#SW17 Product Definition and User Influence: Marlon Banta
Who decides what’s new in SOLIDWORKS? Product Definition team members are a major component in determining and defining enhancements and new functionality included within the SOLIDWORKS products each year. They meet face-to-face with SOLIDWORKS customers to discuss what’s working, what isn’t, and what they would like to see in the future. These customer visits are fantastic opportunities for you to connect with SOLIDWORKS directly, and let us know what we can do to help make your jobs easier. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be talking with members of the Product Definition team for an inside look at some of the ways SOLIDWORKS 2017 was directly defined by user influence like yours!
For SOLIDWORKS 2017, Marlon worked on two different features, Offloaded Simulation and Network Rendered Animations; “Through countless customer visits and a review of customer data, we’ve consistently seen a lot of users who work in an office environment containing many networked computers.”
One of suggestion that many users expressed is to “not have their work interrupted my computationally intensive processes within the software. In this case they include running simulations and rendering animations.” Another request from users was to be able to speed up their work within SOLIDWORKS. Lastly, “many users expressed the sentiment that it seems odd to have a network of computers accessible to them but to be unable to benefit from the computation power within a network” The new features Marlon worked on helps answer these requests.
Offloaded Simulation lets the user to offload the equation solve portion of Simulation to another computer within the network. “Though the overall solution time may actually increase by a small margin, having this computationally intensive process offloaded to another machine makes it possible for the user to work on other tasks within Solidworks without being bogged down by the simulation solving.”
Frame Network Rendered Animations allows the user to “distribute the frames of a rendered animation to up to 10 computers on their network. The time savings can be significant, in some instances we have seen seven-hour rendered animations take only 47 min. to complete.” Each frame of an animation is sent to another machine to be rendered allowing them to be process in parallel. “Times will, of course, vary based on many factors, but distributing a rendered animation such that each frame is processed on a different machine will vastly accelerate the render time and allow the user to access the computational power within their network.”
“For just about any project in SOLIDWORKS we are very fortunate in two ways. First, we have an incredible user base that is always willing to work with us to help us understand their needs and their experience using SOLIDWORKS. From submitting enhancement requests, to participating in the forum, to participating in our beta program to hosting product definition customer visits (where we get to meet customers face-to-face) our users have always been very helpful and influential in guiding the development of the software. It’s always satisfying to reward our customers’ efforts in participating in the development of SOLIDWORKS by implementing functionality that significantly benefits their work.Secondly, I am very fortunate to work with such a great development team. Our developers are some of the best in the world and they always go the extra mile to make sure that our projects meet the customer’s needs.”
As always, thanks for reading! Let us know what you think about the SOLIDWORKS Offloaded Simulation and Frame Network Rendered Animations in SOLIDWORKS 2017 in the comments below!
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