https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOk38i_9Bmg
A design engineering team needs to have regular design reviews. It is a great way to share the progress of a design and get valuable input from all team members. Design decisions can be captured and the design engineers know how to move forward. Design reviews are meetings where teams get things done.
But design reviews meetings are not hosted in the most efficient way.
There is a lot of valuable time wasted by showing the model in a sluggish CAD program and switching to other programs like Powerpoint to show screenshots of issues etc.
Meeting notes often lack critical information, because there is little time to take notes. One design engineer is usually doing everything at once: lead the meeting, operate the model, listen to feedback, capturing screenshots and making notes. There is simply not enough time to write more detailed notes.
This also means that the design engineer needs to spend more time expanding on those notes after the meeting. They need to recall it from memory and might forget some critical details.
With Bench3D you can streamline and structure design reviews and deal with these problems. It is a lightweight 3D viewer that works in the browser. Navigating the model in 3D is very fast and smooth. All input is in one place on Bench3D and structured using Issues. There is no need to switch programs during the meeting and the whole team can add notes in real-time.
Let’s run through a typical workflow on Bench3D to show how this works.
Before using Bench3D, a design engineer who will host a design review will usually prepare a Powerpoint presentation and have the latest model ready on the side in their CAD software. The presentation typically has a lot of screenshots of the model and some text. It covers the topics that need to be discussed during the meeting.
Bench3D combines both: you prepare a list of topics directly on the 3D model. We call those topics Issues. This is a term borrowed from software development and does not have to mean that there are only problems. It is used as another word for topic or task.
An Issue is made out of two parts: the title section and the activity thread. The title section describes the general topic and does not change much. The activity thread is the place where the team can add 3D slides and comments. The thread gets longer as the team discusses the Issue and new slides are added.
A 3D slide captures a view of the model like a screenshot does, including section views and visibility settings of parts. But since you are looking at the 3D model, you can still jump back to the 3D view for a bit of context. This makes it easy for other team members to understand where we are in the model.
A 3D slide can be annotated with a number of tools. Draw on the model, add text and insert images to explain the issue. Prepare as many 3D slides per issue as you need to explain the design challenge. It saves time during the meeting since you don’t have to explain as much or create new section views etc on the spot.
When you prepare for design review you will create a number of Issues. The Issue list will also be the agenda points for the meeting.