When collaborating on a design, there are just so many blood vessels you can pop before you scare your co-workers to jaw-tensing tears. It can be frustrating. Collaboration and discussion about a design should be simple, visual, and not leave you feeling completely defeated… Get ready for this.
CADFaster is taking on design collaboration and their approach couldn’t be more intriguing. A light-weight .exe with everything you need. Tuomas Holma, VP Sales and Marketing for CADFaster, gave us a special hands-on demonstration to show the feature-rich action of the application and how it works over the web.
CADFaster|Collaborate
What you’re about to see is Tuomas working in CADFaster with a model exported from SolidWorks. He begins by starting a collaborative review session of the design.
After this, Tuomas also went over the Revit side of the CADFaster appplication. You are able to open a large data set, walkthrough, measure, and create section of the environment. All of this happens as you share the experience across the web – discussing, commenting and changing visual properties of the model as you walk about. It is nothing but impressive.
The .exe created from the export of the model from the CAD platform condenses the data down considerably, making it easy to send via email or share via a network or web folder. The magic making this happen is the HOOPS 3D Framework Open HSF Architecture for data exchange and compression. The file can be shared in the collaborative mode by a maximum of 10 people and as you saw in the video, the discussion and viewing all happens in realtime.
CADFaster Pricing
They currently have a free viewer available for download that provides viewing options for STEP, DWG, DXF, IGES and HSF files.
CADFaster|Collaborate will be available for SolidWorks and Revit soon, with support for all major CAD platforms within the next 12 months. I’ll post pricing information here once I’ve received it.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this software. It honestly made my jaw drop when seeing all the functionality Tuomas was showing.
