Crashes – unplanned termination of either a program or the operating system – can be more than mere irritants. They can cost you a lot in lost time and effort, to say the least. One cause that’s often overloooked is the role of the Graphics Card and the associated Display Driver: see this article on why you should make this your first port of call if you find yourself cursing after an unexplained crash.

Models and Quilts, together with Layers, are a very powerful way to manage the complexity inherent in CFD, such as the DriveAer model pictured here. But what if a quilt is on a layer that’s turned off? This script shows how Pointwise’s Glyph API addresses parent-child queries that make it easy to manage such situations.

Does a CAD Model represent intellectual property, to be controlled carefully? Or data that can and should be shared completely? This legal viewpoint contains many of the issues involved in that debate, but it’s useful to remember that there’s a lot of space between the two extremes. Read this article to review how – not why! – you can choose which bits of your CAD models you share.