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3DCaliper
3DCaliper for Creo Elements/Pro
Automated analysis of 3D geometry
3DCaliper is a product development tool that helps drive efficient product design by automating the analysis of 3D CAD geometry to check proper wall thickness, minimum clearances, and model variances. Wall thickness is a key design factor that impacts both the quality and manufacturability of production parts and tooling, particularly for products developed using casting, injection mold, or diecast processes.
3DCaliper is a product development tool that helps drive efficient product design by automating the analysis of 3D CAD geometry to check proper wall thickness, minimum clearances, and model variances. Wall thickness is a key design factor that impacts both the quality and manufacturability of production parts and tooling, particularly for products developed using casting, injection mold, or diecast processes.
The appropriate distance between assembly components is also essential to ensure proper fit and function.
By special distance measuring analysis, 3DCaliper is also able to find differences between two similar models, providing easy-to-use and accurate model compare analysis.
Unlike other tools, 3DCaliper supports iterative, problem-based approach - each potential problem in the model can be investigated separately and immediately fixed if needed, without loosing rest of the analysis.
Build product quality & manufacturability into design
3DCaliper allows users to address product quality and manufacturability early in the product development process, before design changes become costly and time consuming. It enables designers and manufacturers to quickly and accurately perform measurement analyses on complex CAD models, identify potential problem areas and make design modifications as needed.
Wall thickness measurements allow users to check for fill of the casting, mold or die as well as part quality. The proximity measurement functionality enables users to verify component clearances for proper design-for-assembly. Variance measurements provide an automated identification of changes between model iterations to quickly focus, and therefore speed up, downstream application rework.
Product features
- Works directly on 3D CAD models
- Easy to use analysis wizard to setup analysis criteria
- Color-coded graphics and associated tabular results
- Filtering, grouping and documentation tools available to view, verify and annotate results
- Results can be published in PDF or HTML format, or exported as native CAD features
- Operates on solid/surface/hybrid CAD models
- Accepts STEP or IGES imported CAD geometry
- English, German and Japanese user interface and documentation
Product benefits
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Powerful 3D CAD geometry analysis
3DCaliper performs a measurement analysis of the CAD geometry directly on the model and eliminates the traditional need to create and work with triangulated representations, thereby saving time and providing more accurate results.
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Automate part & tool design verification
Complex design geometry can be checked for wall thickness and clearances in dramatically less time than the manual checking method. Improve efficiency by eliminating the error prone and time intensive manual process of digitally cross sectioning CAD models or creating part prototypes for destructive testing.
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Design-for-manufacture product development
3DCaliper addresses critical manufacturability issues early in the product development process and helps drive cost effective part and tool design decisions. 3DCaliper enables users to check complex CAD models wall thickness to avoid retooling changes and minimize material scrap.
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Design for part & tool quality
Part and tool designers can test design concepts for quality criteria before the tool is cut, when the cost of change is minimal. 3DCaliper provides an automated verification of 3D CAD models that allows parts and tools to be designed for form, fit and function by providing results on key measurements.
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Shorten time to market
Reduce design and manufacturing cycle times by identifying and addressing key quality and manufacturability concerns in the preliminary design stage. The significant time and cost savings further benefit companies by enabling them to capture market opportunities.
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Easy to learn and use
3DCaliper takes CAD users only minutes to learn and does not require analysis experience. Little experience is necessary to interpret graphical reports showing color-coded measurement results.
Product Upgrades
Improvements in version 4.2
- Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 and Creo Elements/Pro support
- Windows 7 support
- Analysis profiles - It is possible to define profiles for analysis in a config file. By selecting profile's name from the list the type and the name of the analysis, limits and the geometry is defined.
- Improvements of reports - Landscape format of the report is added and model's units are displayed in reports.
- Results managemens - New result's state called hidden is added. The mask option for filtering results can be defined by different filter's types. Subresults of zero critical distance marked as corner are not taken for calculation the critical distance of the result.
- Improvements of filters - Corner filter was improved and for the Clearance analysis it is called Contact filter.
- System variables in config file - System variables can substitute paths defined localy while config file is stored on a network drive.
- Color scale changes - Color scale can be defined for negative values too. It is used in the Model Compare analysis, where material which was added can be displayed by different color than material that was removed.
- Focus level option - Focus level 100%, 50% or 30% can be defined in the config file.
Improvements in version 4.1
3DCaliper 4.1 includes two additional analysis modules -
Thick Walls and
Model Compare. The Thick Walls analysis is equal to Wall Thickness analysis outside the limit (above the upper limit only) from the version 3.1. It allows to detect the areas where the model is too thick. The Model Compare analysis is designed to find differences between geometries in two similar parts.
- The Model Compare results - The Model Compare analysis detects and reports two different types of results: those, where material was added and those where material was removed. They are displayed and handed by the same way, but the critical values have opposite signs.
Improvements in version 4.0
The 3DCaliper version 4.0 has brought improved algorithm to speed up computation time and decrease the memory requirements, but it included only two modules and the functinality of the version 3.1 was not fully covered. For the users who upgrade from the version 3.1 the list of new features of the previous version 4.0 follows:
- Related surfaces and features highlight - Improvement, that highlight related surfaces and features not only by contours, but by surfaces as well.
- Focus including result names - The result names are taken into account when focusing, to allow easy identification of the results on screenshots.
- Adjusting focus level in Report Wizard - User is allowed to set "partial" focus when creating report screenshots. In 3.1 and earlier, the result was only centered on the screen and zoomed as much as possible. Now it can be zoomed for 50%, 30% so more of its neighborhood is visible on the screenshot.
- 3DCaliper version in analysis summary - The analysis summary table include the version and build of 3DCaliper, that was used to compute analysis.
- Related surface selection - It is possible to select surface in the model and highlight all results in the results table, that are related to the selected surface.
- Enhanced Assembly Options dialog - Assembly is displayed in tree (instead in list) in the Assembly option dialog. It is possible to select not only on Part level, but on Subassembly level as well.
- Clearance to subassembly - The clearance analysis can be done not only to one component (part), but to a selected subassembly too.
- Improved sorting of results - Results can be sorted not only by distance, size or name, but by model coordinate (x,y or z) as well.
- Language selection on installation - Installer allows to select languages support to be installed. It is also possible to define default language during the installation.
- New options - There are several new options for 3DCaliper.
- Corner filter options - User can switch this filter on and off and set up the filter options from now.
- Read-only default color scale - There is an option to make default color scale read-only to prevent users to change "company standard".
- Displaying PDF help - Option to choose between displaying help as CHM or as PDF. If the 3DCaliper is installed on network drive, the CHM help does not work correctly (because of error in CHM viewer).
- Filter Tooltip - The tooltip with filter description is displayed when user moves a cursor above the filter icon in the result table.
- Improved Save Model function - The save button in the Main form is enabled only after some changes with results were done. This will prevent unnecessary creating new version of the model (save disk space, prevent check in/check out problems).
- Warning on Batch Analysis - The batch mode can be set up so that no results will be saved and the model is closed afterwards. To prevent accidental result loss, warning is displayed, when user tries to run such analysis.