How Far We’ve Come: Stay Sharp Episode 12

In Episode 12 of Razorleaf’s Stay Sharp podcast, Industry Innovation: A Look Back with Ron Fritz, co-hosts Jen Ferello and Jonathan Scott reflect on the evolution of digital innovation with Ron Fritz, the CEO and co-founder of Tech Soft 3D. For the past 27 years, Tech Soft has created the fundamental engines that provide powerful 3D processing to some of the biggest names in 3D software. Being behind the scenes has given Ron a unique perspective on the drive for digital transformation, and he shares his thoughts about how platforms have changed, how hardware has evolved, and what kind of modeling/design innovation has had the most impact.

Platform Evolution

The changes in the operating systems and platforms the industry prefers have made Tech Soft’s job easier and allowed the company to focus on adding value instead of supporting multiple formats, Ron explains. He admits to surprise that “all the flavors” of Unix have mostly gone away, eclipsed by Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, with Windows the leader by a mile. Ron says he also would have predicted mobile platforms being bigger than they are by now, but he thinks the move to extended reality (XR) applications will continue to make mobile more of a force. “Lots of people have phones and tablets,” he says. “Being able to go out in the field or on a factory floor and point it at something in a mixed-reality kind of way, I think the driver of seeing more 3D on mobile is going to be XR.” Ron goes on to say that he doesn’t think cloud capabilities have driven mobile usage, though they’re a critical component of enabling it.

Hardware Evolution

The changes and improvements in graphics hardware over the past couple decades has probably had the most impact to Tech Soft’s business and the industry as a whole. The increase in the raw power to handle graphics means engineers can draw more components and work with significantly improved visual quality. Ron explains that he used to hear that engineers don’t care about the quality of a rendering. But he notes, “I think what they’re really saying is that they care so much about performance and precision, they’re not willing to make a trade-off for visual quality.” Lucky for everyone, Ron says, “as the advances of hardware have gone forward … you can have your cake and eat it too. You can have strong performance and the visuals are improved.”

On the topic of graphics and expectations, Jen asks Ron about how closely related 3D engineering graphics and gaming graphics have been and how they’re possibly converging these days. “They’re closer than they’ve ever been, but they’re not really all that close,” Ron responds. While the processing power exists to do both powerful visual quality and powerful processing, the two purposes are fundamentally different. “In an engineering application with the detail,” Ron says, “I need all the details in the threads. I need all of that data maybe connected back to BRep [boundary representation] data or some metadata. I have to carry a lot of stuff around to make that model intelligent. It has to be highly precise.”

Gaming and entertainment graphics, on the other hand, have to look great, but can be stripped down. “They use images to make the stuff look really good,” Ron says. “But if you tried to zoom in and do a measurement on a piece of curvature, it would be useless. Or if you wanted to do finite element analysis, it would be useless. So they still are quite different.” The two purposes can’t really be separated, Ron says, making the point that gaming has always led the way, pushing ahead with advances. “Believe it or not, it’s a hell of a lot bigger market than engineering software.”

For the same reason that the industry isn’t likely to see a complete melding of graphics engines for gaming and 3D engineering, Ron says it’s also not likely that there will ever be unification for a single graphics engine. “At the end of the day, every engine is optimized for something,” Ron explains. “And it tends to be optimized for the kind of data it expects, so it’s particularly good at rendering the kind of data it expects to get. So far, I have not seen anything that doesn’t create pretty unacceptable tradeoffs for doing absolutely everything.” In short, there are too many applications with wildly different needs and goals to expect that a single engine will solve them all.

Learn More About Industry Innovation

The full podcast episode offers many more details on what kind of design innovation has had the most impact on the 3D engineering world, which standards changes and efforts have been the most successful, what Ron thinks the biggest changes and surprises have been in the last 25-30 years of engineering software, and much more.

Check out Stay Sharp Episode 12: Industry Innovation: A Look Back with Ron Fritz and join us each week for a new episode.