Parametric/direct CAD integration

TL;DR

This paper reviews current approaches to integrating parametric and direct CAD modeling, highlighting their advantages, limitations, and the need for further research to achieve seamless integration in next-generation CAD systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing parametric/direct integration methods and identifies key challenges and gaps for future research in this important area.

Findings

Existing integration methods are incomplete for seamless operation.

Current approaches have significant limitations and are far from ideal.

Further research is needed to develop fully integrated CAD modeling schemes.

Abstract

In the history of computer-aided design (CAD), feature-based parametric modeling and boundary representation-based direct modeling are two of the most important CAD paradigms, developed respectively in the late 1980s and the late 2000s. They have complementary advantages and limitations, thereby offering huge potential for improvement towards an integrated CAD modeling scheme. Some believe that their integration will be the key characteristic of next generation CAD software. This paper provides a brief review on current parametric/direct integration approaches. Their basic ideas, advantages, and disadvantages will be discussed. The main result reads that existing integration approaches are far from being completed if seamless parametric/direct integration is desired. It is hoped that, by outlining what has already been made possible and what still remains problematic, more researchers will be attracted to work on this very important research topic of parametric/direct integration. This paper serves as a complement to the CAD paper titled ``Variational Direct Modeling: A Framework Towards Integration of Parametric Modeling and Direct Modeling in CAD." Cite this work as follows: Qiang Zou, Hsi-Yung Feng, and Shuming Gao. Variational Direct Modeling: A Framework Towards Integration of Parametric Modeling and Direct Modeling in CAD. Computer-Aided Design 157 (2023): 103465.