Success Stories

Sophis Weaves Textile Design Success

INTERACTIVE UNIX Installed at Sophis Systems

Mention CAD/CAM and most people immediately think of glittering hardware - aircraft and automobiles - or the intricate world of integrated circuits. But Belgium-based Sophis Systems n.v. develops and markets CAD/CAM systems that allow textile companies to automate the design and production of fabrics and textiles. CAD/CAM software is used to demonstrate, on screen or via color hard copy, how designs will look. Variations in color or texture can be quickly visualized and decisions made prior to manufacturing real samples. This process drastically reduces the time and cost involved in creating new textile products.

The company's software development group develops these textile design and engineering applications on i486-based PCs running SunSoft's INTERACTIVE UNIX® operating system.

In the mid-1980's, Sophis decided to commit to UNIX-based open systems for both its internal development and customer systems. Today, UNIX-based RISC workstations and i486 PCs have completely replaced an older generation of DEC PDP11 and Gould MPX systems. For the PCs, the company evaluated UNIX software from SCO and INTERACTIVE before choosing the latter.

"Our systems criteria always begin with the basics: a non-proprietary operating environment, high performance and multitasking," says Sophis technical director Karl Noonan. "Strong networking and virtual memory capabilities are also essential. Since we develop all of our applications in-house, the development environment and tools have to be superior. And because we are always pushing our systems and software to the limit, the ability to grow and move easily to more powerful platforms is crucial to our systems strategy."

"Our application users don't really need to concern themselves with UNIX commands, because we create menus and windows to simplify the interface," adds software coordinator Luc Samaey. "But customers certainly appreciate the advantages that UNIX systems provide, such as multitasking and the ability to run software on different brands of computers."

A typical sequence of pre-production design refinement using applications from Sophis might proceed as follows:

Design Input:

Designs can be scanned in, loaded from optical or magnetic disk, or drawn on screen. A variety of tools can be used to clean up imperfections in background colors and smooth blurred edges or ragged fine lines. Automatic color reduction enables the designer to reduce a color-complex design down to 20 or fewer colors, including tones and halftones.

Design Manipulation and Montage:

Designs can be edited and repositioned in numerous ways using a menu of drawing and editing commands. Special techniques include 'airbrushing', moving pieces of designs, and replication of a design to form a larger pattern.

Studio Design Coloration:

Next, colors are interactively fine-tuned to aesthetic requirements. Colors may be matched to standard on-line color libraries such as Pantone or NCS, or custom colors added to the color library using a Spectophotometer. At this point, hard copy prints are typically made on a high-quality IRIS inkjet printer or a Canon CP color printer. The print inks are CMYK calibrated for accuracy and consistency with the display colors. Management can review the prints and either approve the design or order further color manipulation.

Industrial Coloration:

The Sophis systems contain a library of rasters that are cross-referenced to standard color printing screen types, and customers' rasters can be added. When the desired rasters have been selected, color separations are created electronically. A CONSTRUCT program allows viewing on screen of each separation individually, or of the complete design as it would appear in final printed form. Again, color hard copy at this stage facilitates evaluation and approval.

Production:

The completed design can be transmitted to optical disk for use with a laser engraver, or used to make film separations on the Sophis Laser diode plotter. The optical disk information can also be archived for future reference or use.

Sophis has specialized in textile-oriented computer solutions since 1977, and sales reached $16 million in 1992. The company now has subsidiaries in France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, and more than 170 customer sites worldwide include such textile industry leaders as Burlington, Cone Carlisle, Culp, Milliken and Langenthal.

"Our systems quickly pay for themselves," notes Karl Noonan. "Our customers find that they can respond far more quickly to their customers, and greatly reduce design throughput time. The ability to visualize small color and line adjustments without producing actual textile samples provides substantial savings in time and money."

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