In Windchill 10.0 PTC is introducing new enterprise top down design capabilities. This great new capability allows non-CAD users to edit or create product structures (tied to CAD), perhaps to capture a new product design concept or change. Once satisfied with their design choices he/she has the power to propagate these changes (or ideas) down to the CAD assembly, creating new CAD structures which can seamlessly be passed along to the design engineer, where the update CAD design is retrieved and the more detailed design work can be completed.
Some of the key capabilities in Windchill 10.0 that make this possible include:
- The integration of visualization with the new product structure browser
- New flexibility to create/modify CAD driven structures
- The ability to selectively specify whether structure changes should be propagated to the related CAD data and a new build process that makes it happen.
- Simultaneous creation of new parts and related CAD documents with the New Part UI.
- Introduction of the Structure Compare tool that allows for the side-by-side comparison of Part Structures and CAD tools
Here’s a short video which captures this new 10.0 capability in action:
http://communities.ptc.com/videos/1665
Windchill 10.0 enterprise top down design is planned to initially support Creo Elements/Pro 5, CATIA V5 and NX CAD authoring applications.
