What's New in EngView Package & Display
Designer 8.1
3D
- Upload 3D
models to EngView's dedicated space on the cloud
- EngView
now offers you Shared Space, a cloud service where you can upload fully featured 3D models
of your projects and present them to co-workers, fellow designers
and customers. After uploading a 3D model, you send your associates
a URL, which they use to access the model.
- Use of Physically
Based Rendering for defining surfaces of materials and finishing
effects
- EngView now uses
Physically Based Rendering (PBR) as part of the definition of
material surfaces and
finishing effects.
With PBR, a method that manages how light interacts with surfaces,
you can create material surfaces that most closely approximate
the way in which real-world materials reflect light. EngView applies
a model that defines surfaces through their metalness, roughness,
occlusion and opacity.
- Greater control over the lighting of 3D scenes
- You can now use a richer set of properties for lighting
3D models and their environments. The new options include
lighting presets, a richer choice of backgrounds, greater control
of the model's projection, intensity of the directed light, and
gamma correction.
- Experience 3D model
textures in super high quality
- You can now view
textures in 3D models in super high quality, provided your video
adapter has the capability. By default, the EngView setup program
installs 4k as quality size for rendering these textures, but
you can increase this size to 8k or 16k in
the System Configuration Utility after installing the program.
(On the Common tab, click the Special Effects Test button, and
then follow the instructions.)
- Export to the .glTF file format
- You can now export 3D models in the .glTF file
format. The format is widely used in Virtual Reality, Augmented
Reality and Web applications because of its support of animation,
motion and Physically Based Rendering of materials. EngView exports
3D scenes in glTF's two file variants: .gltf and .glb. Largely
identical functionally, the two differ in how they handle their
3D scene components:
- The .gltf file only references the 3D model's components
— as a result, textures (JPEG, PNG), shaders (GLSL), and geometry
and animation (BIN) are each exported in separate files.
- The .glb file is a compressed version of the .gltf format
and contains in a single file the textures, shaders, geometry
and animation. When you select this export, only one file
is exported, which is smaller in size than the .gltf counterpart
and loads faster in 3D editors.
- Export of models' artwork in extra high quality
- When exporting 3D
models to the file formats Web3D, Collada, glTF/GLB, PDF, U3D,
you can now set the artwork quality
to up to 16k.
- Set viewpoints in
folding sequences
- When building folding
sequences, you can now set viewpoints
— snapshots of the model's positions in the 3D environment. When
you play the sequence and it reaches a viewpoint, the model positions
itself at the exact angle and place that you have fixed.
- Intuitive folding
of panels
- You can now make
two panels meet each other by simply selecting
edges on them that you want to join. You then choose the angle
— acute or obtuse — at which you want the panels joined. This
point-and-fold technique lets you follow your intuition and spares
you the need to pre-calculate the angles at which panels need
to fold in order to meet.
- Preserving
actions set to hidden panels
- EngView
now keeps and highlights in the tabular area actions that are
set to hidden panels — for example,
because they are under activated
conditional visibility. Marking these actions alerts you that
there are panels that you will not see until they are made visible.
When they are, the respective actions become active again. By
keeping actions for panels that temporarily take no part in the
3D model, you can create a full and complete folding sequence
that remains up to date at any moment.
- Give
panels their own names
- You can now add your own, semantic
names to panels. This helps you distinguish them better than
by the generic names Panel1, Panel2, and so on. Using semantic
panel names makes it easier for you to follow which panel does
what.
- Scaling and resizing
of external objects in any dimension
- You can now scale
or resize an external object along any
of its three dimensions. This lets you adjust the size of
the packaging to the exact sizes of the product it will be holding.
You can scale and resize proportionally and non-proportionally.
- The buttons for measurement
lines and overall dimensions are now on the Dimensions tab
- The buttons for measuring
distances in 3D models
and for adding
models' overall dimensions 
have been
moved to the Dimensions tab and no longer appear on the 3D tab.
The underlying functionalities remain as before.
- The Export to File
and Upload to Shared Space buttons sit in a joint button group
- The buttons for exporting 3D models
and for uploading
models to the Shared Space service 
have been nested into a common button group on the 3D
toolbar.
- The mode buttons
for viewing the 3D model share a button group
- The buttons for how
to view the 3D model — with solid or transparent panels, or as
a wireframe — are now in a common button group on the 3D
toolbar.
- Zoom and Zoom to
Fit buttons removed
- The Zoom
and Zoom to Fit 
buttons have been removed from the 3D
toolbar. The respective functionalities remain available on
the main tool panel.
