October 2018

October has been a very busy month for the DriveWorks team!

We’ve been on the road supporting our resellers at their SOLIDWORKS 2019 launch events.

Thursday 18th October was a very popular date on the calendar and lots of our resellers invited us to join them.

We really enjoy attending these valuable events and we’re pleased to say that yesterday we attended 6 SOLIDWORKS 2019 launch events in 5 countries!

Phil was also in Warsaw, Poland, delivering a training class.

Here’s a short round-up of each event:

CONNECT by Visiativ – Lyon, France

Maria and Thomas travelled to the Groupama Stadium in Lyon, France, to join Visiativ at their annual customer event.

CONNECT by Visiativ is an event for companies that want to boost their growth and competitiveness by placing digital at the heart of their strategy. It focuses on the sharing of experiences and technological innovation by bringing together users and general / functional management of industrial companies, retail or services.

We were delighted that Christophe Demunyck and Alexandre Salmon from Visiativ, both DriveWorks Certified Professionals, joined Maria and Thomas on our booth.

Christophe also did a live presentation covering Design Automation and CPQ in the Demo Zone. Attendees were given audio equipment so that they could clearly hear and concentrate on the presentation above the general noise levels generated by the 1000+ attendees!

Maria and Thomas said it was great to meet some new people and also to talk to existing DriveWorks customers who were keen to show us their DriveWorks configurators. Watch our blog for future success stories!

Design Solutions Innovatiedag 2018 – Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Tom and Ollie joined Design Solutions in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, at their Innovatiedag 2018 event.

The theme was innovation and the event kicked off with a great welcome presentation by Arnaud Kooij to over 200 attendees! This was followed by Berry Mulder discussing the new functions and enhancements in SOLIDWORKS 2019.

Geert Hendrikx and Jeroen van der Burg, Applications Engineers at Design Solutions and Certified DriveWorks Professionals, hosted a great DriveWorks breakout session. They discussed how to save time and money by using product configurators and automating design processes.

Simon Booker, Vice President – SOLIDWORKS Global, wrapped the day up with an insight into how 3D CAD and related applications will develop in the coming years.

COFFEE Technology Forum – Munich, Germany

Glen and Ian were in Munich, supporting Coffee at one of their Technology Forum events.

The event was at a really cool venue, the Cineplex in Germering, and it was great to see DriveWorks and SOLIDWORKS 2019 shown on the silver screen!

Tobias Grebe and Torsten Seelig from Coffee gave attendees a great introduction to DriveWorks software. They also held a DriveWorks Solo hands-on session which was very popular.

This is the third Coffee Technology Forum event we’ve supported. Earlier in the month, Mark and Tom joined Coffee in Dortmund and Cologne.

If you’d like to attend one of Coffee’s events, there’s still time to sign up and join them in Haiger or Hannover.

TriMech Technology Day – North Carolina, USA

Heather was in Greensboro, North Carolina at the TriMech Technology Day. She was joined on our booth by Devin Martin, an Applications Engineer at TriMech.

The event was held at the Proximity Hotel and lots of people joined TriMech to learn about what’s new in SOLIDWORKS 2019 and test their skills in the Model Mania competition.

There were lots of DriveWorks customers at the event and Heather really enjoyed chatting to them about the great things they’re doing with DriveWorks.

Heather also caught up with James Adkins, group leader of the Burlington Alamance County SOLIDWORKS User Group (BACON SWUG). At SOLIDWORKS World 2018, we presented James with the DriveWorks Award for SWUGN Leader of the Year due to his commitment to education.

MLC CAD Systems SOLIDWORKS 2019 Launch Event – Texas, USA

For the past week, Mark has been in Texas, USA, supporting MLC CAD Systems at their SOLIDWORKS 2019 launch events.

On Tuesday 16th October he joined them at the Alamo Beer Company in San Antonio and on Wednesday 17th October, he was at Cooper’s Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que in Fort Worth.

Yesterday, he attended their final event which was held at Main Event Entertainment in Austin.

MLC CAD held all of their events at fantastic venues and we were pleased to see so many people joining them to learn about the latest updates in SOLIDWORKS 2019.

Mark spoke to lots of attendees at the events and he also caught up with some DriveWorks customers, including Rob Miller of Chatsworth Products.

It was also great to catch up with Travis Jones, Applications Expert at MLC CAD, and hear more about what’s he’s been up to since we last saw him at DriveWorks World 2018.

Solid Solutions Group SOLIDWORKS 2019 Launch Event – Cambridge, UK

Over the past month we’ve attended 8 of the Solid Solutions Group‘s SOLIDWORKS 2019 launch events. We’ve joined them in Durham, Doncaster, Manchester, Bath, Southampton, Droitwich and Leicester.

Yesterday, Laura and Oliver supported them at another event which was held at the Imperial War Museum in Cambridge.

