According to Jim Eardly, U.S. Sales Director for KISTERS, 3D configurators are gaining more influence on the competition. “Customers and their sales staff expect more than just one variant,” Eardly explained. “They are looking for details that are as realistic as possible in order to present a view of the end product that is more true-to-life from all angles. The use of 3DViewStation is particularly well established in the automotive and architectural sectors. Many of our customers use photorealistic renderings to authentically depict the nature of their products and better highlight unique selling points. This naturally includes attributes such as transparency and luminosity.”

“KISTERS 3DViewStation offers new features from the areas of lighting, light and glare effects that complete the visual post-processing portfolio,” Eardly added. “Materials and textures have been available for quite some time to create a detailed and vivid representation of CAD models.” According to Eardly, light and shadow effects are brand new and provide even more realistic scenes to achieve greater clarity and three-dimensionality. Headlights, for example, can be made to glow at night with typical transparency using glare effects.

With KISTERS 3DViewStation, the staging of complex processes and products is very successful, as they can be quickly visualized in new perspectives, combinations or environments. Renderings are amazingly similar to conventional product photography and are more cost-effective in the medium term. Once CAD data from the design department is available, it can be used in further iterative processes in the future in a cost-saving manner.

Here is an overview of the main improvements:

New and enhanced file formats:

• 3D Import: Parasolid 34.0, NX 2007, Solid Edge 2022 und SolidWorks 2022
• 2D Import: CATIA V5-6R2022 (R32), Solid Edge 2022, SolidWorks 2022 (SP0), NX 1992, 1996, 2000, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2015

New and enhanced functions & features:

• CATIA: PMI reference to solids
• Light sources on node level: allow e.g. inner parts of a car to render nicely in a night scene
• Night scene settings
• API only: New Glare effects. Light sources will appear more realistic in the night
• Setting to load prototype views
• Setup creates backup of presets.xml
• enhanced and accelerated file format recognition
• Copy text from 2D files to clipboard
• Import setting to load PMIs as ‚always on top‘
• Enhanced: Shadow rendering
• Layer support for 2D documents

Known for its modern user-interface, high performance viewing, advanced analysis and integration capabilities into leading systems, 3DViewStation ships with current and mature importers for a broad range of 3D and 2D formats including Catia, NX, Creo, SolidWorks, SolidEdge, Inventor, Revit, JT, 3D-PDF, STEP, DWG, DXF, DWF, MS Office and many more.

The latest developments of 3DViewStation can be reviewed in more detail at:

https://www.3dviewstation.com/news/blog.html

According to Eardly, KISTERS 3DViewStation is continuously enhanced in response to customer needs and requirements. It is available as Desktop, VR-Edition and HTML5 WebViewer product versions plus the online collaboration tool VisShare. All product flavors are intended to be used together with a PLM, ERP or other management system product configuration or service and spare part applications, providing all necessary APIs. For cloud, portal and web solutions, there is an HTML5-based WebViewer solution available, which does not require client installation. All file formats can be used in combination with the intelligent navigation and hyperlinking features to address the needs of complex integration scenarios.