Innovate style and differentiate
Design better products in less time
Create stunning presentations quickly
Elegant and comfortable user interface
Matchless construction history: experiment, invent, create
Comprehensive curve creation
Complete set of surface and solid modeling tools
Optimized organization of the scene
Interactive analysis tools for improved quality of your models
All industry-leading rendering techniques
Associative dimensioning and plotting
Efficient data exchange
| From your sketches to the final surfaces, solidThinking is a comprehensive modeling, analysis, and rendering environment that delivers all the necessary tools for the creation of high-quality, manufacturable 3D models and the power to render them with unsurpassed photo-realism. Based on a revolutionary industry-leading Construction History technology, the modeling process in solidThinking grants you the greatest freedom to experiment with shapes and innovate. |  |
Because productivity does not simply depend on the power of the tools you are provided with, solidThinking has been developed with the fundamental concept that the ease of use of the tools is equally important to their power.
solidThinking lets you work in an intuitive and comfortable manner, allowing you to create complex scenes in the fastest way possible. The name itself expresses our aim: designing a tool for you to give shape to your ideas quickly and easily.
Full NURBS power with an interface designed by designers
Full NURBS-based modeling and Construction History make solidThinking a matchless tool for designers and graphics professionals. NURBS are capable of representing any desired shape, both analytic and free form, with flexibility and precision that are the standard in most technical applications of 3D modeling. In addition, the customizable user interface enhances the power of solidThinking by making these powerful tools easy to use, and creating a fluid modeling experience. All of your tools and working environments are at your fingertips, and every action provides instant input and feedback loops for an accurate and liberating design process.
The basic layout of solidThinking user interface can be customized with great flexibility, so that you can easily find the ideal configuration for your project. Take advantage of the interactivity of full and complex OpenGL support while designing your models, assigning materials, and positioning lights, to achieve the best results quicker than ever.
| Advanced grids, snaps, construction planes, layers, and an informative World Browser provide access to all of the technical and organizational tools needed for complex and precise modeling. With solidThinking you can define up to four different grids, each with its own origin and spacing, grid type, and color. The numerous snap options for snapping to points, curves, midpoints, tangents, and incremental manipulations provide invaluable construction aids, while the three-axis, interactive snapping in the 3D views makes designing in perspective a reality. |  |
Construction Tree: try it once and you will never do without it!
The Construction Tree is a fundamental structure of solidThinking. It gives you real-time updates when modifications are made to points, curves, parameters or entire objects. This way you can easily evaluate more design alternatives, thanks to this ease of manipulation at the core of every model built in solidThinking.
 Experiment with new shapes and unleash your creativity with solidThinking quickly and effortlessly editing points on parametric objects, changing parameters with instant feedback, and inserting, removing, and replacing source objects at will. Manipulate both the parameters and points of all objects freely. And never forget the steps involved in construction - the entire tree is saved inside the file and is accessible at any time. Once you have experienced how the Construction Tree improves your productivity you will not do without it. |  |
The pictures on the right show you some of the great advantages of the Construction Tree: once we have performed the boolean operations, we can still modify the two solids, and the changes are instantly and dynamically updated.
| The most complete NURBS curve toolset with parametric controls for all curves, including seamless support for high order (2-7) curves, weighting, analytic circles and arcs, and interactive "comb plot" curve analysis. Build curves from points using freeform NURBS, continuity controlled MetaCurves, and multi-entity curve objects. Extract complex curves from surface isoparms, edges, silhouettes, and surface intersections. Work fluidly with common construction methods like joining, splitting, blending, and filleting. Edit any type of curve at the point level, and even edit curves in a point-independent method like the bezier-type curve editor, or directly apply any of a suite of deformation tools. |  |
Powerful and innovative modeling tools in a multiplatform solution
solidThinking offers the most comprehensive set of surface creation tools of any modeling program available for both Win and Mac platforms, including sophisticated tools like curves networks, Multisweep and Railsweep , n-sided patching, blending, fillets, surface intersections in history, automatic boolean operations, interactive trimming of surfaces and solids, trim conversions, rebuilding of curves and surfaces and many others.
The pictures show a simple example of the variable radius fillet command allowing G3 curvature continuous blending.
The seamless integration of solid modeling tools and technology into a Class-A surfacing suite further distinguishes solidThinking. Combining the best of both modeling worlds allows designers to create complex, multi-surface shapes in new and innovative ways, while engineers can extend their surfacing capabilities without loosing any solid modeling precision and tolerance control. Creating and manipulating solids in solidThinking is as natural as working with all other NURBS surfaces and curves, with the added advantage of point-level editing and constant construction history maintenance.
