PARTNER INDUSTRY Design and manufacturing CHALLENGES To enable CGPdesign to provide free SOLIDWORKS® and CATIA™ training to Bosnian students, expanding to cover more complex projects than its previous hardware would permit. SOLUTION Equipped with twin AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 graphics cards, an Intel® Core™ i7- 6700K CPU and 32GB RAM, CGPdesign's new workstations load and edit large CAD files seamlessly. RESULTS On CGPdesign's previous most powerful workstation, opening its award-winning PINKI sports bike model in SOLIDWORKS® took 10 attempts. On its new AMD workstations, it opens first time. SOFTWARE USED AutoCAD® | Autodesk CATIA™ | Dassault Systèmes® SOLIDWORKS® | Dassault Systèmes AMD TECHNOLOGY AT A GLANCE Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 GPU Memory—8GB GDDR5 Compute performance—Up to 5.73 TFLOPS peak single-precision floating-point performance AMD Eyefinity technology—Supports up to four displays at 4K resolution Open standards—Supports OpenCL™ 2.0, OPenGL® 4.5, Vulkan® 1.0 AMD + CGPDESIGN CASE STUDY AMD's powerful Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 graphics cards help this award-winning design collective teach CAD tools like SOLIDWORKS® and CATIA™ to the next generation of Bosnian engineers. POWER TO CGPDESIGN It's hard to master CAD tools when you live in a country in which even their student editions would cost a professional engineer a week's wages. Which is why Adi Pandžić founded CGPdesign. Over the past four years, its team of freelance engineers and designers has taught scores of Bosnian and Herzegovinian students how to use SOLIDWORKS®, CATIA™ and AutoCAD®, entirely for free – while the award-winning 3D models it has produced have been used by companies including HP®, Dassault Systèmes® and Epic Games. And now, with the help of AMD, CGPdesign is extending its mission. Thanks to two top-of-the- range workstations equipped with dual AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 GPUs and running Radeon™ ProRender add-in for SOLIDWORKS®, AMD's free, physically based renderer, the team is teaching the next generation of Bosnian engineers ever more complex 3D design techniques. OVERCOMING THE COST OF CAD SOFTWARE “I only started to learn 3D design software in my second year at university,” says Pandžić, now a PhD student and teaching assistant at the University of Sarajevo. “I learned CATIA™ first, then switched to SOLIDWORKS®, and I've now been using it for five or six years.” The problem that Pandžić faced, and that Bosnian students still face, is the cost of CAD software. Unless your university course teaches a particular application – Pandžić's own faculty only taught CATIA™ – low average local salaries make it very difficult to obtain a license for yourself. “You don't have the money to buy the commercial version of SOLIDWORKS®, and even the student version costs around €140,” he points out. “My current salary, by the standards of Bosnia, is amazing, and I'm earning around €600 per month.” TEACHING 3D DESIGN SKILLS FOR FREE Pandžić's solution, together with two colleagues at the University of Sarajevo, was to found an organization dedicated to teaching local students how to use CAD tools. Since 2014, CGPdesign has run courses in product design and engineering in SOLIDWORKS®, CATIA™ and AutoCAD. “Because the economic situation isn't good, thousands and thousands of young people are leaving our country to find a better future,” says Pandžić. “CGPdesign's goal is to teach Bosnian students engineering skills like 3D design for free.” The classes were originally held at the university itself, but have now moved to a co-working space in central Sarajevo where, with the help of Swiss government-funded project MarketMakers, CGPdesign has now diversified into teaching 3D printing and electronics prototyping. “In a recent project, we worked with 12 students in two teams for around two months, creating two fully functional robotic hands,” says Pandžić. “They were designed in SOLIDWORKS®, printed on an Ultimaker 3D printer, then given functionality with Arduino and Internet of Things technology.” “Thousands and thousands of young people are leaving our country to find a better future. CGPdesign's goal is to teach Bosnian students engineering skills like 3D design for free.” Adi Pandžić, Co-founder, CGPdesign
Transcript
PARTNER
INDUSTRY Design and manufacturing
CHALLENGES To enable CGPdesign to provide free SOLIDWORKS® and CATIA™ training to Bosnian students, expanding to cover more complex projects than its previous hardware would permit.
