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Visual Components
What is Visual Components?
Visual Components offers a complete toolkit from manufacturing planning to industrial automation with a powerful and easy-to-use 3D simulation software. With over 20 years in business, Visual Components is one of the pioneers of the 3D manufacturing simulation industry. Visual Components started with a humble goal – to make manufacturing design and simulation technology easy to use and accessible to manufacturing organizations of all sizes and has retained the same philosophy in their product.
Who Uses Visual Components?
Designed for manufacturers, machine or robot builders, and system integrators, it helps view material textures, configure layouts, and analyze collisions while designing visual components.
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Reviews of Visual Components
Strong DELFOI user and supporter
Comments: Great, cant waiting for the upgrades and enhancements to come through. Always looking forward to new functionality.
Pros:
The whole product is such a valuable addition to our digital manufacturing capability, allowing us to support our partners and member companies in the quest to improve and enhance their manufacturing capabilities.
Cons:
The software needs to be used constantly to maintain proficiency. More online video examples of functionality. More online training videos.
Alternatives Considered:
Overall a great software product!
Comments: The support was great!
Pros:
I love how smooth even the largest plant simulations run.
Cons:
Unfortunatly for simulations only the software was a little too expensive for long term use in our company.
Alternatives Considered:
Does less than we hoped
Pros:
Easily drop in Solidworks models and get a true sense of the layout vs. 2D AutoCAD. We purchased VR goggles so the user can be "dropped into" the cell to feel it out. We attended a training and it really helped us get up and going.
Cons:
Animating the cell takes more time invested than the reward reaped from seeing it animated. The data we need is better gathered from a 2D simulation vs. a 3D so that it is more accurate/exact. Also the female operator wears heels, has an inch of midriff showing, and a large chest - it is weird.
Versatile simulation software with unsurpassed CAD data support
Comments: The software helps me to quickly extract different components and create a preliminary layout. It wasn't until recently I really understood the importance of defining the components. If you put in the extra time to create frames in the right places of the component then the software will do a lot of the grunt work for you, and there are great tools for snapping and aligning that speeds up the process. Creating custom components has become increasingly easier the last couple of years and the programming of the components is really visual and hands on. I think one pretty unique thing that separates Visual Components from other simulation software is that it's being used in such a wide variety of applications, and even though some scenarios don't exist "out of the box" they're usually possible to script thanks to the API.
Pros:
You can throw basically any CAD model into the software and it will handle it with ease. The CAD data simplification tools are easy to use and can drastically increase simulation performance. Being able to present layouts and simulations in 3D PDFs, high quality renderings or lightweight animation format makes it easy to distribute content to anyone.
Cons:
One could wish that the user interface would become a bit more responsive. I usually experience a slight latency when switching between tabs and that can get a bit frustrating when a certain task requires a lot of back and forth between tabs.
Alternatives Considered:
Education and industry use
Pros:
The software has the best 3D user interface and exellent tools for programing of production logic.
Cons:
Since it is 3D can run slow in you progra it to calculate different what-if scenarios.