you an idea of just how a suite takes the user through the entire workflow, from concept to manufacturing to presentation.  There’s much to learn, but so much to gain from taking on the power of a suite!

Posted in Manufacturing | No Comments »

Introduction to Simulation

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Welcome to my very first post!  I’ve never had a blog before, so this is going to be an interesting experience.  I hope that I can provide some great information for everyone.

The purpose of this blog is to post information regarding 3D modeling and simulation products.  (To know more about my background, click the “About” link on the menu above.)  Simulation software has tended to be pushed to the back of the line, especially with today’s economy, in that it’s extra money, training, and time being spent on software, rather than producing any tangible goods.  But that trend seems to be changing.  Companies want to streamline processes, cut costs, and bring products to market faster.  And THAT is where simulation software really comes into play.

So, why simulate, when you can actually test something?  How does a simulation product do all of these magical things?

Simulation software can assist with designs, helping to work out some of the details before any material is shaped, formed, or cut.  Using the 3D model produced in CAD, a company can discover weak points or over-engineering, or even test multiple design possibilities, to figure out the best course of action.  This means fewer physical prototypes, resulting in a shorter design cycle.  Of course, the fewer prototypes, mistakes, and less testing that needs to be done also means cutting costs, in terms of both material used and man-hours spent doing the work.

Sim software can run just about any scenario imaginable.  The main product that I use, Autodesk Inventor Professional, includes a simple and easy basic environment to do static stress analysis, modal analysis (discovering natural frequencies of an object or assembly), and kinematic analysis.  It’s a great way to start off in the world of simulation.

But what else can sim software do?  If you move up into a more-comprehensive Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software, such as Autodesk Simulation (formerly Algor), you get so many more possibilities.  Here’s just a short list:

  • Static Stress Analysis
  • Dynamic Stress Analysis
  • Modal Analysis
  • Non-linear Material Models
  • Permanent Deformation of Material
  • Heat-Transfer Analysis
  • Fluid Flow Analysis
  • Electrostatic Analysis
  • And more…

Of course, as capability and performance goes up, so does complexity of the software.  But the ability to simulate your product is out there.  And nearly any company can benefit from using it.  I whole-heartedly believe that.

Do you need to be an engineer to understand and use the software?  Not necessarily.  Inventor Pro’s sim environment is pretty simple and straight-forward.  Once you try it out, you’ll see how simple it can be.  But, a full-fledged FEA system is something that, for the most part, an engineer will be required to run.  It will have lots of options and settings, different solvers, and require input of various kinds to run properly.  But with proper training, it’s certainly possible for any technically-inclined person to learn.  And if you only need a one-time simulation, there are always consulting companies ready and willing to help you out.

So that’s it for my first post!  I don’t want to go overboard with it.  I still have lots of material to write, and intend to go over all sorts of info, from what FEA is all the way to understanding results.  But those will have to wait for another day…

Posted in Manufacturing | No Comments »

Autodesk 2012 Software Certification Prep Classes

Friday, October 14th, 2011

By, Dan Banach

If you are planning on taking an Autodesk 2012 Certification exam Autodesk is offering virtual certification prep classes. The virtual classes will be hosted on the Autodesk University (AU) Virtual class site starting on October 18th, 2011. The list of prep classes is located at: http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=au2011_certification_preparation_classes

Enjoy the classes.

Posted in Building / AEC, Civil, General, Manufacturing | No Comments »

Autodesk University 2011 registration now open!

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

Early Registration for the AU Las Vegas event, and the AU Virtual event are now open - register soon to get the best class selection and pricing! Learn more

Posted in Building / AEC, Civil, General, Manufacturing | No Comments »

Inventor Publisher 2012 - Service Pack 2

Monday, August 29th, 2011

By, Dan Banach

Autodesk has issued service pack 2 for Inventor Publisher 2012. You can download the 32 bit or the 64 bit version from: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=17627596&linkID=14856948

Posted in Manufacturing | No Comments »

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