Search Unity

Unity Partners with PiXYZ Software to unlock CAD data for real-time development

March 6, 2018 in Technology | 6 min. read
Topics covered
Share

Is this article helpful for you?

Thank you for your feedback!

Together, Unity and PiXYZ deliver a solution that makes creating real-time interactive and virtual experiences based on CAD data faster and easier.

Unity today is used across many industries beyond gaming, including aerospace, architecture, automotive, construction, gambling, transportation, manufacturing, medical, and more. The benefits of using real-time in these industries include accelerating innovation through better design collaboration, developing VR and AR training to improve training outcomes, and creating immersive experiences that can increase engagement and drive higher sales.

Industry professionals are increasingly seeing the value of bringing real-time into their workflows, recognizing its potential to completely transform the way products and experiences are conceived and built. Despite the fact that forward-thinking individuals in these industries have made great strides to bring real-time into their creation processes, they have encountered persistent challenges, particularly when it comes to preparing or importing large CAD assemblies for real-time development.

That’s why Unity and PiXYZ software have joined forces to provide large enterprises and individual professionals alike with best-in-class solutions to easily import and optimize CAD data for creating real-time experiences in Unity.

“PiXYZ was founded by CAD professionals, for CAD professionals, with the goal of addressing the difficult challenges presented by working with large-scale CAD assemblies,” said Stéphane Imbert, Chairman, and Founder of PiXYZ Software. “Unity’s real-time development platform is widely recognized as the best real-time workflow for customers who use CAD and want to build high-quality experiences. Our strategic partnership with Unity will allow us to better serve our mutual customers together - today, and in the future - by delivering the best, most responsive, and most painless solution on the market.”

Best-in-class CAD data prep and import

With PiXYZ, we’re bringing you a way to work with large scale CAD assemblies in Unity, whether you are an enterprise managing large volumes of data, or an individual professional developing projects in Unity. Let’s take a look at how PiXYZ’s products fit these different needs.

One thing all PiXYZ products share is a high performance core that combines fast processing speed, the ability to handle massive assemblies, and the ability to use data from virtually any common design system. Whether you’re working with a complete automotive powertrain assembly in NX, a large architectural curtain wall in CATIA, or manufacturing equipment in Inventor, Unity with PiXYZ has you covered.

PiXYZ Plugin adds a menu option in the Unity editor that allows you to directly import CAD models into your project. The Plugin provides a set of dialog controls to scale, orient, repair (stitch), and tessellate your CAD model, and includes options to map UVs, control how design hierarchy is imported, and generate LODs. In addition, the Plugin has a secret superpower – the ability to directly import CAD data into a Windows runtime! Using the Plugin, you can publish a runtime executable from your project, and the end user can trigger the import of new CAD data. This is especially valuable when working with constantly-changing CAD data, providing immediate update without the need to rebuild a project or create asset bundles.

This content is hosted by a third party provider that does not allow video views without acceptance of Targeting Cookies. Please set your cookie preferences for Targeting Cookies to yes if you wish to view videos from these providers.

PiXYZ Review and Review Premium provide an alternative to interacting with CAD data without the need to build a project at all. With Review, you can quickly open a native CAD file and interact with it using intuitive methods such as dynamic cutting planes, assembly exploding, interactive 3D measurement, and access to PMI (Product Manufacturing Information) data. Review also enables remote collaboration among multiple participants using different device types in different locations. With Review Premium, you can also use VR and AR devices for immersive collaboration.

PiXYZ Review provides real-time interactive collaboration for designers and engineers everywhere.

PiXYZ Studio and Studio Editor provide powerful and customizable CAD import and data preparation for the desktop. These products provide additional controls beyond those available in the Plugin, and add tools for model simplification, hidden geometry removal, fixing flipped normals, and interactive modification. With Studio Editor, you can create Python scripts that allow powerful automated processing based upon geometry characteristics or design metadata.

With PiXYZ Studio you can quickly prepare your product design data for creating real-time experiences.
PiXYZ Studio can prepare manufacturing CAD data for real-time experience and exploration.

PiXYZ Pipeline and Connect enable you to move your process into the datacenter. Pipeline provides all the power of Studio, with the ability to run automated batch processes on your on-premise servers or private cloud instances. If you need to process large volumes of data, you can add additional servers to scale to the capacity you need. With PiXYZ Connect, you can harness the power of multiple Pipeline servers to provide CAD import and data prep as a private web service within your company’s security perimeter.

An end-to-end solution to enable your success

We also recognize that you need more than just industry-leading products. You also need support, training, and the ability to scale your development efforts dynamically. Unity already provides value to customers with a range of enterprise support offerings, and we’re extending that to further meet the needs of enterprise customers in industries beyond gaming by offering the Unity Industry Bundle, a customizable combination of PiXYZ products, support, and training, built on the foundation of Unity.

We offer custom training as well as new training offerings focused on the needs of industry professionals. Unity also offers assistance to help your developers use Unity to its full potential. And, when you need to scale up your development efforts, you can look to the massive community of Unity developers – more than 1.5 million active developers per month – to find talent to accelerate your projects.

Accelerating innovation and the creation of high-impact experiences

The potential applications for real-time are seemingly endless, and with the ease of working with CAD that PiXYZ and Unity unlock, developers can create experiences for over 20 different platforms including many of the leading virtual reality, augmented reality, PC and mobile devices. In particular, companies and developers in these industries are seeing immense value in using real-time for product design and visualization, training applications, and customer-facing interactive or immersive experiences.

Virtual Design Review – Accelerate Innovation

Unity’s real-time development platform and augmented & virtual reality capabilities can help you create better designs faster and more efficiently. Designers and engineers can collaborate on common ground with a shared, at-scale visualization of the product where the impact of design changes across different departments and disciplines can easily be visualized. Virtual design review can even be extended to include suppliers and business partners.

Training – Transfer Knowledge

VR and AR experiences help deliver training in a true-to-life experience that engages learners through a high-fidelity, realistic setting, resulting in improved training outcomes. With virtual and augmented reality training, you can train workers to operate a factory that is not yet built, or train people on the operation of dangerous equipment without risking physical safety, significantly reducing the risk of an accident happening on the job.

Marketing and Sales – Deliver High-Impact Experiences

Unity allows you to create real-time, interactive, and immersive customer experiences that help drive higher customer engagement and investment in the product, ultimately driving more sales. With PiXYZ, product design data can also be leveraged directly to create an online configurator, or a VR experience that allows customers to experience a product in true-to-life fidelity.

Questions? Interested in learning more?

If you would like to know more about the Unity Industry Bundle or how Unity and PiXYZ can help you accelerate innovation, deliver high-impact experiences, or transform your business, our dedicated team of experts are standing by and ready to answer your questions!

March 6, 2018 in Technology | 6 min. read

Is this article helpful for you?

Thank you for your feedback!

Topics covered