Key Features

Create, modify, and de-feature models using Inspire’s modeling tools:

• Sketch Tools – Build or modify parts by sketching lines, rectangles, circles, and arcs. Geometric constraints such as tangency and perpendicularity can also be applied.
• Trim/Break – Cut and remove sketch curves at the point of intersection.
• Push/Pull – Extrude flat or cylindrical faces to create solid parts or holes, modify dimensions, or remove features such as fillets.
• Boolean Operations – Add, subtract, or intersect solid parts to create more complex geometry.

Generate design concepts that are not only structurally efficient but easily manufacturable using Inspire’s shape controls:

• Symmetry Planes – Force asymmetric design spaces to generate symmetric optimized shapes.
• Cyclic Repetition – Create cyclically repeating shapes like propellers or spoked wheels
• Draw Directions – Generate shapes that can be easily molded or stamped by applying single or split draw directions.

• Parent-Child Instances – Individual parts can be copied and pasted as an instance. Whenever one is updated, the other is automatically updated as well. Instancing information can also be imported from CAD files.
• Pattern Repetition – When a design space is repeated multiple times in your model using part instances, Inspire will automatically apply pattern repetition to the design spaces so they generate identical shapes during topology optimization.

Explore optimized shapes using a simple slider to add or remove material. This allows you to decide which features are important and then pick the concept design best suited to your needs.

Inspire is packaged with a material library including various aluminum, steel, magnesium, and titanium alloys. You can also add custom materials.

Geometry readers such as AutoCAD 3D, Unigraphics, CATIA, SolidWorks, Pro/ENGINEER, Parasolid, STEP, ACIS, JtOpen, and IGES formats are all supported.

Design concepts can be exported in STL format and prototypes quickly fabricated using a rapid prototyping machine.

Import models from Evolve to optimize your design, and export back to Evolve with a single click.

One or more parts from an assembly can be deactivated to create new configurations. You can use those configurations to study design concepts on few of the parts in an assembly. The deactivated parts can be reactivated with a single click.

English, Japanese, and Italian language formats are available.

solidThinking state-of-the-art unlimited Construction history gives you real-time updates when modifications are made to survey, parameters or surfaces.

Browse the graphic representation of the Construction Tree to identify and select source objects within the Tree with immediate reconstruction. Manipulate both the parameters and points of all objects freely. And never forget the steps involves in construction - the entire tree is saved inside the file and is accessible at any time.

Thanks to the possibility to freely manipulate your models, you can easily experiment with new shapes and improve your creativity.

Once you have tried how the solidThinking exclusive Construction Tree improves your productivity, you will not to without it.

Full NURBS-based modeling, Construction History and the most advanced modeling tools make solidThinking a matchless tool for designers and graphics professionals.

solidThinking used NURBS (Non Uniform Rational B-Splines) as its geometry type. This curve and surface definition method offers the greatest flexibility and precision. NURBS are capable of representing any desired shape, both analytic and free form, and their algorithms are extremely fast and stable.

The Construction Tree gives you real-time updates when modifications are made to curves, parameters or surfaces. Thanks to the possibility to freely manipulate your models, you can easily experiment with new shapes and improve your creativity.

• Simultaneous parameter editing and control point editing.
• Point editing on multiple objects
• Un-edit. Allows to remove any editing from selected points of a curve/surface independently from any other successive modification of the curve/surface.

• Translate. Move one or more pickable items to a new location. Magnet options: Constant, Linear, Smooth.
• Rotate. Rotate one or more items.
• Scale. Change the size of one or more items
• Mirror. Mirror objects.
• Replicate. Replicate any object along a path or over a surface
• Matrix copy. Replicate an object along X, Y, Z to create a box-like array.
• DynaMatrix. Dynamic matrix copy with Construction Tree.
• Polar copy. Replicate an object along a circular path of any given radius.
• Step copy. Replicate an object applying incremental transformations (translation, rotation, scale).
• DynaStep. Dynamic step copy with Construction Tree
• Combine. Combine two or more selected objects into one single object.
• Uncombine. Create a separate object for each entity of an object.

