Latest Version KeyCreator Released

Infotech Enterprises (Germany) has released version 7 of the mechanical design and manufacturing CAD/CAM software KeyCreator. KeyCreator 7 includes numerous performance improvements and customer-driven productivity enhancements, as well as additional advances in Kubotek's direct modelling technology.

KeyCreator 7 expands the capabilities of the new Direct Dimension-driven Editing function to allow greater use of angular dimensions to rotate faces on a solid model. Direct Dimension-driven Editing was unveiled in January 2007, and further enhanced in a June release. Direct Dimension-driven Editing allows users to use an intuitive parametric editing interface on any solid at any time. The history-based modelling approach used in most other popular CAD products requires models to be constrained with proprietary sketches and relations during construction before parametric editing can be used.

For improved system performance for users who receive or generate very large design files KeyCreator 7 has increased support for lightweight loading of 3D model data. The Kubotek CKD file format has also been expanded to support inclusion of lightweight 3D copies of solid and surface models. During file loading KeyCreator can now read just the lightweight 3D data and skip over reading the much larger amount of solid/surface data, significantly reducing the time and system memory used to open a large file for review. KeyCreator contains many visualisation tools such as cutting planes which allow extensive review of lightweight models.

Several sheet metal specific tools added to version 7 can save users a dramatic amount of time in design and manufacturing engineering of sheet metal parts. Additional user-driven enhancements in detailing include new section view hatch pattern options, hatch editing and moving, an exportable table entity, and batch printing of multiple selected drawing layouts contained within a single design file.

Apart from the new features the new release enhances several functions. Among others, these enhancements include PDF and 3D PDF exports for batch translation, several export functions which allow export of entities, selection of entities in part references as tools to generate splines, and Quick Move option. Besides, the ‘Set material properties' function now also applies to shells, and the function to set material physical properties allows more selections.