Impact ‘Dynamic Constraints Edition’ has seen Impact become the first packaging design CAD software to offer geometric constraint tools, which captures the designer’s intent as they draw, and also enables quick and easy resizing.
The industry-first feature was introduced to key Arden Software customers last year and has since received widespread acclaim for its ability to enhance design flexibility, speed up workflow, and elevate creative possibilities.
Matt Hewitt, Business Development Director at Arden Software said, ‘The introduction of geometric constraint tools within Impact has been a game changer for the packaging design industry. Our early adopters have already seen remarkable improvements in their design efficiency and creativity, as they’re empowered to work with unprecedented flexibility, precision and speed. Impact Dynamic Constraints has been embraced by design professionals, reshaping how packaging is created and setting a new standard for the future of the industry.’
‘Constraint-based design is more commonly used within CAD software in other industries, such as architectural or Mechanical CAD, but it has never been seen before in packaging design software, so we’re incredibly proud to be leading this innovation at Arden and redefining what’s possible in packaging design.’
Impact Dynamic Constraints enriches the entire use of the product’s design and editing capabilities, moving away from the legacy history-based approach to parametrics. It not only captures the designer’s intent as they draw, but also offers the unique advantage that any existing or imported drawing can be resized quickly and effortlessly.
Key Highlights
Next-generation parametric design: the Dynamic Constraints feature offers a cutting-edge parametric design solution, allowing designers to define rules and relationships within their designs. This ensures that design intent is preserved, even during edits or resizing, improving the integrity and reusability of designs.
Seamless resizing and adaptation: designers can easily create resizeable models from scratch, or apply constraints to existing or imported designs, allowing quick adaptation to changing requirements. This eliminates the need to rebuild designs, saving time and improving efficiency.
Impact supports various dynamic constraints, including: distance constraints for controlling the length or radius of entities; angular constraints to control angles between entities; lock constraints to quickly fix entities without needing to specify angles, ensuring elements like lines remain horizontal, vertical, or points stay aligned; and geometric constraints like Coincident, Parallel, and Perpendicular to control the position of points, lines, curves, and other entity types. Other constraints include: dimensional constraints to control distances between points or entities; and equals constraints, a mix between geometric and dimensional constraints, used to quickly create a matching relationship between two or more entities, without the need for additional variables or expressions.
Automatic constraint creation: many existing tools in Impact, such as the Draw and Edit tools, have been updated to automatically infer and apply relevant constraints as designers work, streamlining the design process.
Customisable standards for reusable designs: designs created with Dynamic Constraints can be turned into Standards — resizeable designs that are stored in the Impact Standard Library. These custom Standards automatically resize when used, offering users a flexible and efficient solution for recurring design needs.
Dynamic constraints toolbox: this new toolbox provides real-time feedback, showing available constraints, model status and reporting errors. It ensures that the model maintains integrity during modifications and helps designers correct underdefined areas of a design.
Looking ahead, Arden Software’s development team is already working on the next major Impact release, due later this year. This update will further refine the Dynamic Constraints feature, making it even more powerful and intuitive for users. Alongside these enhancements, the upcoming release will introduce improved revision support, specifically around enhanced layer revisions, a highly requested feature by customers.
The snapping tools will also see significant upgrades, offering easier access to overrides and configuration of the Smart Snap tool, giving designers greater control over snap modes.
Additionally, the upcoming release will feature enhancements to 3D design with updated Scene Templates, providing greater flexibility for building pre-defined 3D scenes, complete with cameras, animation paths, and other scene configurations.
