FRED was developed with the following goals in mind:
- Make rapid virtual prototyping accessible to engineers with a broad range of experience levels
- Use a Dynamic System Tree to order Curves, Surfaces, Custom Elements and Subassemblies to create geometry and order objects into layers
- Offer a high level of visualization and user interaction with a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) Interface
- Position any object versus any other object using multiple coordinate systems (i.e., local, global, self, other object, versus parent or subassembly)
- Include IGES, and STEP translators for geometry import and export and optical translators for optical design import
- Introduce new support tools for the fastest geometry, materials, coating creation (i.e., digitizer, etc) and modification (i.e., parametric modeling, etc) with multiple aperture capability
- Compiled Visual Basic scripting with extended FRED functionality to think outside the box
- Give engineers a new tool to complement existing software
using non-sequential multi-threading algorithms for faster raytracing
Recommended System Requirements to run FRED
Intel® Duo-Core or AMD® Athlon x 2 CPU with 1 Gigabyte of RAM and Windows® XP
40GB Harddisk and either an ATI® or NVIDIA® Graphics Card with 128Mb of memory
Premium System (Dell 390 Desktop) to run FRED Turbo
Intel® Core™2 Extreme QX6700 2.66GHz/1066MHz/8MB L2/Quad-core/VT
Genuine Windows® XP Professional, SP2 with Media
256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 3450, Dual DVI or Dual VGA or DVI + VGA
2GB, 667MHz, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, ECC (4 DIMMS)
320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 16MB DataBurst Cache™