Version 15 is a customer focussed release but in these days of rapid software development and technology advancement, that's never a bad thing. Al Dean takes a look.

Taking stock of the CAD/CAM industry, it's clear that those that operate heavily within the space fall into a number of camps. There are those general purpose CAD tools that provide some basic form of CAM support to generate NC machining code from the 3D data. Then there are those that are heavily engaged in the production environment, those which are developed to solve real issues that occur when taking parts from geometry to a manufactured component. One of the leading organisations within this category is Vero software and its flagship application set, VISI. VISI has been around for many years and the depth of knowledge and level of detail in process and task support for the mould, die and machining industry is evident. But as with all such systems, a few releases ago, the company began a process of looking at the system and finding areas in which it could be improved - these ranged from a complete rework of the interface to bring it up to current users' expectations, through to many more technically lead areas, such as geometry definition, modification and manufacturing process support.

User interface

As we've said, the VISI interface has had a lot of rework over the last few releases and it looks clean and fresh and that always helps with initial training and knowledge retention as you work with the system. That said, there have been a few interesting changes made in this release that are worth discussing. The first also relates to assisting those working with the system. At the base of the UI, you'll find a small text entry box. This allows you to quickly type in a search string that pops up a list of commands that match that string. For example, typing BLE will give you all of the blending commands. It's going to be very useful for those that are casual users or those looking to expand their knowledge outside of what they do everyday.

Geometry display has also seen a lot of work. Reflection mapping is now available, allowing you to use any bitmap image or industry standard zebra striping for surface evaluation. On the same subject, threaded holes are now displayed using a threaded bitmap representation - which is going to be really useful to those designing complex moulds and mould bases, as it'll be immediately clear whether a hole is threaded or not - you can also use a customisable method of colouring faces to specific hole types (company standards often differ) making design data less ambiguous.