ROCK HILL, South Carolina, May 19, 2020 – 3D Systems (NYSE:DDD) is accelerating the transformation to digital manufacturing workflows with its extensive suite of software. By utilizing the company’s software as part of their workflow, manufacturers can deliver high quality products with digital precision and speed - from digitization and design to manufacturing, inspection and production management.
3D Systems is continually innovating to enrich its products, and today is announcing new versions of Geomagic Design X and Geomagic Wrap, which include first-to-market capabilities that streamline workflows and empower designers and engineers with digital tools to achieve greater precision. Rooted in the company’s “customer-first” approach to innovation, these enhancements to 3D Systems’ industry-leading reverse engineering solutions are specifically developed to help manufacturers maintain competitive advantage by accelerating product development cycles – achieving faster time to market.
New Geomagic Design X Features Increase Efficiency with Improved Accuracy
3D Systems’ Geomagic Design X combines robust 3D scan processing and complete CAD design functionality to enable faster, more accurate and reliable reverse engineering than possible with other methods. Using the software’s newest features, engineers will benefit from streamlined modeling workflows as well as expanded modeling pathways for complex, revolved parts. With the release of Geomagic Design X 2020, engineers will have access to the following unprecedented new features:
Unrolling of a 3D scan of a tire for mold modeling in Geomagic Design X
- Revolved parts with features have historically been very cumbersome to model as CAD software is using a two-dimensional environment to create three-dimensional, rotating parts with multi-axis features. The process often requires a great deal of trial-and re-work to get to a final part – often times sacrificing precision. The newest Geomagic Design X release includes an Unroll/Reroll function that enables a new modeling workflow to tackle these complex, revolved parts. Using a comprehensive suite of mesh processing tools, an engineer can unroll the mesh to automatically extract a 2D sketch, make the modifications needed, and then reroll the sketch for additional engineering. This feature reduces the need for multiple rounds of trial and re-work, dramatically improving part precision, efficiency and downstream usability.
- Topology optimized parts and castings with precision features present unique challenges for repatriating a generative mesh, or 3D scan into CAD with intelligence. The new Selective Surfacing features in Geomagic Design X 2020 simplify the hybrid modeling process, providing easy workflows for traditionally difficult parts with both organic and prismatic features. Selective Surfacing combines very fast organic surfacing with high precision feature modeling methods. This results in accelerated productivity while providing greater downstream CAD re-usability, and maintaining control over model accuracy.
- Since its inception, 3D Systems has taken a customer-centric approach to innovation – collaborating with its customers to understand their application needs and developing solutions to address them. The company is further accelerating this approach by releasing a framework for early feature and capability preview. Through this framework, Geomagic Design X customers on-maintenance will be invited more efficiently into the R&D process - providing early access to innovations and the ability to share feedback. Additionally, this new plugin structure enables 3D Systems to quickly gather customer support requests – and in many cases more efficiently delivering support for customers’ business critical needs. Shortly following the general release of Geomagic Design X 2020, on-maintenance customers will be directly invited to visit the company’s new support site, and get access to the first Add-in pack delivered through this framework.
Geomagic Design X 2020 is planned for general availability in late May 2020.
Geomagic Wrap 2021 Includes Enhanced Automation to Accelerate Workflows
Geomagic Wrap provides the industry’s most well-known toolset to transform 3D scan data and imported files into 3D models for immediate use in downstream engineering applications across a variety of industries. 3D Systems’ latest release – Geomagic Wrap 2021 – includes features such as scripting automation and texture manipulation that accelerate designs; thus enabling faster time-to-market.
Example of using the updated scripting editor showing the real time error tracking, Contextual highlighting, and autocomplete tools.
- 3D Systems’ Geomagic Wrap is the only product in its class that includes scripting automation that enables engineers to work more efficiently. The latest release includes a new scripting editor that allows engineers to customize their workflow for their unique applications. The editor uses Python – an open source, widely used programming language with which many engineers are very familiar – to interact with the custom Geomagic Wrap accessible features. This has enabled a much simpler experience with new tools such as ‘auto complete’ and ‘contextual highlighting’ that accelerate the design of accurate, 3D surfaced models. These new features are complemented by enhanced API Documentation that will be live-hosted on the company’s support site providing customers access to continuously updated documentation.
- Geomagic Wrap 2021 includes new texture manipulation tools to streamline workflows involving color and texture scans. When an engineer scans an object that includes colors, logos or other complex visual elements in a scan-to-web workflow or digital asset creation, an additional software program is generally required to edit and re-touch these files prior to manipulating the surface textures. The latest release includes a more robust set of texture map manipulation tools to deal with complex geometries directly within Geomagic Wrap. Having these advanced capabilities included in the same program streamlines the workflow – enabling creation of higher quality and more logical texture maps for improved downstream usability - helping improve efficiencies and reduce design time
- A new HD Mesh Construction method provides a powerful way to construct 3D data from point clouds. This can be a particularly challenging operation when dealing with a scan that is missing information, or for those that result in large data sets. HD Mesh Construction is designed to overcome these challenges, enabling engineers to create watertight meshes.
General availability of Geomagic Wrap 2021 is planned for late July 2020.
“3D Systems has the broadest reverse engineering software portfolio in the industry, which includes a variety of best-in-class products,” said Radhika Krishnan, executive vice president, software, healthcare & digitization, 3D Systems. “Our Geomagic software combines robust 3D scan processing with CAD design functionality to help manufacturers expedite the product development cycle. With the new features we are introducing today, designers and manufacturers who have incorporated our reverse engineering products into their end-to-end workflow will be able to achieve unmatched speed and accuracy. We are committed to continuing this caliber of innovation which is enabling our customers to improve productivity, lower Total Cost of Operation (TCO), and maintain competitive advantage.”
Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements made in this release that are not statements of historical or current facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company to be materially different from historical results or from any future results or projections expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In many cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terms such as "believes," "belief," "expects," "may," "will," "estimates," "intends," "anticipates" or "plans" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements are based upon management’s beliefs, assumptions, and current expectations and may include comments as to the company’s beliefs and expectations as to future events and trends affecting its business and are necessarily subject to uncertainties, many of which are outside the control of the company. The factors described under the headings "Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk Factors" in the company’s periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as other factors, could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected or predicted in forward-looking statements. Although management believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not, and should not be relied upon as a guarantee of future performance or results, nor will they necessarily prove to be accurate indications of the times at which such performance or results will be achieved. The forward-looking statements included are made only as of the date of the statement. 3D Systems undertakes no obligation to update or review any forward-looking statements made by management or on its behalf, whether as a result of future developments, subsequent events or circumstances or otherwise.
About 3D Systems
More than 30 years ago, 3D Systems brought the innovation of 3D printing to the manufacturing industry. Today, as the leading AM solutions company, it empowers manufacturers to create products and business models never before possible through transformed workflows. This is achieved with the Company’s best-of-breed digital manufacturing ecosystem - comprised of plastic and metal 3D printers, print materials, on-demand manufacturing services and a portfolio of end-to-end manufacturing software. Each solution is powered by the expertise of the company’s application engineers who collaborate with customers to transform manufacturing environments. 3D Systems’ solutions address a variety of advanced applications for prototyping through production in markets such as aerospace, automotive, medical, dental and consumer goods. More information on the company is available at www.3dsystems.com.