Showing the true range of unique and powerful tools in solidThinking, the Make Manifold tool seamlessly bridges the gap between a high-end surface modeler and advanced solids creation, while maintaining the highest level of interactivity for the designer and engineer.
In a non-manifold environment, the intermediate stages in a construction process do not have to be a closed solid (as with a manifold solid modeler). The Make Manifold command produces a manifold solid or cellular topology from a non-manifold topology. This tool automatically deletes excess faces, edges and vertices to get to achieve a manifold topology, and maintains the interactive history connections of the Construction Tree, granting the designer the power to evaluate any design alternatives.
The Make Manifold power and flexibility can best be explained by following how surfaces can be combined to construct a simple mouse starting from few curves.
The Shelling command allows user to create a shell and define its thickness by just selecting the faces you need to remove. Wall thickness can be easily changed in the Modeling Tool panel, and includes full support for positive or negative offsets.
The Solid offset command allows you to offset or inset a solid on all of its faces, or just an interactively selected few. With robust options for automatically rounding edges to maintain offset distances, and precise control of solid enclosure tolerances, the Solid Offset provides yet another advanced solid modeling tool to insure easy tooling, molding and manufacturing across a range of design requirements.
Intuitive Organization and Management of the Scene
No matter the complexity or simplicity of a project file in solidThinking , the hierarchical browser system keeps track of everything. Drag-and-drop simplicity sets the standard for scene organization, and the World Browser supports this intuitive method of organizing for objects, layers, and groups. The History Tree graph illustrates the flow of creation for every object, and allows for easy sub-selections of source objects and actions with OpenGL "ghosting" to show manipulations to hidden objects. The complete, internal library manager allows for quick access to frequently used models and shaders across all projects.
Analyze and improve the quality of your design
solidThinking includes a full suite of advanced analysis tools to calculate area, volume, length, and curvature, as well as a real-time, shaded surface analysis display system. Surface curvature display, reflection lines and environment mapping can be used to visually analyze smoothness, curvature and other important properties of your models while you edit them.
The Curvature Plot command displays a white graph attached to curves showing how the curvature varies along the curve.
The Tolerance check modeling tool detects any gaps between surface patches. Thanks to the Construction Tree, tolerance can be adjusted to make the model "water tight" at any point.
All industry-leading rendering techniques in one environment
The efficient memory management functions, unlimited output resolution, and multi-threaded/multi-processor rendering ensure the highest productivity.
solidThinking also features completely non-photorealistic, or "sketch" based rendering techniques. These methods cannot be adequately described with words, but they allow even the most technically complex model or scene to be presented as a hand drawing, a simple shaded cartoon, or even an ink and oil paint study. This softens the appearance of the design and encourages design freedom by not showing a "locked in" shape or image.
solidThinking rendering engine uses all of these technologies within the industry-leading shading system. This model provides a highly flexible and versatile environment for the specification of material and light properties in your scene, and even allows for high-resolution analysis rendering using surface-curvature evaluation shaders for automotive and product design.
Thanks to the open architecture, solidThinking supports other rendering systems - including PhotoRealisticRenderMan and Maxwell Render - that can be seamlessly integrated in the environment for added power and flexibility.
Just as in a photographic set, you can position and control an unlimited number of light sources (including area, volumetric, and goniometric lights). The full, shaded OpenGL display system provides real-time previews of both the material and lighting characteristics of your scene.
The keyframe animation environment brings motion to your images by introducing Construction Tree-independent manipulations over time.
Output of QuickTime VR movies can be used for presenting panoramic movies (a series of images from a fixed viewpoint) and object movies (a series of images of an object taken from different angles) solidThinking offers other advanced features such as feature-following anti-aliasing (FFAA), which brilliantly performs extra anti-aliasing around features in the image, and image post-processing to add effect such as lens flares and depth of field.
solidThinking exports and integrates your 3D objects or scenes into HTML pages through the VET streaming format. 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. Click here to see some Viewpoint VET examples.
Associative Dimensioning and Plotting
2D/3D dimensioning system for the automatic creation of horizontal, vertical, aligned linear dimensions, arcs and circle radii, curvature radii of NURBS curves at any given point, diameters, edges, angular dimensions. Leader command for quickly creating leaders (text annotations).
The power of the Dynamic Associative Dimensioning is realized 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 dimensioning change as well, in real time.
You can then compose drawings and pictures on a virtual sheet of paper and configure plot scale, paper size, plot area, paper orientation. Multiple drawing layouts are possible.
Efficient Data Exchange and CAD collaboration
The continuously updated import/export plug-ins include IGES, STEP, DWG, DXF, DWG, 3DS, 3DStudio Max, Lightwave, Maya, Rhino, RIB, SolidWorks, STL, VET, VRML and many others.
