CAD Compared to Simulation Assets#

Understanding the differences between CAD (Computer-Aided Design) assets and simulation-ready assets is crucial for effective industrial simulation workflows. While highly related, they serve different purposes.

CAD Assets#

CAD/CAM assets provide the design intent for an object destined to be manufactured in the real world.

Characteristics

Manufacturing-specific details
High precision and accuracy
Complex internal geometric structures
Solids and surfacing construction in CAD software

Simulation Assets#

Simulation assets are created for one or more simulation runtime engines to simulate a given business logic use case and provide insights and data.

Characteristics

Starts with CAD data
Represents the baseline digital twin of the real-world asset
Configuration of data and hierarchy is often different from engineering designs - abstracts or omits details that do not affect simulation results to optimize computational performance
Augmented with extra metadata to support runtime use cases (such as physics, semantic labels, AIF thermal cooling, and electrical input data)

The Conversion Challenge#

Converting from CAD into a simulation digital twin asset requires:

Exporting CAD source data into USD (moving from solids to polygons)
Geometry re-organization and clean-up
Addition of simulation metadata
Validation and testing
Adherence to simulation standards (like SimReady) to ensure consistency