Create an automated 3D Catalogue leveraging Forge, Inventor and Vault

TOLGAY HICKIRAN: Hello, guys. This is Tolgay. Today I'm going to be presenting you, Create an Automated 3D Catalog Leveraging Forge, Inventor, and Vault. You can check me out in LinkedIn. I'm a frequent poster about Autodesk and Unity, basically. This is my third time presenting at Autodesk University. And I presented a couple of times in extensions as well.

[INAUDIBLE] Codeo basically started off as two people, Kivanc and myself. Kivanc is a mechanical engineer, and I'm an industrial engineer. We are both Autodesk expert elites. We mainly focus on Autodesk products, and creating actually third party software for Autodesk products, leveraging mainly Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Vault, and Autodesk Forge. Kivanc mostly works on the design side, the design automation, and the sales automation side. And myself is working on third party software creation, user experiences, and UI design-- automations and databases as well.

So we partner with a couple of companies. The biggest one is obviously Autodesk. We are an Authorized Developer for Autodesk and Academic Partner for Autodesk, a Services Marketplace Provider for Autodesk, and an Independent Software Vendor for Autodesk. We obviously have an independent software being developed right now, called Autocase. This is going to be based on Inventor OEM. We are also a training center and then reseller for Unity. I am actually a Unity Certified Instructor, and an Autodesk Certified instructor as well. So we do training in these products.

We do have a couple more, like Sketchfab. Actually, all these partnerships work for the thing called configurator. So Codeo actually makes configurators-- a lot of configurators. You can find examples in our website. And we are also a testing center for Autodesk products, like the user certification and the professional certification. So our main products are our configurators, training, software sales, and we also do engineering services like consultancy services and simulation services, especially on Autodesk CFT.

We do have a lot of European customers. We are situated in Turkey. And then we are focusing on the EMEA region obviously. Most of the time it's the UK.

We are situated in the first steps of industry 4.0, and we call this the step 01 one and 02. And this actually starts with sales automation and configurations. So we tend to be on the data generation side rather than the actual physical automation side.

So what brings us today here? Let's talk about the problem definition. We are going to talk about the 3D catalogs that we can create with Autodesk products, and actual 3D catalogs with Autodesk Forge Weaver. The problem comes along in two steps.

The first problem that we have, is the revisions. Revisions actually happen all the time. Designs get changed. New colors are added. Things change. Materials change. The list continues. It goes on forever, basically.

So does this propagate into catalogs? No, because our catalogs are mostly 2D and pressed. They're actually created with different software, like Adobe products, et cetera. And they are very static. So the biggest problem we have is doing a revision on an assembly that we have.

The second problem comes up, where the CAD data is there, but not really useful for sales. There is a lot of information in the CAD data, a lot of metadata that we have to work on. But the sales doesn't really need it. Creating 3D visualization takes time and effort. All the time, we need to use some type of a stack, where we have to create a usable 3D data for visualization, for let's say, Lumion or Unity or something else. We need to do a lot of pre-work.

And it's always, always, always harder to convince the customer with only pictures. Right? We are at a stage where the customer wants more. They want augmented reality. They want virtual reality. And you're trying to sell your products in 2D pictures, basically. It is going to be very hard. To keep up with the competition, you need to think from somewhere else. So the static visualization is becoming more and more obsolete. We are going to see static visualization less over time now. And I think-- this is obviously personal-- it is going to be an exponentially increasing process going through the 2D to 3D revolution in visualization.

So how can we solve these problems? We have a couple of obviously current solutions in the market. These are just one of the few that are found on the internet. One of them is called CADenas. CADenas has a solution where you can put your parts in, and visualize them on the web browser. Basically, this is one of the examples. Their tool, called Tool Architect. You can check from the website. You can obviously visualize your parts, visualize your assemblies, make some differences inside, check the dimensions, as well as also getting some screenshots.

Traceparts is another one. These are very well known and very long timed catalog sites, that we can find over Google, over the internet, et cetera. Traceparts is very well known. As can see, you can get dimensions. You can basically look and feel, and check how it looks like over the internet. So this gives a type of edge for the people that are using the website. We are selling a product and we can show the product in 3D over our website, basically.

So how can we solve the same problem with Autodesk products? Well, the solution is Forge. Forge has more than eight different APIs that we can use. These are called design automation, data management API, model derivative API, behavior API, BIM 360 API. Now it's coming like Civil 3D API. And there's going to be more APIs over time.

This is where we are starting the custom solution revolution, let's say. Because more and more companies want to create their own custom solutions. And Forge is a very, very nice way to start from. Because we already are experts on Inventor, experts on Revit, experts on Macs, whatever software we are using. And Autodesk gave us the ability to create, with these APIs, basically on the internet, which is-- it's amazing. You can build whatever you want.