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Libraries
- New designs and structures
- The libraries have been expanded by a total of 374 designs
and structures — 315 in Packaging
and 59 in Displays and Furniture.
- Paired designs ensure less layout waste
- The library now offers designs that, when used together in
layout arrays, contribute to less overall waste. Largely identical
in structure, paired designs normally differ in the position of
a panel. As a result, when arrayed in a layout, these designs
stack in a manner that generates significantly less waste. You
can find these designs in the following sections of the Library
of Packaging Structures: EVF111 and EVF112 (folding carton),
EVC111 (corrugated board) and EVP12 (PVC).
- Access the indexes directly from the program's UI
- You can now open the two indexes — for the Library of Resizable
Designs and the Library of Displays and Furniture — directly from
the program's main panel.
- Indexes' content available in English, German and Japanese
on UI Language Switch
- When you choose to use
the UI in English, German or Japanese, EngView loads the content
of the indexes in the language you have selected. When the UI
language is other than these three, you work with the English-language
edition.
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Drafting
- Two types of material
thickness
- When defining a material,
you can now set two
different thicknesses:
- Calculation Thickness. The value that EngView uses
when making calculations within resizable templates.
- Real Thickness. The actual material thickness and
also the value that EngView uses to visualize 3D models.
- Export of braille matrices (PDF, EPS, AI)
- When exporting braille inscriptions, you can now export also
the matrix that holds the braille text. The matrix is exported:
- In a separate layer.
- In the automatically generated Braille Matrix style.
Supported file
formats: .eps, .pdf and .ai.
- Auto-complete suggestions for functions and parameter names
- When you start typing functions, parameter names and expressions,
EngView offers you auto-complete hints.
- Library of Components loads in English, German and Japanese
on UI Language Switch
- When you switch the program's
UI language to English, German or Japanese, EngView loads
the library of resizable components in the language you have selected,
provided you have selected the Browse
with System's language functionality. When the UI language
is other than these three, the English-language edition loads.
- Routing areas for pocket milling processing
- You can create routing areas
for pocket milling jobs. Pocket milling removes layers of
material from a panel's surface. You can set the cutter to move
shuttle-like between a panel's edges or to form concentric shapes.
The functionality is most helpful for the processing of unbending
materials — for example, glass or metal.
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Integration
with Adobe® Illustrator®
- Resolving conflicts between overlapping graphics bleeds in
layout files
- When working on layout
files where graphics bleeds on adjacent panels overlap, you
can now resolve
such conflicts by choosing which bleed to use in the final
production file.
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Sheet layout
- Multi-die nesting layout
- A new layout option offers the arraying of layouts out of dieboard
components.
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- Crop and print marks management in samplecounter drawings
- You can now transfer print marks
to samplecounter drawings and create crop marks. The crop
marks are then used as pinpoints on the machine's coordinate system.
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Cost
Estimator
- Three views for displaying
cost models
- You can now choose
between three ways to view
cost models in the Cost Estimator tab:
- User View. If you have made your own pattern of
grouping and arranging parameters, this view displays it.
Designing your own view lets you group
and order the parameters as you want to view them and
not in the order EngView uses for calculations (see Calculation
View).
- Calculation View. Display the parameters in the
order that EngView uses to calculate the total cost.
- Debug View. Identical with the Calculation View
but displays also any hidden parameters.
- More options for exporting
cost models
- You can now use a larger
number of options for the export of cost model data. These
include three types of file formats (.txt, .csv, and .json) and
additional options for formatting the exported data.
- More functions for
extracting cost model data
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Design frames and print presentations
- Customize the contents
of print legend tables
- You can now arrange
the information displayed in print
legends according to your own needs. You can select which
components of the legend table — style patterns, names, and values
— to include and then, respectively, see in the print drawing.
Using check boxes, you can control the information that goes into
the legend table and out of it.
- Customize how style
names are listed in the print legend table
- You can now choose
how you want EngView to list style names in the legend table.
You can choose between listing the names as a catalog, by name
or by value. In the table,
see the Order list.
- Formulas extracting
information from strings
- You can now extract
information
from strings — series of characters that consist of letters,
digits and symbols. You can:
- Measure the lengths of strings.
- Extract the position of string items within strings.
- Extract portions of strings.
- Formulas extracting
information about dates and time
- You can now extract
information about
dates and time and combine functions to display future moments
in time. You can also set to display elapsed times.
