Welcome to the Virtalis Community - Dave C Intro

Who and What

Hello and welcome to my blog! I’m Dave Corlett, Technical Consultant here at Virtalis.

I guess the first thing to address is what exactly a “Technical Consultant” is, or failing that at least explain what I do. Let’s start with the cheesy headline from my LinkedIn profile:

Helping customers realise their goals and leverage the full potential of the Virtalis product suite

Good, right? But what does it actually mean? Basically it’s my job to enable customers to do the visualisation they want to do. This can take a variety of forms:

• Some customers want to specify a package of work and get a complete solution delivered to them, so I’d talk to them about their requirements and build something like a plugin to do what they want.
• Others want to take a more collaborative approach, because their integration is a bit more bespoke or they have some expertise that will help the project along. A typical example would see me working alongside a developer of another product, sharing our knowledge of the respective APIs to come up with something really cool.
• For those who want to learn the skills to implement their own solutions from scratch, Virtalis offers training in how to use the more advanced features and APIs of our software, which I run.

Alongside these more structured projects, I’m also lucky enough to spend a little of my time coming up with my own ideas and building capability demonstrators around them.

Why and How

Arguably more important than some of the individual projects I get involved in are the communications I have with customers around their needs and how we can help. By far the most common question I get asked both externally and by the sales team is “Can we use the software to do X?”.

The answer to that question is almost always yes, but then I work here, so I would say that wouldn’t I? I won’t pretend that everything is easy, but hopefully this and future blogs will go some way to demonstrating the variety of things that are possible.

This blog is going to be focused on showing as many wide-ranging examples of the things I get involved with here at Virtalis. I’ll be going into some technical detail about how these examples were created, and why they’re designed the way they are.

The aim is to inspire you to think about visualisation in a new way. Don’t ask how you can be visualising what everyone else is visualising, but think about what you need to visualise, and then ask us how it can be done. I strongly encourage you to get in touch with me if you want to know more.

Teaser

Here’s a taste of what’s to come:

• Importing CAD directly from data management software
• Creating obfuscated visualisations
• Simulation in VisRen
• Connecting VisRen to web APIs
• Visualising weather data
• Visualising project management data
• Visualising CAM data
• Visualising simulation outputs
• Visualising 4+ dimensional data