So when our customer came to us and asked for a 3D catalog, we came to a conclusion. And we said to ourselves, why not? Let's create a catalog in Forge. So the first approach to the problem started from one of our customers. They came to us and they asked, how can we achieve this? How can we create a 3D catalog that's living? That's not static, that is living? This is the key part. It needs to live.

So most of the manufacturers' workflow looks similar to this. We use CAD software to create the design. We use the PDM software to store the design, revise, create version controls, et cetera. We use some type of a visualization modeling software and a visualization software. These can be the same. But these can be different, also. Because we need to create some type of a model that could be rendered, and then we need to render. So these can be different.

In our case, most of the time when we are working in Autodesk space, this is what we see. Right? We see the design with Autodesk Inventor. We see the documentation, the PDM system with Autodesk Vault. Most of the time, and so obviously, Autodesk Vault Professional, not Basic. For the design visualization model, [INAUDIBLE] we most of the time see 3ds Max, because it's paired with Inventor. And next stop, is obviously because of its ease of use, we tend to see Vray and Lumion after Max.

So this is a basic stack of how manufacturers work. And obviously, while working in the stack, you lose some information, coming from Inventor to Vault, to Vault to Max, to Max to Vray and Lumion. So there is not really a fluid, and an automated process from one side to the other. Obviously Inventor, Vault is much more automated. But from Vault to Max, that's not really an automation that we can talk about, because we need to do a lot of different stuff after grabbing the model itself.

So when the customer approached us, we said to ourselves, OK. We should be starting from somewhere. But we shouldn't only look for our own solution. We should actually really understand the customer. What are they doing? They were already our customers. So we knew a lot of stuff about them.

Cemer Playground Equipment is one of the bigger playground manufacturers in the world. 50,000 meters square closed space, 50,000 more in open space, so it's a very, very big factory with nine different buildings, and with seven different production types. They do produce wood. They do produce plastic, metal, sheet metal. You can basically find all the different types of manufacturing, even 3D printing.

So we decided to take a look at all the actual process there. So for four weeks, which took us four working days, we actually created a report and presented our solution to our customer. So the solution looks like this. We always, always, always look for a central approach in these type of projects. So we need to put the data at the center, basically. Because if you have a workflow that has very many areas, you need to be making sure that all the data that is inside of your workflow, needs to be the exact same thing.

Most of the time, when you're trying to create a catalog, this is not the case. You have your catalog two revisions before. And you've actually changed a lot of stuff in your Inventor model. What tends to happen is, that the salesperson sells the two-revisions-before before item to whatever customer they're going for. And for example, something actually really, really got changed. So it adds a negative value when you are trying to manufacture the exact same old system that you're going for in an assembly.

So we need to make sure-- this is the first item. We need to make sure that we are going for a datacenter approach. 3D CAD documents were already created with Autodesk Inventor. This could be the case for any other CAD application. So there is a 3D based platform, already maintained. All the documents are actually being maintained with Autodesk Vault. This is also another very nice addition. Because going for a solution like this, you need to make sure that something has to be at the center.

And Vault is the perfect candidate here, because that is the actual database that we can go for. Because all the revisions are taken care of Autodesk Vault. We can also leverage this technology as well. So after a very, very good consideration, we decided to go for a new workflow. Vault at the center.

We do our design, we do our revisions, and do our check-ins from Autodesk Inventor. Vault takes care of creating the DWF files, version control, automatic and manual trigger for the catalog. So we said we are going to create a third party-- not one but two third parties, one for Vault, one for Windows, to take care of all the data managed in the Vault. Basically there is only one way to go back, which is from Vault to Inventor and Inventor to Vault. But otherwise, it's a very lean approach.

So after Vault, we can export the DWFs, the PDFs of the assembly items-- the playground assemblies basically-- the renders of the items. And then take all of them, rename them in a smart sense, and actually automatically upload it to the Forge regularly, depending on what the customer wants. Like, how frequent the customer changes their revisions, basically.

After our third parties, Autodesk Forge takes care of the cloud space. So it's our actual second database. And then model derivative, if need be, takes care of the automated changes that needs to be done on the website. And we are also using the [INAUDIBLE]. And as you may or may not know, Autodesk Forge also takes care of version control. So this is perfect for us.

After this, the Cemer's website has an automated check from our Autodesk Forge cloud space. It has an embedded viewer. It has a 3D catalog and a website. So this is what we offered to the customer. And then we started obviously developing the software.

This is one of the software that we developed, uploader for Windows. As you can see, we can check all the buckets that we have from Autodesk Forge. And we can also upload, download, et cetera. So we can do a lot of things. This is show bucket contents. We can create a bucket from here, as you can see. We can have very many buckets in Forge, as you may or may not know. So we can create a bucket. We can delete a bucket.

We have the ability to automatically upload at any point in the day, or throughout the day. Or we can also do a manual upload. This is obviously again up to us. You might ask, why do you want to automatically upload this? Well, the customer might not want to have some type of an uploading operation during their work time. So this is why we are basically doing an automatic upload, for example, every day at 8:00 PM, when no one is at the office.