SOLUTION Equipped with twin AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 graphics cards, an Intel® Core™ i7-6700K CPU and 32GB RAM, CGPdesign's new workstations load and edit large CAD files seamlessly.
RESULTS On CGPdesign's previous most powerful workstation, opening its award-winning PINKI sports bike model in SOLIDWORKS® took 10 attempts. On its new AMD workstations, it opens first time.
AMD TECHNOLOGY AT A GLANCE Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 GPU Memory—8GB GDDR5 Compute performance—Up to 5.73 TFLOPS peak single-precision floating-point performance AMD Eyefinity technology—Supports up to four displays at 4K resolution Open standards—Supports OpenCL™ 2.0, OPenGL® 4.5, Vulkan® 1.0
AMD + CGPDESIGN CASE STUDY
AMD's powerful Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 graphics cards help this award-winning design collective teach CAD tools like SOLIDWORKS® and CATIA™ to the next generation of Bosnian engineers.
POWER TOCGPDESIGN
It's hard to master CAD tools when you live in a country in which even their student editions would cost a professional engineer a week's wages. Which is why Adi Pandžić founded CGPdesign.
Over the past four years, its team of freelance engineers and designers has taught scores of Bosnian and Herzegovinian students how to use SOLIDWORKS®, CATIA™ and AutoCAD®, entirely for free – while the award-winning 3D models it has produced have been used by companies including HP®, Dassault Systèmes® and Epic Games.
And now, with the help of AMD, CGPdesign is extending its mission. Thanks to two top-of-the-range workstations equipped with dual AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 GPUs and running Radeon™ ProRender add-in for SOLIDWORKS®, AMD's free, physically based renderer, the team is teaching the next generation of Bosnian engineers ever more complex 3D design techniques.
OVERCOMING THE COST OF CAD SOFTWARE “I only started to learn 3D design software in my second year at university,” says Pandžić, now a PhD student and teaching assistant at the University of Sarajevo. “I learned CATIA™ first, then switched to SOLIDWORKS®, and I've now been using it for five or six years.”
The problem that Pandžić faced, and that Bosnian students still face, is the cost of CAD software. Unless your university course teaches a particular application – Pandžić's own faculty only taught CATIA™ –
low average local salaries make it very difficult to obtain a license for yourself.
“You don't have the money to buy the commercial version of SOLIDWORKS®, and even the student version costs around €140,” he points out. “My current salary, by the standards of Bosnia, is amazing, and I'm earning around €600 per month.”
TEACHING 3D DESIGN SKILLS FOR FREE Pandžić's solution, together with two colleagues at the University of Sarajevo, was to found an organization dedicated to teaching local students how to use CAD tools. Since 2014, CGPdesign has run courses in product design and engineering in SOLIDWORKS®, CATIA™ and AutoCAD.
“Because the economic situation isn't good, thousands and thousands of young people are leaving our country to find a better future,” says Pandžić. “CGPdesign's goal is to teach Bosnian students engineering skills like 3D design for free.”
The classes were originally held at the university itself, but have now moved to a co-working space in central Sarajevo where, with the help of Swiss government-funded project MarketMakers, CGPdesign has now diversified into teaching 3D printing and electronics prototyping.
“In a recent project, we worked with 12 students in two teams for around two months, creating two fully functional robotic hands,” says Pandžić. “They were designed in SOLIDWORKS®, printed on an Ultimaker 3D printer, then given functionality with Arduino and Internet of Things technology.”
“Thousands and thousands of young people are leaving our country to find a better future. CGPdesign's goal is to teach Bosnian students engineering skills like 3D design for free.” Adi Pandžić, Co-founder, CGPdesign
CREATING AWARD-WINNING ENGINEERING ASSETS CGPdesign's best-known model is PINKI, a concept design for a sports bike created with nine students over a period of 18 months. When it was posted on international engineering community GrabCAD, it won the site's Golden Gear award for best collaborative model, and has subsequently been used in the marketing materials of firms including HP, Epic Games and Dassault Systèmes.
With over 2,500 individual parts, the asset posed real problems for the hardware on which the CGPdesign team was working at the time. “I had the most powerful machine, and I had to try around 10 times to open that file,” says Pandžić. “After that, I didn't dare turn off my PC until it finally crashed because it was so hard to open again.”