• Twist. Twist an object along a user-defined axis.
• Taper. Widen or narrow one side of an object.
• Warp. Warp all points of an object comprised in a user-defined distance and with respect to a user-defined axis.
• Shear. Shear an object with respect to a user-defined axis.
• Bend. Bend an object with respect to a user-defined axis.
• Linear Stretch. Stretch an object along a path curve.
• Lattice. Free object deformation.
• PixelMap. Deform and selected NURBS surface based on the brightness intensity of each pixel of a bitmap image that you use as a map.
• SurfDrape. Drape a NURBS surface over another surface.

• Plane, disc, cylinder, sphere, cube, cone, toroid, prism, 3D text.

• High quality freeform NURBS curves of order 2 to 7.
• Real time adjustment of curve tangency and curvature at any given point. Any curvature radius can be set.
• METAcurves. Interpolation of points using a smooth curve. Ability to specify cusps at points.
• Arcs (center-2 points, 2 points-radius, 3 points, fillet arc, tangent-2 points, line-arc, fillet curves).
• Circles (center-radius, 3 points, tangent-2 points, point-2 tangents, center-tangent).
• Ellipses (center-2 axes, point-2 focuses).
• Lines (single, perpendicular to segment, parallel to segment, fillet segment, segment from center, inclined segment, segment tangency align, bisector, bitangent segment).
• Polylines (open, closed).
• Regular polygons.
• Helix and spiral.
• Curve offset. Create the copy of a curve at a fixed distance. Options: Symmetric, Closed, Rounded corners and Rounded ends.
• Split curve. Splits to intersecting curves into more paths.
• Divide curve. Divides a curve into two independent curves.
• Break curve. Breaks a curve into two joined curves.
• Blend curve. Create a blend curve connecting two existing curves.
• Curve tangency align. Establish tangent continuity between two curves. Optionally, modify incidence of a curve to tangency plane.
• Extend curve. Extends a curve for a user-defined length to a given point or to another curve.
• EdgeExtract. Extract a surface edge into a 3D curve.
• Extract isoperimetric curve. Extract an isoperimetric curve from a surface.
• Curves from intersections. Extracts a curve from the intersection of two surfaces.
• Section. Extract any number of sections from a set of NURBS surfaces along a specifies direction.
• Silhouette. Extract a silhouette of curves from a set of NURBS surfaces given a direction and a viewpoint.
• PathCast. Project a curve onto a surface in order to obtain a 3D curve on a surface.
• Join curve entities. Join two curve endpoints.
• Refine curve. Increase curve detail.
• Rebuild curve. Rebuilds a curve with a user-defined number of points distributing them at a constant distance while still keeping the curve original shape.
• Simplify curve. Reduce the number of points of a curve given the target number or a tolerance.
• Curve to arcs. Starting from any planar curve you can create a new curve made up of a series of accurate arcs.

• C2 continuity surfaces.
• Extrude. Create a surface by extruding a profile along a specified direction.
• Surface extrusion. Create a surface by extruding a cross sectional profile along a specified direction.
• Lathe. Create a surface by removing a profile curve around its X, Y, Z-axis or any user-defined vector.
• RadialSweep. Creates a surface by sweeping one or more profile curves along a rail curve and a common rotational point in space.
• Rule. Create a surface that fits across a number of cross-sectional curves by a linear interpolation.
• Spin. Create a surface that fits across a number of cross-sectional curves by a smooth interpolation.
• Lofting. Create a surface that fits across a number of cross-sectional curves by a spline-controlled interpolation.
• Pipe. Create a surface by sweeping a profile curve along two path curves.
• MultiSweep. Creates a surface by sweeping one or more profile curves between one or more rail curves.
• 3sides. Create a surface that is fitted between four arbitrary boundary curves.
• Coons. Create a surface that is fitted between four arbitrary boundary curves.
• N-Side modeling tool. Create a surface that is fitted between “n” arbitrary boundary curves.
• Curves Network. Create a surface by interpolating a network of curves.
• FillPath. Create a surface by filling one or more selected curves.
• Patch. Create a G1 surface from a list of surface edges and, optionally, from separate curves.
• Close hole. Close a hole in a NURBS surface where the hole is defined as a loop of at least three edges.
• Surface from curves. Create a surface that fits across one or two sets of curves.
• Blending. Create a surface forming a blending between two surface edges.
• Surface Tangency Align modeling tool. Align a surface border to any surface trim edge, with the ability to specify the incident angle between the two surfaces.
• Extend surface. Extend a surface along one or more boundaries for a user-defined distance or to a given curve.
Surface offset. Offset or inset a solid.
• Shell. Shell a solid by just selecting the object to work on and defining which faces shall be made open for the Shell.
• Trim surface. Interactively trim a surface and retain specified regions of the surface while discarding others by projecting a curve on it.
• Trim solid. Interactively trim a solid and retain specified regions of the solid while discarding others by projecting a curve on it.
• Trim Convert. Converts a four-sided trimmed surface into an untrimmed (natural) surface.
• Intersect. Surfaces intersection.
• Intersect CT. Surfaces intersection maintaining Construction Tree.
• Make Manifold. The Make Manifold command produces a manifold solid topology from a non-manifold topology. It deletes excess faces, edges and vertices to get to a manifold topology.
• Interactive Boolean Operations if Intersection, Difference and Union.
• Round. A topology-based technique to build constant or variable radius round while maintaining the Construction History.
• Chamfer. Perform filleting with a linear cross section (constant or variable) rather than a circular cross section.
• Approx Round. A faster round technique at the price of a mathematical approximation.
• Fillet surface. Create a fillet between two intersecting surfaces.
• Surface Refine. Increase detail of surfaces.
• Simplify Surface. Reduce the number of points of a surface given a tolerance.
• Join surfaces. Join two or more surfaces into a single surface.