Solid Solutions always host their SOLIDWORKS launch events at really cool venues and the Imperial War Museum didn’t disappoint. Not only was there lots of cool war memorabilia, there were also plenty of classic cars on display!

It was a great event and Laura and Ollie had the opportunity to speak to a lot of attendees and tell them all about DriveWorks design automation and CPQ for manufacturing.

Training with DPS Software – Warsaw, Poland

On Wednesday 17th October, Phil travelled to Warsaw to exhibit at the DPS Forum 2018.

The event focused on Industry 4.0 and the affects that digitization can have on indirect production areas and production upstream development areas.

They also discussed what’s new in SOLIDWORKS 2019 and gave attendees the opportunity to try Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies.

It was a brilliant event and 540 people attended!

Yesterday, Phil spent the day at DPS’ offices, delivering a DriveWorks training session to their Technical Support team. 13 members of their team physically attended his training session and 4 people joined in via a web meeting. This was a great turn out and it shows DPS’ dedication to providing great DriveWorks support!

Thank you to our resellers for inviting us to attend and exhibit at your events!

The Most Productive Place in the North West

Warrington has been ‘home’ to DriveWorks for the last 15 years. A recent article by City Metric got us reflecting on the place where we have planted our roots.

According to City Metric, Warrington is the most productive place in the North West of England.

Even as a smaller town, Warrington competes with nearby big cities, Liverpool and Manchester on productivity and on average income.

Historically, Warrington is an industrial town, acting as a centre for brewers, distillers and wire manufacturers. There is still a lot of industry in the town today and we are proud to be associated with wire manufacturer, Locker Group, as they use our software.

Warrington changed in 1968 when it became a new town and the population boomed, whilst other industrial towns were in decline. Now the population of the town is over 210,000.

The Emergence of Technology

The City Metric article picked up on one of the things we love most about our town, the mix of history with new, modern facilities.

There are more and more tech and digital businesses like ours moving to Warrington and a community of like-minded companies is emerging. The Business Exchange by Warrington & Co. is a local networking initiative to bring these companies together.

We went along for the launch night back in March and over 280 businesses had registered to attend. On the night we joined as members of the Warrington Business Exchange and have been watching the member numbers grow massively over the past few months.

It’s inspiring to see how many businesses in Warrington see the importance of networking and collaborating. It’s already clear how much value it will bring to our community, to create a better connected and stronger economy in Warrington.

Location, Location, Location

Aside from the industrial heritage and the community, another great reason to be in Warrington is the location.

We’re within easy reach of Manchester and Liverpool, both of which have airports.

There are two train stations in Warrington, at the intersection of the London to Glasgow, West Coast Mainline and the Liverpool – Warrington – Manchester – Huddersfield – Leeds – Hull, Transpennine routes.

We’re also really close to the major motorways (M6/M62/M56) that connect the UK.

All in all, we’re in a great place for our visitors from far and wide, and for travelling to and from the office ourselves.

In our converted barn offices, we have the best of both worlds. We’re just outside of Warrington, close enough to make the most of all of the great facilities the town provides but also rural enough to enjoy beautiful scenery, peaceful lunchtime walks, less traffic and easy parking.

The villages around Warrington, like Thelwall, Lymm and Stockton Heath are worth a mention too.

These villages are where we spend most of our time as a team. Whether it’s a drink at the pub after work, a kick around on the football pitch, a weekend park run, the Sunday evening pub quiz or a meeting at one of the nearby modern facilities, there’s everything we need right here.

Join Us!

Like the sound of our location and what we have to offer? Come and join us! We’re always looking for talented people to join our team of software developers, creatives, marketers, engineers and all-round tech geeks.

You may have used Ambient Occlusion in your SOLIDWORKS models or perhaps in SOLIDWORKS Composer. If so, you will have noticed that this should give you a more realistic and much better looking rendered visual.

Ambient Occlusion is a shading and rendering technique used to approximate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting. It darkens creases, holes, intersections and surfaces that are close to each other. In real life, these areas tend to block or occlude ambient light, therefore they appear darker.

The good news is that with the release of DriveWorks 16 SP 1, you now have the option of adding Ambient Occlusion to your DriveWorks 3D models.

DriveWorks uses Screen Space Ambient Occlusion to calculate the ambient occlusion effect. Creative work is often subjective to individual taste, style and perhaps product types. For that reason, we have plenty of settings to help you achieve the realism that you want. The occlusion amount depends on a number of factors, exponent, falloff depth, radius and intensity.

Information Panel

With the Environment selected, you can change the following settings to suit your needs:

Ambient Occlusion Enabled
Enable and disable Ambient Occlusion on the Default Camera.

Exponent
Increasing this value has the effect of making the Ambient Occlusion darker. Think of this as Ambient Occlusion contrast.

Falloff Depth
Falloff Depth determines how close two surfaces need to be to cause an occlusion effect. A lower value means that the two surfaces have to be really close together, a larger value means that the two surfaces can be further apart.

