SUPER HOLLYWOOD: Footwear Design Software

Friday 20 July 2012

Footwear Design Software

NC Graphics was founded by Arthur Flutter in Waterbeach, Cambridge, England, in 1977 after completing a PhD in Computer Aided Design at the CADCentre. This work became the basis of Toolmaker, a product that has been sold by the company since this time.
In the mid-1980s the company collaborated with C&J Clark to write shoe design software until a dispute about the intellectual property rights over the product caused a falling-out. C&J Clark sued NC Graphics and won the case and NC Graphics was no longer able to develop or sell the shoe design software that they had been contracted to develop for C&J Clark.
NC Graphics focused on developing a surface modelling software product that used polynomial mathematics and was driven by human-readable input commands based on the APT language. The initial product was called Polyapt and was sold initially to manufacturing companies that specialised in producing lost wax dies for aerofoil and turbine engine blades.
In the late 1980s NC Graphics collaborated with Hurco whereby NC Graphics developed the software and Hurco marketed it worldwide. The product was marketed by Hurco as TDM3000 on a global exclusive basis. At the same time, the same fundamental source code was sold through a company in Aylesbury called VanDix and the product was marketed by them as the "VanDix" CADCAM system. Around 1990 NC Graphics and Hurco parted company after Hurco discovered that their global exclusivity agreement had been breached. Hurco obtained joint copyright to the software source code and continued to develop it before abandoning CADCAM development in the mid-1990s.
NC Graphics picked up the UK customer base from Hurco and sold what was to become "Toolmaker" until they were finally bought out by PTC some years later.