solidThinking also features an advanced polygonal modeler with support of n-side polygons. It is possible to create and extrude polygons, split faces and edges, refine, decimate, and perform and other operation.

The possibility to convert a NURBS surface into a polygonal model and vice versa is great for virtual reality and video game developers.

The unique implementation of Interactive Subdivision Surfaces with Construction Tree gives the user maximum power for refinement and smoothing of polygonal meshes. solidThinking Subdivision Surfaces fully adheres to the Pixar standard.

• Advanced polygonal modeling with support of n-side polygons.
• Polygonal primitives: sphere, cylinder, torus, cube, plane and disc.
• Create single polygons
• NURBS to poly: tessellate any NURBS surface. Optional creation of quadrilaterals whenever possible and welding of coincident vertices.
• NURBS CVs to poly: create a PolyMesh from the control vertices of a NURBS surface.
• Vertices editing. Translate, rotate, scale, delete, split, welding, normal direction.
• Edges editing. Translate, rotate, scale, smoothing, delete, relax, split.
• Edge welding. Merge coincident edges.
• Faces editing. Translate, rotate, scale, delete, extract, split, normal direction.
• Face normal editing. Invert or unify the specified face normals.
• Refine edges
• Simplify. Reduce the number of faces to a specified percentage of the original, optionally preserving edge sharpness and curvature.
• Fill hole: close holes in a polyhedron using an N-Side polygon.
• Smooth. Applies a smoothing filtering on a polygonal object. Very useful for 3D scanner data processing.
• Interactive Subdivision Surfaces. User-controllable refinement and smoothing of polygonal meshes.
• Advanced tessellation: transforms a NURBS surface in a polygonal mesh with the guarantee that adjacent polygons have perfectly matching edges, so avoiding clefts. Useful when you have to export to CAM software. Total absence of clefts as well as various control parameters permits an accuracy optimization of the resulting mesh at any point.

Analysis tools are useful for finding distances, lengths, areas, and volume. They also allow you to analyze curve/surface curvature and tangency.

solidThinking Curvature Display also offers the possibility to dynamically analyze smoothness, curvature and other important properties of your models by evaluating surface curvature, reflection lines and environment mapping.

• Evaluation tools: distance between two points; length of a curve; length of a part of a curve; interactive curve curvature/tangency; interactive surface curvature/tangency; surface area; volume.
• Surface curvature evaluation shaders for automotive and product design, including shaders using analytical anti-aliasing.
• Mold design false color shader, for evaluating draft angles of mold designs.
• Tolerance check. Detects any gaps between surface patches. Thanks to the Construction Tree, tolerance can be adjusted to make the model "water tight".
• Tools for evaluating draft angles of mold designs.
• Interactive curvature display. Interactive visualization of surface curvature while editing. The following methods: mean curvature, Gaussian curvature, absolute curvature.
• Interactive reflection lines display. Allows to analyze surface smoothness and curvature by using zebra stripes.
Interactive environment mapping display. Allows to analyze the surface curvature by using environment mapping.
• Continuity Check. Allows to check surface continuity at joined edges, and in particular you can check gaps, tangency and curvature at any point.

