3D Direct Modeling. I would guess most of our customer base has heard this term by now. What does this mean to Kubotek? It has been interesting to spend some time at numerous tradeshows this fall and demonstrate KeyCreator as the newest rage in the CAD market. It’s true. No one is interested to hear about another CAD product, but virtually everyone we talk to is interested to hear about the benefits of direct modeling. I find it quite amusing that we have been singing the praises of this approach longer than most, and our customers have known the advantages of working without constraints in a history-free environment for a long time, but it has only been recently that the market has gotten on board. The adoption of most CAD packages adding some form of direct modeling or editing has been very positive for Kubotek. For a long time we would preach the benefits of our direct modeling and editing approach, but the market wasn’t ready. Now people are seeking us out and wanting to learn more. It is nice to confidently claim we were the pioneers of 3D direct modeling and emerging as the leader in this area. Our persistence and vision is gaining momentum. I believe over the next few years we will take larger strides forward. We have to embrace some changes, while keeping our existing user needs in mind. We have to carefully look at the trends in the CAD market and adopt the pieces that fit while staying true to our vision of a simplistic, but powerful, approach to working with geometry and topology at a competitive price.

I am confident KeyCreator Version 9, which was released December 1, is the beginning of a new attitude for Kubotek. Our development staff has made some major breakthroughs under the hood that will result in noticeable performance enhancements throughout the software. I don’t want to promise performance gains across the board, as there is still more work that will be done moving towards version 10. But on the whole, our users will notice the improvements. Our focus with Version 9 and moving forward is to dissect what we currently have for existing functionality within KeyCreator and look to enhance and improve current functions to make the software more intuitive and reduce the amount of clicks to get from point A to point B. This can be most noticed with the improvements to quick dimension for 3D annotation and driving our dimension driven editing function. These features have been vastly improved and are much more useable. Another area of interest is the dynamic transform function. The addition of the Dynahandle to the transform function can now be duplicated with every function in KeyCreator and will be expanded throughout the software in future releases. From a casual user of the software, I found these to be fun to use.

Once again I would like to end my statement with another great example of one of our passionate users of KeyCreator speaking out about the power of KeyCreator and making a difference. Josh Stollar of Multi-cast Corporation was motivated to contact Cadalyst magazine and write a user review of KeyCreator Version 9 after participating in a post on our user forum. I am very excited to see his review in print and I am sure our users will appreciate his efforts, as well. Josh states: “I have used KeyCreator (since Version 3) for 5 years as the casting engineer for an aluminum sand foundry, and have come to rely on KeyCreator’s flexibility and power. I learned to model with history based software, and have since used, in one way or another, three other packages in my short engineering career. KeyCreator and its approach to direct modeling stand out among all the modeling tools I’ve worked with over the years.