IntraVISION 3D Viewer Review

Geoff Harrod

Spatial Technolgy Inc are best known for their ACIS 3D solids modeling "engine" that they license to many CAD producers to incorporate within their CAD product. IntraVISION is a Windows and Unix product from Spatial Technology for viewing, interrogating, measuring, marking-up and printing many formats of all types of data including most notably, 3D CAD data produced with many CAD products.

There are a number of multi-format viewing programs on the market today, including several that can handle some popular CAD data formats as well as common graphic image data formats and general office data formats. IntraVISION is also a general-purpose multi-format viewer as it can also handle many 2D CAD formats and almost any graphic image files, text, spreadsheet, database and presentation files. What makes IntraVISION uncommon is its ability to view and manipulate data from high-end 3D design systems. It also has more thorough facilities for 3D data manipulation than most viewers that can handle 3D at all. Most multi-format viewers are 2D only.

IntraVISION makes full use of the OpenGL 3D display protocols originally developed by Silicon Graphics, and support for OpenGL in the computer’s display system is a prime requirement. For the Windows platform, a display board with OpenGL support is needed plus support for OpenGL in Windows. With Windows 95 that requires a downloadable extra component. For Windows98, NT4 and later, it is built-in. Today most PCs sold with Windows have a 3D and OpenGL capable display system of some sort. For optimal results and response speed, a display board with OpenGL support in hardware is desirable, as it is with any of the major 3D solids design CAD systems. But I ran IntraVISION on a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion 8509 PC bought over the counter at an office supplies shop. This PC comes with a Pentium-III 450MHz CPU, an NVIDIA RIVA TNT 8Mb AGP display system and Windows 98se. The standard memory was 64Mb but has been increased to 192Mb. This is essentially a standard domestic or office PC although it runs most CAD products very well, including such products as SolidEdge. Its OpenGL support is not of the top-line hardware type, and PCs of this type are designed more for 3D games than CAD, but IntraVISION worked very well indeed on this PC.

Spatial state as the minimum requirements for Windows: 32 MB of RAM, 16 MB of free hard disk space, Windows 95 with OpenGL, Windows 98 or NT, Pentium 90 or better, graphics card with hardware OpenGL support strongly recommended. There are also versions of IntraVISION for Unix graphic workstations.

IntraVISION's optional CATIA and Pro/ENGINEER Direct CAD Modules automatically install with Full and Lite versions of IntraVISION 4.2 for Windows. The Direct CAD Modules enable you to access CATIA and Pro/E models and assemblies, including product structure data, without the native applications. Supported versions include version 4.x of the CATIA format and versions 18 through 2000i of the Pro/E format. The CATIA and Pro/E Direct CAD Modules are licensed separately at extra cost.

IntraVISION Lite is a lower-cost version of IntraVISION that provides viewing, printing and conversion capabilities. The Markup, Measure, Comparison, and Entity Pick functionality is only available in the Full version. IntraVISION Lite contains all other functionality and all other supported formats for 2D/3D and text viewing.

The illustration above shows IntraVISION displaying a 3D model created with CATIA v4. Most of its controls are available on toolbar buttons as well as the menus. The purpose of many of the buttons should be fairly obvious from their icons, and you can see that IntraVISION is distinguished from most viewers by its wealth of 3D manipulation functions. The toolbars also show some greyed-out items such as next and previous arrows. Those become active when viewing document formats with multiple pages.

As shown above, IntraVISION can interrogate the details of a 3D CAD model such as its build-up of objects and their parameters. The illustration shows the radius of the left end boss being measured by clicking and snapping onto the features in the display. The details are shown in the panel while the picked object’s reference points and basic value is superimposed on the image. It can also show the names and parameters of the features used to build the model and show their extents.

As well as the special direct provision for CATIA and Pro/E, IntraVISION also supports many other CAD formats and the three major CAD data interchange file formats, DXF, IGES and STEP. This support is thorough and the provision of STEP support will be valuable now that it has become more established and is being used intensively in many industries. Where CAD systems support assembly modelling as well as part design, IntraVISION supports both forms. The two optional extra "direct" formats are both CAD systems that do not use the ACIS solids sub-system. Most CAD products can now generate "slice" format 3D data for rapid prototyping machines in the standard STL file format, and IntraVISION can display models in that form also. Naturally, it can display solids data in the generic ACIS SAT format.

The range of file format support for of office data is exceptional, particularly many of the old formats supported. Support for standard raster formats used in scanning technical drawings will be valuable in design offices.

As can be seen from the extensive range of format support, IntraVISION can fulfill all office data viewing and printing needs as well as performing its special capabilities with 3D design data. It is a highly commendable product.

An evaluation copy of IntraVISION software can be downloaded from the Spatial website