Radius
This is the distance between samples on the actual image. A higher value means that the pixel will look further away for surfaces that will darken it. Increasing this value has the effect of smoothing out the Ambient Occlusion effect.

Intensity
Intensity is a flat multiplier on the Ambient Occlusion effect. Increasing this value makes everything darker equally.

Downsampling
Ambient Occlusion creates a texture and applies it to the final rendered image. Downsampling controls the size of this texture. Lower values create a higher resolution image. Higher values reduce the final render quality.

Blur Passes
Ambient Occlusion performs blur passes to smooth the Ambient Occlusion effect. Low values create a noisy effect, higher values smooth that out. As in all cases the higher the resolution requires more performance from the computer.

Viewing Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion will not be visible in a 3D Document while in edit mode. To preview the Ambient Occlusion Camera Effect, you must enter Preview Mode. Preview Mode can be found on the Command Bar in a 3D Document.

Preview Mode will hide the 3D Document triads, hide wireframe selections, show Camera entities and enable any Camera effects.

Read more about Ambient Occlusion in the DriveWorks Pro Online Help File.

Showcasing Our Technology, Using Our Technology

DriveWorks design automation and online 3D configurator software allows you to create tools to streamline your design and business processes.

We have developed the software specifically for manufacturing companies.

Over the years, we have added new features and functionality to meet a variety of business and industry needs.

Our goal is to allow you to easily create your own configurators and business tools that are custom to your processes and the way you work.

What makes all of this possible is our underlying technology.

The DriveWorks Tech Stacks are designed to introduce you to the core technologies that make DriveWorks the powerful world-leading software that it is.

We’ve even used DriveWorks as the medium to show the technology in action.

All of the Tech Stacks have been created using the DriveWorks Form Designer, they are built on rules and use many other features from our technology capabilities.

DriveWorks Reporting Tech Stack

Reporting and Diagnostic tools are available throughout DriveWorks.

DriveWorks gives you real-time feedback and a complete audit trail of everything you do.

Setting Up Your Configurator
When designing your configurator, use Test Form to check how your forms will appear and behave. Use the Rule Editor Helper and Diagnostic tools to help with Rule building.

Running Your Configurator
Test your project in an environment that replicates the user experience. Validate your project, diagnose potential issues using what-if scenarios and analyse rule efficiency.

Feedback and Reporting
DriveWorks provides reporting on the status of files, documents and data created to give a step by step audit trail.

Ease of Use
These tools are included to help you set up and maintain your own DriveWorks Configurator. All reporting and diagnostic tools are in-built and require no setup.

Take a look through the Reporting Tech Stack to see all of the Reporting & Diagnostic tools in DriveWorks.

Explore the Reporting Tech Stack

Learn More

If you’re already a DriveWorks customer, head to the DriveWorks Community to download the Reporting Tech Stack webinar.

Technical Specialist, Mike, takes you through the Reporting Tech Stack so you can learn more about the diagnostics tools in DriveWorks and how you can use them.

See What Else DriveWorks Can Do

Reporting is just one of the core technologies that make up DriveWorks software.
See what else you can do with DriveWorks by exploring all of the Tech Stacks.

In 12 months we raised the funds needed for a life-saving public access defibrillator. Thank you to everyone who contributed and helped us to achieve our target. We’re really proud to see our fundraising pay off as the device was installed this week!

Installing the Defibrillator

The defibrillator was installed this week. After a team effort to close the cabinet door, it is now in place on site.

We’re really proud to have reached our target and would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who supported our fundraising efforts.

Our whole team watched a video explaining how to use the machine should we ever need to. The great thing about defibrillators though, is that they are really easy to use. No training is required as the machine explains each step.

It can be used by anyone to help save a life.

Although we hope it will never be needed, this defibrillator will serve to protect our local community. We share our site with 17 offices, NGS gardens and horse stables. There are also nearby houses, public walkways, pubs, shops and a school.

Defibrillator Fundraising

Fundraising for the life-saving public access defibrillator started last year. The idea came from our suggestion box.

Our suggestion box is just one of the ways we gather opinions from our team. We value everyone’s opinions and have implemented lots of suggestions from the box, including; a weekly fruit box, coffee machines, time zone clocks, and headset stands for our desks.

Last year, Jake from the DriveWorks team put a different kind of suggestion in the box – to have a defibrillator installed on site.

Research shows if you give a person CPR they have a 3% chance of making a full recovery, whereas if a defibrillator is used in the vital first few minutes, patients have a 60-70% per cent chance of making a full recovery.

Seeing these amazing stats, we set ourselves the challenge of raising the £2000 needed to buy a public access defibrillator.

After two bake sales, a Halloween party, collecting loose change, hiring out our meeting room for a day and generous donations from our Laskey Lane neighbours, we managed to raise the £2000 in less than a year!