solidThinking 8.0 offers a number of key design elements that encourage exploration and creativity during the design process, while allowing designers and companies to quickly bring concepts and products to market. Some of the enhanced capabilities of version 8.0 include:

- Modeling tolerance wizard
- Enhanced point, curve and surface representation
- New 3D manipulators for transformations
- New materials browser with tagging system
- Re-render of selected regions
- Progressive rendering
- Real-time rendering
- New complex reflectance shaders
- Ambient occlusion for greater photorealism

Click here to take the solidThinking 8.0 Tour.

solidThinking Inspired 8.0 adds unique computational capabilities to solidThinking 8.0 design tools bringing new sources of inspiration into the hands of product designers and architects.

The new exclusive morphogenesis form-generation technology help discovering forms that are aesthetically interesting, often unexpected, and at the same time, well-adapted to their intended function.

Click here to take the solidThinking Inspired 8.0 Tour.

solidThinking Product Day on November 2, 2009
Ludwigsburg, Germany

You are invited to the first solidThinking Product Day on November 2nd at the "Forum am Schlosspark" in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

The information day is part of the 3rd European HyperWorks Technology Conference 2009 (www.altairhtc.com/europe), which you might be visiting (registration is free).

The solidThinking day is dedicated to all creative trend-setters of the design community in Europe and will offer networking with the developers of solidThinking and solidThinking Inspired and experiences from real customer use cases.

The solidThinking day will start at 11.00 am on November 2nd and will include workshops and papers from solidThinking spokespeople and users. It will end at 18:00 with refreshment at the Welcome reception of the 3rd EHTC, to which all attendees of the solidThinking day are invited.

Ludwigsburg is located in Baden-Wuerttemberg, not far from Stuttgart. Baden-Wuerttemberg is one of the largest tourist states in Germany. It is situated in the very heart of Europe and is just as famous for its delicious cooking as for being the industrial home of globally renowned companies like Daimler, Bosch, Porsche, Boss, Adidas and Puma.

Ludwigsburg has a lot to offer. In the baroque centre of the town you can see the baroque quarters, which host the birth houses and residences of famous poets, such as Morike and Schiller, and you can stroll around in the castle park or go shopping and try out the local restaurants.

The solidThinking Information Day is FREE of charge.

Directions Map

From the Press

The launch of solidThinking 8.0 and solidThinking Inspired 8.0 has been covered by many media. Here are just a few of their reports:

“solidThinking, a maker of 3-D design software, thinks it has hit on something big by borrowing a page from nature. The latest release of its software has something called a morphogenesis tool, which amounts to a filter designers can use to tweak their projects. The filter stems from research done around algorithms that try to mimic how human bones grow and support weight.”

The New York Times Bits Blog, Ashley Vance
Sept. 18, 2009
Also ran in the New York Times national print edition on Sept. 21, 2009

“solidThinking Inspired 8.0 with morphogenesis technology adds a new layer of design thinking to the creative process by allowing the designer to study and review how nature would most likely solve the same problem, yet back off from the literal and strict bio-natural response to environmental forces at various degrees of subtlety.”

Architosh, Anthony Frausto Robledo
Sept. 18, 2009

“The technology, which ST is calling morphogenesis, is a sort of semi-automated biomimicry toolbox, and after an hour-long phone and webinar demo last week, we have to say it’s unlike anything we’ve come across in the CAD world to date… It’s not explicitly an engineering aid — the forms created are far from manufacturing-friendly — but since the process is based on optimal material usage, using it as a design guide nudges the product towards greater efficiency, which is something engineers love. For the same reason, it could be thought of as a decent example of green technology too, giving designers hints on how to do more with less material, early on in the form-giving phase.”

Core77.com, Carl Alviani
Sept. 15, 2009

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