- Additional arguments
have been added to formulas specific to sheets and dieboards:
- Extract information about sheet and dieboard in drawings
without actual sheets and/or dieboards. Sheet-
and dieboard-related
formulas now extract data from drawings that do not have an
actual sheet or dieboard. They extract these data by using
a parameter that takes account of objects in the Sheet, respectively,
Dieboard styles. This functionality is most handy for drawings
from imported file formats — for example, .cf2 — which often
do not contain their own sheet or dieboard objects and define
sheets and dieboards by means of regular objects in the Sheet
and Dieboard styles.
- Extracting cut box area and rule-to-rule box area on
cutting die drawings. A cut box is formed by:
- For 1up. By the overall dimensions of the design
(its bounding rectangle).
- For layout. The cut box is the overall dimensions
of all parts.
- A rule-to-rule box is the bounding rectangle
of the drawing, which takes into account stripping knives
and compensating rules.
- When extracting margins, you can now ignore inliner objects.
- Formulas exracting
information about holes area
- You can now use a formula
to extract the areas of
holes in 1up and layout drawings.
- Formula for counting
all objects in a specified style and its child styles.
- You can now use a formula
to count how many objects in a specific
style and objects in its child styles there are in a drawing.
- Formulas related to
production on inliner machines
- The following new formulas
extract information specific to production on inliner machines:
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Other new functionalities
- New installation settings and work resources directories
- Changes have been made to where EngView puts its installation
settings and work resources: The earlier settings and resources
directory — EngViewWork[version number] — has been retired and
now the installation's settings and work resources are installed
by default in C:/ProgramData/EngView/Package Designer. In this
directory, you can find, among other resources, the installation's
local and shared settings, samples, OpenGL settings, standards
libraries, and the PO database and files.
- NOTE: Normally, the C:/ProgramData directory is not visible
in Windows Explorer, and if you want to access its contents, you
need to allow visibility of hidden items.
- Start menu location and install-language libraries
- Changes have been made to how the EngView installation appears
on the Start menus:
- You can now find the installation under the EngView category.
- There you also find links to the EngView libraries and
the help system, which load in the language selected in the
setup program.
- Unicode characters in file names
- EngView now recognizes Unicode characters in file names. This
means that you can save, open, import and export files whose names
feature diacritical marks, as well as file names in non-Roman
scripts — for example, Cyrillic, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese.
- Import CorelDRAW files
- You can now import
files of the CorelDRAW format (.cdr).
- More options for importing
DDES line types
- When importing DDES line types, you can now use a larger
number of options to tell EngView what to import and how.
You can set rules for importing line types:
- Whose widths and perfo patterns are identical with existing
EngView styles.
- That are identified by specific names in the DDES file.
- That are held in separate layers in the DDES file.
- Cut box area statistics
- You can now follow
area statistics
for individual boxes, specifically the area for a box's bounding
rectangle, the waste area in the bounding rectangle.
- More display options
in the Styles tab
- The Styles
tab now offers:
- A Details column, which lists the production process and
the line width associated with a style.
- Context menu options that let you choose the columns you
want to see in the tab.
- Translation of selection
type entries strings
- The descriptions of
selection type entries in cost model and parameter template parameters
do not translate when you switch
to a different user interface language. Now you can add a
set of your
own translations to these strings.
- Renamed controls for
adding external drawings on the File menu
- The controls that let
you add external drawings to projects have been renamed as follows:
- New functionalities
in the active drawing icon
- The icon
of the active drawing now offers shortcuts for you to:
- Review/edit the drawing's properties:
Double-click the icon to do this.
- Review/edit the properties of a placed sheet and/or dieboard:
when you are in the respective drawing, right-click the icon
and use the command you need.
- View a drawing's material
name and thickness in the graphical area
- You can set the program
to always
display the active drawing's material name and thickness in
the graphical area's upper left corner.
- Association of tool
type to production processes during style definition
- Among other properties,
a style points to a specific production process, which is then
associated with a tool. When defining a global style, you can
now set additional
information about the tool type. This information is most
helpful when EngView is integrated with external production systems
whose production processes may require information about the tool
type — it helps to differentiate between the tools used in production.
- Presets for manufacturing
joints
- The functionality that
defines and applies manufacturing joints to structures — defining
the side (right, left), the panel (short, long) and the method
of joining (taping, gluing, stitching) — has been expanded.
Now you can set presets, which you can apply
to structures. Setting a manufacturing joint is necessary
if:
- EngView is integrated with an external production system
that requires information about the joint.
- You want to create a multi-purpose structure that can change
its behavior.
By using an editable manufacturing joint, you can produce, for
example, two different designs from the same structure.
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