Whether you are an enterprise managing large volumes of data or an individual developing projects in Unity, PiXYZ’s newest product, which allows you to import CAD files directly to Unity, might be of interest.
Founded by CAD professionals with more than 10 years of experience optimizing 3D models for complex and numerous industrial use cases, PiXYZ develops software to help companies and 3D users re-use their CAD data for any visualization scenario. PiXYZ Studio, the company’s main software, allows users to import, assemble, tessellate, interact, optimize and export CAD files by providing an easy-to-use and intuitive user interface.
“3D visualization of aircraft interior design is a real challenge as CAD Data evolve continuously”, said Dassault Aviation, a French manufacturer of both military aircraft and business jets. “PiXYZ helps us win this challenge thanks to its optimized tessellation and optimization tools for CGI and real-time applications. It’s fast, light, efficient, and mostly, it is flexible and can be customized to our process.”
Last month, with the goal to provide large enterprises and individual professionals alike with a solution to easily import and optimize CAD data for creating real-time experiences in Unity, PiXYZ and Unity launched the PiXYZ Plugin. In addition, Unity is providing an enterprise-level offering called Unity Industry Bundle, which is a customizable combination of PiXYZ products, support, and training, built on the foundation of Unity.
“Unity has been a not-so-secret weapon for our industrial customers for years because they have recognized the power of our real-time development platform and its unmatched flexibility and extensibility,” said Tim McDonough, GM of Industrial, Unity Technologies. “A key workflow for these customers involves importing and preparing large-scale CAD assemblies, which is a time consuming process that stifles productivity. We believe that the experts at PiXYZ have simplified this and have made it easier for customers improve the quality of their real-time 3D experiences.”
The PiXYZ Plugin adds a menu option in the Unity editor to allow you to directly import CAD models into your project. It features different controls to scale, orient, repair (stitch), as well as tessellate the 3D model, and includes options to map UVs, control how design hierarchy is imported, and generate LODs. Additionally, to make it easier to work with constantly-changing CAD data, the Plugin also opens the possibility to import it into a Windows runtime. Once you publish a runtime executable from a project, the end user can trigger the import of new CAD data., thus providing an immediate update without the need to rebuild a project or create asset bundles.
As a result, developers can use Unity’s real-time development platform for product design and visualization, and to easily and more efficiently create new training applications, customer-facing interactive or immersive experiences for various platforms, including PC, VR, AR and mobile devices. Besides, companies
Priced at around $1,235 a year, the PiXYZ Plugin offers a 7-day free trial. Moreover, an Unreal Engine plugin seems to be in the works, as the page indicates it is coming soon.
