Autodesk ShapeManager is a 3D geometric modeling kernel used by

Autodesk Inventor Autodesk Inventor is a computer-aided design application for 3D mechanical design, simulation, visualization, and documentation developed by Autodesk. Features Inventor allows 2D and 3D data integration in a single environment, creating a virt ...

and other

Autodesk Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartere ...

products that is developed inside the company. It was originally forked from ACIS 7.0 in November 2001, and the first version became available in Inventor 5.3 in February 2002. On the day of the announcement, VP of Autodesk, Robert Cross, denied that the genesis of ShapeManager was the purchase by

Dassault Systèmes Dassault Systèmes SE () (abbreviated 3DS) is a French software corporation which develops software for 3D product design, simulation, manufacturing and other 3D related products. Founded in 1981, it is headquartered in Vélizy-Villacoublay, F ...

of ACIS from

Spatial Corp Spatial Corporation was founded in 1986, and had one main product: ACIS, the first commercially available 3D modeling kernel. Through subsequent years, Spatial added products to its portfolio that enabled ISVs mostly in the CAD/CAM industries, ...

in July the previous year, though industry experts commented on Autodesk's exposure to dependence on technology controlled by its main competitor (Dassault owns

SolidWorks SolidWorks is a solid modeling computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) application published by Dassault Systèmes. According to the publisher, over two million engineers and designers at more than 165,000 companies w ...

). The move was enabled by a clause in the 1990 contract between Autodesk and Spatial that made Autodesk a joint developer (with some restrictions) of the software with Spatial and provided an option to buy out of the contract to continue development of the source code on their own at a later date for $6.4 million. Following this move, Dassault filed an injunction on 27 December 2001 for breach of contract against Autodesk and D-Cubed, the contractors who were then working on the kernel, on the technicality that these contractors had been allowed to access the source code. The lawsuit eventually came to an end on 2 October 2003 in favour of Autodesk after the jury had deliberated for under two hours and basically agreed with the videotaped testimony from Spatial's co-founder, Richard Sowar, who confirmed that D-cubed had been contracted to work on various parts of the code by both companies throughout the decade without any suggestion of a breach of contract. Dassault's appeal that this evidence should not have been admitted to the court was also lost in 2006.

References

3D graphics software Computer-aided design {{software-type-stub