CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
22 February 2007
Product News
VX Introduces New Inlay Wizard for Product Designers
VX Corporation, specializing in CAD/CAM for plastic products and molds, announces the new Inlay wizard for producing inlaid shapes or raised bosses such as company logos or text on product surfaces.
Applying Raised Bosses or Inlays
VX CAD/CAM offers true hybrid modeling functionality, and VX customers use this power to define highly complex product shapes with curvatures intended to lend good ergonomics and appearance. However in today's quality conscious world, style without substance is meaningless. The devil is in the details and one of the detail problems that designers often hit is the need to apply a shape such as text or a logo as either a slightly raised boss or inlay.
It's necessary to produce the inlay geometry accurately in CAD models for the purposes of manufacturing and especially important for mold designers for producing injection molded parts. Even on flat surfaces, a lot of effort is required of the designer to ensure manufacturability. The same task on a multi-curvature surface is even more time consuming using "traditional" modeling tools, and the little devils can be error prone.
Exactly What the Customer Wanted
VX has introduced a "wizard" solution to the problem and a once tedious task is now easy. Working in tandem with VX's extraordinary "wrap" command, which can actually wrap a planar Sketch onto any face curvature, the new inlay wizard can accept any shape or 3D text to produce a subtle inlay or slightly raised boss in seconds - complete with user-specified draft relief and blend filleting, as one parametric feature. The parameters of the feature can be edited via the history tree at any time. Bob Fisher, VX Vice President Product Management & Business Development, said "This is another exciting new tool we have developed in response to requests from our product design customers, yet other designers have also found it invaluable, especially mold designers that receive files produced in other CAD systems by their customers. These mold makers win contracts because they can use VX to modify just about anything to make a mold which often includes adding features that their customers were unable to model with their CAD programs."
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