It has been the experience of many CAD experts, to sit and operate a CAD system like NX, while a person with little or no CAD experience sits beside them and tries to navigate the system vicariously through the expert in order to view and interrogate assemblies, parts, and drawings. I liken this approach to someone sitting in the back seat of your car while they tell you how to navigate the streets to get them to where they need to go when they could just as easily operate the car themselves.

Ok, I get it, CAD software can be difficult to learn and operate, and so the mindset is that it’s easier to tag an expert to do the driving… but does it make sense to tie up two resources for the purpose of viewing CAD data? Wouldn’t it be more proficient, and cost effective, to utilize a user friendly viewer to review and interrogate your NX CAD data… one that can be accessed and used by all… even by those with little or no CAD experience? The obvious answer is yes, so for this reason, many companies have employed the use of a lightweight viewer that relies on tessellated data. Obviously, this is not the most proficient or cost-effective solution for viewing NX data since these viewers require data translation which means they use a separate file format, and the viewer is a separate application, both of which need to be managed and maintained by your companies IT department… all of which add time and money to your product development projects.

NX Viewer is a subset of NX with a simplified layout containing a reduced set of menu items and icons, making NX Viewer easy to learn and operate, and since it is so easy to learn, it can help free up resources that would normally be deployed as CAD “drivers.” Everyone in your company can benefit from using NX Viewer, but the ones that can benefit the most are your casual users… your Engineering Managers, Shop Floor personal, Estimators, Engineers, and anyone who needs read access to native NX data but do not need write access to the data. You’ve heard the old adage, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Teaching the casual user to “fish” for what they need to view, and “drive” on their own to where they need to go has never been easier.

NX Viewer is a cost effective, user friendly tool that enables users to open, view (rotate, pan, zoom, fit) and interrogate (accurately measure and cut sections) NX CAD models and drawings in the native NX format, and because it is a view only tool (no write access) this ensures data integrity since the data cannot be overwritten.

Why use NX Viewer… why not just use NX? NX Viewer is far less expensive than a seat of NX and it’s a perfect way to read, browse, and interrogate NX assemblies, parts, and drawings by everyone, but especially by people with little or no CAD experience. Making design information accessible to all departments within your company, and not just engineering, can have a positive effect on productivity by improving communication and understanding between groups.

• Features include:
• Browse the assembly and model history trees
• Rotate, pan, zoom, and fit the geometry
• Hide and Unhide objects

• Dynamic sectioning

• Accurate measurement of model B-Rep geometry
  • NX Viewer is NX, so you are measuring real math data and not tessellated data.

• Edit object display
  • Color
  • Translucency
  • Shaded or Wireframe

• View drawing sheets

• Key benefits:
  • Cost-effective and inexpensive alternative to purchasing a third party viewer or a full seat of NX.
  • Intuitive and easy to learn even by casual/inexperienced CAD users
  • Share information across your enterprise – collaboration is the key to productivity
  • Accurate measurements because NX Viewer is NX, so you are measuring B-Rep data and not tessellated data as with other viewers.

Today’s world of design, engineering, and manufacturing is all about collaboration, and NX Viewer is an effective tool for connecting all of these areas of your product development activities, getting your ideas to market faster than ever before!

Tata Technologies is a Siemens Platinum Smart Expert Partner indicating our validated expertise in NX-CAD.