We can also see the list of the uploaded items. Whether they're uploaded OK or not, whether there was a shortage of electricity, et cetera. Is everything OK? Because this is very crucial. We are trying to get the most recent data possible to Autodesk Forge, all the time. Because we want to have a living 3D catalog.

And our second third party development was in Autodesk Vault, actually. So this is a very, very small add-in that we created. What it does, it just takes care of all the render files, all the PDFs, all the main assembly DWFs, and it renames everything according to the main assembly. So basically we are using some type of a smart coding system to take all the necessary files related with a catalog-- meaning could be renders, could be safety PDFs, could be a lot of different stuff. We are going to show a couple of examples, anyway. And these are automatically exported to the auto uploading folder.

So the user-- the designer-- it might be a designer. It might be the CAD administrator. In this case, it is the visualization person-- automatically exports all the necessary files regarding with that assembly. The use languages are-- for the auto uploader, it's basically C#.NET, NET Core, Autodesk Forge Model Derivative API, and data management API. So for the uploader, we are using these APIs. For the preparation add-in for Autodesk Vault, we are using C#.NET and Vault API Web Services. So basically we created these two different items to create this automatic 3D catalog system. Let's see the end result.

So here is Cemer's new website, published around four, five months ago. And all the products over here are automatically uploaded from our third party. We have the filter system. You can filter out all the activities if you want to. It's like hanging, interactions, pushing, sliding, pulling, et cetera. You can apply a filter. You can also apply a age filter, or a fall height. And then you can open up any assembly you want.

As you can see, there are renders of the product. There is also the other documentation, technical information, which is a PDF. That's coming from Vault. And also downloadable DWGs coming from Vault again. But this is the nicest part of course. You can obviously see all the 3D data inside your website, with proper coloring, proper texturing. This is all because of Autodesk Forge.

And maybe you can also see, some of the options are not available for the customer at the moment. It's because that we are limiting the user's interactions inside Autodesk Forge Viva. They are giving some of the options, like measuring, and list of the bill of materials, to rather super-users, rather than a random person that's coming to the website. This is kind of a security measure that we created for our own customers. We don't want the end user to get filled with a lot of information, anyway. Because as you can see, these assemblies have a lot of parts. More of the time, it's above 1 K range. So a playground manufacturer assembly takes around more than 1,000 parts, basically.

So what happened in the end? What's the conclusion? Comparing it to the old versus new, we had very many static images in our catalogs. Actually, only static images. We might have some animations created, but they were also static because they're not interactive. We had revised content almost always stay old. Because then you actually create a catalog. Maybe two days after, some random design gets revised, because a company like Cemer has more than 800 big designs, that is end product type of designs. I'm not even talking about subassemblies. You can imagine a lot of subassemblies are also created in this type of factories.

So old content gets sold, creates a ton of problems. Imagine you're the salesperson going to a potential customer-- potential lead-- and then the lead actually selects an item that is the old revision. And they actually say, I really want this item. This happens all the time, by the way. So you can actually feel the pain.

Catalog content is manually created, so you need to manually create the catalogs. This is rather a dull and a non-value adding operation. I'm an industrial engineer and I really hate these type of processes. These are called muda. These are called muda in Japanese. We need to remove all the muda from our operations.

So what about the new system? So we have an interactive catalog. We can do all the stuff that we want inside the interactive catalog. We can also add color changes if you want to. We can create a configurator out of it. This is a bit of an easier version that we created, let's say, that you're seeing. But it is very, very handy, as you can see. It's all automated.

Revisions propagate seamlessly. All the revisions get done after Autodesk Vault. So basically, you're almost 100% sure that your Autodesk Vault has a digital twin on Autodesk Forge. Content is always recent, right? It's always, always recent, and this is the idea of creating a 3D catalog. This is the second idea, let's say. The first idea is obviously creating an interactive 3D catalog.

Aftersales orders are easier with data management API. This is also very crucial. All the single time, when you're manufacturing for all over the world-- Cemer has 65 countries that work with them. So all the time when you're trying to get an aftersales order for a subassembly for a part that's broken down, et cetera, it's always hard. But with a viewer like this, every single part is in the bomb list. So aftersales doesn't have much time creating an order, because they all know the exact same part number, which is very, very nice in this case.

So what's next? From here, we need to create extended reality applications, whether it's augmented reality, whether it's virtual reality. We can create different approaches here. Our actual next approach is to create an automated augmented reality version of the Forge catalog. This is in the works. And we are also going to create a VR application for park creation. Basically one for the end user, one for the sales.

So as you can see, by using Forge, you can create not only for the design but for the sales, for the marketing, for the production, every single place, actually-- for the installation as well. This was a great time for us. Thanks for joining, guys. Thanks for listening to the presentation. I'll be taking all the questions on 7th of October. Thank you and see you soon.