• Fit points - Create a surface from a point cloud data set.
• PointsCloud from object - Create a PointsCloud given a surface.
• Planar Clouds from PointsCloud - Creates a specified number of points clouds lying on parallel planes from a given points cloud. This command can be useful to simplify a points cloud derived from 3D scanning. Beside a section planes direction, the user can specify either the number of planes, or the distance between planes.
• Curve from PointsCloud - Creates a curve from a points cloud. This tool creates a curve starting from a selected point and approximating the points ordered by minimal distance.
• Minolta Vivid 3D scanner front end - Remotely controls (via SCSI interface) Minolta Vivid 3D scanner. Data can be imported as a point cloud or a polygonal object.
• Advanced MicroScribe - 3D support.
• Sketch on planes - Using Microscribe - 3D scanner, creates point clouds by "sketching" a real object. The tool samples the points derived from the Microscribe - 3D digitizer.

Associative Dimensioning for the automatic creation of horizontal, vertical, aligned linear dimensions, arcs and circle radii, curvature radii or NURBS curves at any given point, diameters, edges, angular dimensions. Leader command or quickly creating leaders (text annotations).

You will realize the great power of the Dynamic Associative Dimensioning when a revision to a drawing comes through, or a design changes. With Associative Dimensioning on your model, you can edit your entities and have the dimensions change as well, in real time.

Connection from the Design to Documentation. You cannot compose drawings and pictures on a virtual sheet of paper and configure plot scale, paper size, plot area and paper orientation. Multiple drawing layouts are possible.

Once you have created your models you can take advantage of a truly comprehensive rendering system for the most advanced of graphics professionals, integrating all industry-leading rendering techniques. The most efficient memory management functions, unlimited output resolution, as well as multi-threaded and multi-processor renderings make solidThinking the perfect tool for generating photo realistic images.

Progressive rendering gives you immediate feedback on the final image with a fast preview of the lighting and materials in the scene; subsequent rendering passes that continue to fill in detail until the final high-quality image is achieved.

Final Gather, an exclusive global illumination method, optimizes quality and performance. Simply press a button and solidThinking will calculate the lighting for you automatically. The increased breadth of functionality introduces means that solidThinking can match the fastest and the best global illumination solutions, and is now significantly faster than other rendering engines for a given quality of image.

• Wireframe.
• Fast hidden-line.
• Flat, Gouraud and Phong shaded.
• Preview scan-line.
• Full scan-line.
• Preview ray-trace.
• Full ray-trace rendering (multi-threaded).
• Hybrid rendering for integrating radiosity with ray-tracing and other rendering methods.
• Preview quality post-processing and full quality post-processing.

• Radiosity for simulating real light effects.
• Progressive simulation allowing to balance speed and accuracy.
• Generation of the solution for a view-dependent illumination model allowing the fastest result possible.
• Support of industry standards for the definition of the luminous intensity distribution of a luminaire.

• Advances parameterizes procedural shaders with high quality noise function.
• Shade trees for combining multiple shaders.
• Color Source, Reflectance Model, Transparency Source, Displacement, Texture Space, Light Source, Background, Foreground, and Post-processing Shaders.
• Highly realistic simulation of a wide range of wood surfaces, for ease of visualizing furniture, doors, cabinets, and even parquet floors.
• Leather shader, giving users the ability to simulate the surface finish of a wide range of leather materials. They can decide on the complexity and detail of the surface of the leather, including creasing, smoothness, color and regularity.
• Multi-layer paints, to simulate the multiple highlight and color shift effects of multi-layer paints used in the automotive industry. Designers can specify the composition of each paint layer to simulate a wide range of paints and finishes including metallic.
• Anisotropic reflectance shader for woven materials, to produce physically based simulations of the anisotropic reflectance properties of woven textiles and materials, such as satin.
• Environment-mapped and mixed backgrounds.
• Environment-mapping (e.g., reflection mapping).
• Wrapped filtered image shader for adjusting color contrast and brightness of textures.
• Interactive transformations (translation, rotations and scale) of textures and materials in the views.
• Procedural and image-based transparency effects.
• Decal support for combining different materials and wrapping images around surfaces.

