Review of 3D Model/Geometry/Shape Searching Software?

[LawrenceS]

I have been investigating different 3D/geometry/shape/model searching software to be able more accurately and quickly search our database.  I am finding that there are several companies that claim to do this and would like to hear peoples experience and opinions are.

Some questions:

• How well does it work?  What features do you like?
• If you are using it why did you choose it above other options?
• Does it integrate with Creo?  Windchill?  if so how well?
• Anything else?
• Any other programs that do this?

#	Software Name	Company Name
1	3DSearchIT	Geometric
2	CADSeek	iSeek Corporation
3	ModelSearch	??? (not sure since I only see VARs selling it)
4	Geolus	Siemens PLM
5	Shape Indexer via ModelCheck	PTC (though very basic, barely supported, and seemingly never updated)
6	Bingo	Enfinio
7	???
8	???

Thanks!

[andrewhood]

Did you ever see CADENAS PARTsolutions?

cadenas.de

partsolutions.com (US domain)

We are a geometry search tool and parts management system that integrates with Creo and Windchill directly.

If you are going to Liveworx 2019, come by our booth, we are there every year and have a great partnership with PTC.

[JHall]

@LawrenceS 

We did some extensive testing at a previous company with Bingo.  It seemed to be pretty good, and identified a large number of duplicate or near duplicate models we had in our system.  It did take a while to 'build' the index it used to search, but as I recall we did that over a weekend, or perhaps overnight. It integrated with CREO just fine and with Windchill.  I did like how it would show you a group of models and the percentages of similarity between them.  For example ABC.par and XYZ.par may be named differently but have 93% of the geometry the same.  You could then evaluate a group of models to see if you could purge some unneeded ones (which was our goal).

In the end the company did not move forward with it, but I thought it would have been very valuable to clean up a lot of data that was in poor shape. 

James

[STEVEG]

Lawrence and I work at the same company and we were both involved in the software selection group.  We decided on ModelSearch (MoS) from Techsoft.  We looked at Bingo among the others he listed.

One of the reasons we choose MoS was because it was the most integrated add-on to both Creo and Windchill at the time.

Lawrence can give you a more detailed response.

[TomU]

@STEVEG & @LawrenceS,

How's it going with ModelSearch?  Still happy with it?  Any thing you wish you would have know before implementing?

[Chris3]

Don't know if you read it, but they wrote up a review over here:

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Windchill/Techsoft-Model-Search/td-p/612910

[STEVEG]

Yes, we are still happy with it.  They are very open to suggestions to develop their software. That is all one can hope for, right?

@LawrenceS has been off due to a newborn so I don't know when he would be able to answer.

Generally we are happy with it.

[LawrenceS]

@TomU,

MoS has been very helpful and fairly responsive to suggestions however there are still some negatives:

• As of our version, the filtering is very awkward.  The functionality has been significantly improved upon in our version however still needs to be more intuitive.
• Results cannot be exported or number of results dynamically changed by the user, however, I think both of these are being improved upon in the next version.  We asked them to custom make an CSV output that has proved to be extremely important for improvement projects so further analysis can be done and even some good old fashion excel 'customization'.  This means we have the tool inside Creo, the WC search tool, and the excel search tool.  This may go away as more functionality is integrated with their main tools.
• We have had some significant issues with the Creo part not working on higher builds of Creo 4 due to some changes that PTC made.  It is not that MoS is not compatible but that we have not been able to allot the necessary time to complete troubleshooting and fix the issue due to conflicting priorities.  I don't blame them for this as this could be more on us.  However, it does show that it is another piece of software that needs to be maintained and considered for compatibility.
• If MoS goes down it prevents the WC actions menu from working properly.  This also includes the right-click menu.  This is because there are a couple of entries in the right-click menu that are specifically for MoS.  The first time this was troublesome to diagnose but after that, we learned that it was MoS that went down and the service probably just needed to be restarted.  This is fairly rare so I wouldn't be too concerned about it however it is good to know about.
• The software works decently out of the box, however, it is tricky to tweak and customize if you want to optimize it for your database.  For example, most of our parts are mostly symmetric around an axis and it would be nice to optimize the search around this fact, however it is tricky.
• Some users have disabled the Creo tool because it interferes with how the Creo UNDO button works.  This is not a big issue for most users as Creo undo in models is not fabulous anyway, however it did affect some users who heavily use UNDO.  Techsoft did actually make a modification in the next version to help users be able to on the fly turn it on/off simply, which was helpful.
• The duplication analysis wasn't super helpful because we have a lot of duplicate parts that may have different material or other reasons for the identical geometry which are legitimate.  Don't expect to look at a duplicate table and think that half can just be removed.  I think that this would be a challenge to overcome with any software.
• I am very happy that they have been eager to improve the software.
• Help documentation is helpful and fairly comprehensive.  Their service website is quite good.
• We had to go through another company, which proved to be an awkward route and probably not ideal.  This may be because we were either the first or one of the first companies to use MoS in the US.  I think there is a US reseller now, which would probably be a better route.

This doesn't mean that we are not happy with the software, but I am trying to give a straightforward reply to your question.  We have found the software very helpful.  I may think of something else, but this is just off the top of my head.