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Geoff Harrod

‘Designer Elements’ is the name given by Ashlar-Vellum to a family of three solid modelling products for product design. Their individual product names are Argon, Xenon and Cobalt, in ascending order of capability. The company summarises the capabilities of the three products as follows:

ARGON – Powerful and affordable precision wireframe, surfacing and solid modelling. Anyone can do 3D modelling and concept development. 

XENON – Associative and history-based free-form wireframe, class-A NURBS surfacing and solid modelling. Created for the professional engineer.

COBALT – Advanced parametric free-form wireframe, class-A NURBS surfaces and feature-based solid modelling. The ultimate product design tool.

As you can see, the lowest-level product, Argon, provides good basic 3D facilities including surface-shaping to a degree. Many low-end solids products provide little by way of surfacing. Xenon adds ‘association’, which in this context means the ability to define parts of the model as related to other parts, so that correct inter-relationships are maintained when shapes are edited. It also adds much more comprehensive free-form shaping. Cobalt adds parametric or dimension-driven modelling, and true feature-based modelling – that is, modelling in terms of real object form and function rather than by geometric shape. Cobalt also adds assembly modelling, bill-of-materials support, GD&T tools, and more options for generation of 2D drawings from design models.

With Cobalt, Ashlar-Vellum also provide a complimentary copy of Graphite, their basic 2D drafting system, which is the latest incarnation of their original CAD product that was just called Ashlar-Vellum. That product, many years ago now, marked a new concept in user interface design for CAD and a radical new tool called ‘Drafting Assistant’ that greatly automated the use of object-snaps and geometrical constraints or relationship snapping, so that operation was greatly streamlined. That mechanism has since been licensed to most of the top CAD makers, where it appears in various guises. At that time, Ashlar-Vellum was only on the Macintosh, and that restricted its market, so that it did not make as big an impression on the CAD world as it should have. The Drafting Assistant is present in Cobalt, enhanced for 3D.

The current range of products is delivered on dual-standard CD-ROMs that install on either Windows PCs or on Macintosh systems.

The field of solid modelling product design software is rather well filled with rival products on the Windows platform, including several very effective and well-established products. It seems to me that, as well as holding its own rather well generally against the established rivals, Cobalt shines particularly in the area of free-form surfaces on solid modelled objects. Cobalt does not have surface modelling tools to equal the specialised optional modules of the top-end systems, but it does provide more free-form surfacing than most mid-range systems. This would make it very good for Industrial Designers. There has not been a big choice of cost-effective software that adequately serves the needs of Industrial Designers. Xenon or Cobalt seems able to do what Designers want, and in addition, has the capability to carry their designs forward to manufacturing detailing.

The display has a very clean appearance. The following remarks all refer to Cobalt running on Windows XP Professional. From the manuals, it appears that the Mac version looks almost identical. There are several button toolbars, which float independently of the main display. For the screen images shown in this article, I reduced Cobalt’s display area to produce an image that would show more clearly with the severe resolution limits of the Web. Normally I would run it full screen with a resolution such as 1280 x 1024.

Cobalt full screen layout.

The toolbars and other floating palettes have very clear and simple design. On the full-screen display shown here, you will see that there are four basic sets of toolbars. The horizontal one carries the display controls – zoom, pan, view direction, and the four display modes; wireframe, wireframe with hidden lines dimmed, fully-hidden line, Phong shaded, and perspective or parallel projection. All editing work can be done in the shaded mode, but there is no transparency option. The upper vertical toolbar has all the line drawing tools, which are used for 3D profile drawing as well as basic drawing. This includes dimensioning and text. All of these buttons have fly-out toolbars for the various optional ways of drawing that particular type of object. The middle vertical toolbar has the tools for setting work-planes and creating and editing surfaces. The lower toolbar provides for solid modelling by primitives, sweeps, rotations, extrusion etc, feature creation, and solids editing such as fillets and blends.

A test of the solids editing ability of a modelling system is the application of fillets or blends between complex shaped objects where the blending encounters other joined shapes at odd angles and combinations. Cobalt seems to cope with these challenges very well. One of their sample files is called ‘Tough Blends’ and the rather odd-shaped model in that file is shown here.

The "tough blends" model demonstrates Cobalt's capacity to handle fillets and blends in a demanding situation.

The ‘Design Explorer’ panel displays the creation history tree for the objects selected. Double-clicking any operation in the tree pops up a edit dialog, or right-clicking pops up a context menu of operations that can be performed on that history item. This includes re-ordering, which results in the entire history being re-evaluated to possibly drastically alter the final shape.

Cobalt's "Design Explorer" panel.

Cobalt has built-in high quality rendering using ray-tracing, and can generate Quicktime animations. It has provision for sharing data with Pro/ENGINEER, Parasolids-based systems (Unigraphics, SolidEdge, SolidWorks), ACIS-based systems (Inventor, MDT, AutoCAD), plus DXF, IGES and STEP.

These Ashlar-Vellum products come with substantial printed documentation – a rarity today. There is a 94 page ‘Getting Started’ book, and a two-volume ‘3D Modelling User Guide’ that totals 630 pages. They are presented in the Apple tradition of slightly wide format pages with spiral binding, so that they lay open flat while in use. The User Guide applies to all three products, Argon, Xenon, Cobalt, in both Windows and Macintosh. It marks sections about features only found in the higher-level products or that differ between the two platforms. The topics reflect the scope of the product: Wireframe modelling techniques, surface modelling, solid modelling by primitives, by profiles, by features, editing solids, and rendering (a lengthy chapter).

Hardware Platform

The manual state minimum hardware requirements, but as usual, these need to be interpreted carefully. I tried it on a system that was around the stated minimum, and found the performance was inadequate for serious work, The best possible hardware needs to be provided to do justice to this software. This is especially true if your work will involve assemblies. The stated minimum for a PC is a Pentium-II, 256Mb RAM and an unspecified display card. The system I tried first was a 450MHz P3 with an INVIDIA Riva TNT display board and 200 Mb RAM. The program’s operation was decidedly sluggish. The recommended system is a Pentium-4 or Athlon, 512Mb RAM and a 32Mb hardware OpenGL display board. For my final try-out, I used a Dell Precision M50 mobile workstation, which has a 1.8GHz mobile-P4, 512Mb SDRAM and an INVIDIA Quadro4 500 GoGL 64Mb display board. I think the high performance OpenGL display hardware made the major difference, as well as the extra memory. I suggest the latter is a realistic hardware spec for serious work with Cobalt. It ran extremely well on the Dell M50 and never kept me waiting for things to happen.

Ashlar-Vellum have produced some outstanding software in their new 3D ‘Designer Elements’ suite.

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