Pandžić says that CGPdesign faces similar problems even today, since it relies on students working on their own machines. “They're always asking me to do big projects, and I have to tell them: 'You don't have a powerful enough PC to do that.'”
PRODUCT DESIGN POWERED BY AMD GRAPHICS CARDS Enter CGPdesign's two new AMD graphics-powered workstations. Thanks to their Intel® Core™ i7-6700K CPUs, dual AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 GPUs and 32GB of system RAM, the machines make short work of large CAD files. And with a peak single-precision floating-point performance of 5.73 TFLOPS and 8GB GDDR5 graphics memory, the Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 cards help ensure that even complex assets with multiple individual parts remain seamlessly interactive in SOLIDWORKS®.
Both machines were supplied free of charge by AMD and its workstation partners, along with three additional Radeon™ Pro WX Series graphics cards — all of which are now transforming the way in which CGPdesign teaches.
“Our biggest problem here is support,” says Pandžić. “We're fighting to give our students good equipment to work with. If I could get an AMD machine for every student, I'd be so happy.”
Pandžić notes that the AMD workstations are actually more powerful than the ones most local design and engineering firms are using in production. “I don't know of any company that has the chance to buy this kind of PC,” he says. “At our commercial clients, a typical machine is around two times less powerful, and they're also using gaming graphics cards.”
GPU-ACCELERATED RENDERING WITH RADEON™ PRORENDER ADD-IN CGPdesign has also begun using AMD software in its work, in the shape of the Radeon™ ProRender add-in for SOLIDWORKS®, its free,
physically based render engine. Unlike SOLIDWORKS®' own PhotoView 360 system, Radeon™ ProRender add-in is GPU-accelerated, speeding up renders of complex assets like the PINKI sports bike. “They render significantly faster than on the CPU alone,” says Pandžić.
Being based on open standards like OpenCL, Radeon™ ProRender add-in is also hardware-agnostic. “I don't like the fact that some renderers don't let you use the GPUs you want,” says Pandžić. “With Radeon™ ProRender add-in, we can choose to use our powerful AMD graphics cards.”
For CGPdesign, another benefit of Radeon™ ProRender add-in is the free Game Engine Importer, which transfers assets created in SOLIDWORKS® to Unreal Engine. “It's amazing being able to export a 3D model for use in virtual reality,” says Pandžić. “You can do crazy things with it.”
LAUNCHING THE NEXT GENERATION OF BOSNIAN ENGINEERS Thanks to AMD's backing, CGPdesign has been able to extend its work making training in 3D design tools like SOLIDWORKS® and CATIA™ freely available to anyone in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its new AMD workstations enable students to work interactively on more complex CAD assets than before, while the free Radeon™ ProRender add-in for SOLIDWORKS® makes it possible to harness the power of their dual Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 graphics cards for rendering.
Adi Pandžić now aims to use the workstations to teach his students VR design skills, and says that he also hopes to test AMD's Ryzen™ CPUs in production. Meanwhile, his former students have gone on to careers in the industry, forming Bosnia's next generation of engineers and entrepreneurs.
“For me, the biggest success of our PINKI sports bike project is that every student got a job,” he says. “Some of them created their own companies, and now work for Ducati and on NASCAR racing cars. For me, success is seeing them working alone on these projects.”
ABOUT CGPDESIGN Based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, CGPdesign offers services and training in mechanical engineering, product design, 3D printing, Internet of Things technology and software development. The freelance collective teaches 3D design in SOLIDWORKS® and CATIA™, 2D drafting in AutoCAD, and electronics development with Arduino and Zelio Soft, while its commercial design clients include Epic Games, Dassault Systèmes, Altair and Gazzda. For more information, visit http://cgp.ba.
ABOUT AMD For more than 45 years AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics, and visualization technologies – the building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms, and the datacenter. Hundreds of millions of consumers, leading Fortune 500 businesses, and cutting-edge scientific research facilities around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work, and play. AMD employees around the world are focused on building great products that push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information about how AMD is enabling today and inspiring tomorrow, visit www.amd.com
“Our AMD workstations are amazing. I can't work with my students on big projects because they don't have good computers. If I could get an AMD machine for every student, I'd be so happy.” Adi Pandžić, Co-founder, CGPdesign
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