• Anti-aliasing shader class for applying different snit-aliasing per material.
• Feature following anti-aliasing for the highest-quality image output (brute-force over-sampling to perform extra anti-aliasing around any areas of intensity change).
• Enhanced analytical anti-aliasing while using minimal processing time and resources.

• Unlimited number of lights.
• Ambient, distant, eye, goniometric, point, projector, sky, and spot light sources.
• Area Lights.
• Volumetric lighting effects.
• Global lighting effects using real sky conditions.
• Radiometric or photometric measurement.
• Light sources using goniometric data in lighting industry-standard formats.
• Expanded physically accurate lighting range. Goniometric lights allow users to define accurate light beam shapes (such as fluorescent lights) using manufacturer’s lighting data.
• Perceptual tone mapping, for physically accurate re-creations of the eye’s response to brightness levels.

• Shodow Mapping.
• Shadow ray casting.
• Soft Shadows.
• Shadows cast by semi-transparent objects.
• Hybrid shadow creation, combining ray-tracing and scan-line rendering for fast, efficient production of ray-traced shadows.

• Physically based depth of field.
• Post-Processing depth cue, variable fog and show foregrounds.
• Advanced atmospheric effects.
• Lens flares (Glows, Ghosts, and Halos).
• Direct output of QuickTime VR panoramic and object movies.

• RPC stands for Rich Photo Realistic Content. RPC include people, trees, and furniture, all easily placed within traditional 3D scenes. High quality photographic images combined with minimal polygonal geometry, create the illusion of 3D

Real-time rendering further improves interactivity during the review and visualization phases of design.

Sketch rendering is used to create stylized presentation.

In contrast to photo realistic rendering, the aim of Sketch rendering is not to use the computer to produce an image which looks as close as possible to a photograph, but instead to use the computer to produce an image which is more like a pencil sketch, ink drawing, or painting.

Effects available include:

• "cartoon"
• "color wash"
• "contour"
• "hand drawn"
• "hatch"
• "ink"
• "lines and shadow"
• "mosaic"
• "oil painting"
• "rough pencil"
• "soft pencil"
• "stipple"

solidThinking is open to support third-party renderers through continuously enhanced plug-ins. Already available:

• solidMaxwell. Plug-in for integrating Maxwell Render. Windows and Mac OS X.
• ThinkMan. Plug-in for integrating Photorealistic RenderMan. Windows only.

Animation in solidThinking is based on a simple but powerful technique called Key framing.

A key frame sets the one or more characteristic or attribute of an object (for example, its position) at a given time. Once the user has specified the key frames, solidThinking will generate all the intermediate frames (interpolation) so that an animation can be created.

Attributes that you can animate for any object (including lights) are Translation, Rotation and Scale. For the camera, you can animate Position and Target.

It is also possible to control the interpolation speed and path.

solidThinking supports direct output of QuickTime VR panoramic and object movies.

QuickTime VR is a cross-platform standard, developed by Apple, for presenting:

• Panoramic movies, a series of images from a fixed viewpoint.
• Object movies, a series of images of an object taken from different angles.

The software to view a QuickTime VR movie once creates can be freely obtained from Apple via the internet, if you do not have it already.

solidThinking offers a sophisticated web-authoring environment which allows you to export and integrate your 3D objects or scenes into HTML pages through the Viewpoint Media Player developed by Viewpoint.

This technology creates a compelling and interactive user experience for many e-business applications, from advertising and e-commerce to online customer service and internal training.

Objects can be easily manipulated and visualized with textures, reflections, transparencies, and shadows. Besides, it permits the immediate streaming display of content.

Support for industry standard data formats allows you to share data with other software packages using neutral file formats.

• Color palette RGB and HSL.
• Image Formats: BMP, JPEG, and TIF.
• Import/Export Object Formats: 3D Studio, DWG, DXF, IGES, Lightwave, Maya, Rhino3D, RIB, STEP, STL, VDA-FS, VRML, .obj, Keyshot (.bip).

• Support for different IGES flavors.
• SolidWorks plug-in for importing/exporting solidThinking scene files from/to SolidWorks.
• I/O plug-in for 3DStudioMAX.

The Plug-Ins Development Kit documentation is available for developers and users that want to create their own modeling tools and plug-ins. Code samples are included.