A few years ago, Form Trends published an article citing clay modeling as ‘An Alternative Career‘ to traditional automotive sketch-and-render design. Times have changed. While many design studios still use clay in the development process, it is often only employed as a verification tool in the final stages before the design is ultimately signed off. Digital modeling is faster, more cost-effective and taking over in design studios worldwide. Senior Digital Modeling Manager Pierre-Paul Andriani walks us through these digital tools.
If you have some time to kill on Google Street View, check out the original campus of the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. If you go to this location, you’ll find the nicknamed Tinkertoy building. The computer lab was on the third floor.
It was a mysterious room, hot, dark and full of very colorful computers. I had never seen such computers before and for good reason. Those were Indigo boxes made by Silicon Graphics. They could cost you more than $50,000 apiece. Only big companies and schools were able to afford them.
I attended my first 3D class with Alias more than 20 years ago at that location. I logged in and for all intents and purposes I never logged out. From my first class, I was completely hooked on digital modeling. I stumbled into a world that literally had no limits. More than 20 years later, let’s have a look at the state of digital modeling.
The Gold Standard
Over the last 30 years, two programs have emerged in the field of CAS (Computer Assisted Surfacing): ICEM by Dassault and Alias by Autodesk.
Alias has earned itself the lion’s share of CAS worldwide. You use curves (Non-Uniform Rational B Splines or NURBS) to generate surfaces. Those surfaces define your 3D design. The methodology is actually very simple. Think of it as a digital band saw carving out a piece of foam.
You first define your big primary surfaces, i.e. your first cuts on the saw. You then define your secondary surfaces. The sharp edges where your surfaces meet define the location of your fillets. You don’t even need to create a fillet if those intersections are not clean in all views. In the shop, you would use sandpaper to get those edges rounded off.
The tools have improved and expanded over the years. However, an Alias user frozen in time from 1996 would be able to use Alias today without any problems. Don’t let this apparent stagnation fool you: this speaks to the dominance, ubiquity and power of Alias.
The Blank Screen
The start of the design process is wonderful. It is a blank canvas. Designers are free to explore. Packages are not set. There can be quite a lot of bandwidth in measurements.
A traditional tool like Alias is ill-suited for this task. As the car fluctuates in size, it tends to destroy your primary surfaces quickly. That means starting over. The key goal at that stage is speed while mitigating the fluctuations of the package.
For that reason, at the start of the decade, OEMs have started to use polygonal modeling, as used in the movie and gaming industries. With polygons pull a bunch of points and your shapes will follow. You want a 3D shape as soon as you have a key sketch.
Autodesk Maya was introduced in 2000. Other tools have emerged later such as Modo by The Foundry and most notably Blender. Blender’s unbeatable feature is its price: totally open source and free. For budding car designers and modelers, it is the perfect getaway drug.
Autodesk has now ramped up its arsenal with the integration of subdivision surfacing (Sub D) within Alias. Sub D is like polygonal with NURBS tools integrated. The bottom line is the same when you model in Sub D: speed.
The Rise of The Machine
In the mid-1990s, nobody ever heard of an architectural project being on time and on budget. Enter Frank Gehry. Starting with the famous Golden Fish for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, he pioneered the use of digital modeling in architecture, pioneering BIM (building information modeling) and parametric design using CATIA. One of his contemporaries has adopted the parametric approach with eye-popping results: the late Zaha Hadid.
The parametric revolution made its way into cars. 2016 was a banner year with the Renault Trezor and BMW Next 100 concepts. Tata Motors has also used it for the 45X Concept Car. Parametric design is very different from polygonal or NURBS modeling. It is a logical step-by-step mathematical process. It is certainly the “technology du jour”. Yet it does have very practical applications, some of which make modelers very happy.
There are some car parts modelers dread doing, such as grilles. It is repetitive, time-intensive and not as exciting as an IP or a body side. If you have a grille design you can dial in all its parameters with code (vanes, motifs, etc.). Then you can iterate until you meet all your requirements for design and function. The machine’s computing power does all the heavy lifting for you. You will most likely have to rebuild the final product but at least you only do it once.
The VR Revolution
How will we design cars in the future? Next year the computer mouse will be 50 years old. Will we still use it to build cars?
Enter Moore’s law. 3D modeling used to require an insane amount of money and hardware. Then the technology got cheaper and faster, and roughly as predicted by Moore, refreshed every 18 months.
The gaming industry rode that wave into the homes with ever powerful gaming consoles, now powered by virtual reality. The concept of a head-mounted 3D headset is now mainstream.
There have been a few sketching solutions that want to accelerate the building of cars in 3D. First, there is Vector Suite, as adopted by McLaren. Traditionally you give your modeler a sketch that must fit into a 3D form. In VR a designer can now naturally build a 3D curve and export it as is to his modeler. You skip the entire Photoshop stage.
Another 3D solution is Gravity Sketch. It is taking things a step further by introducing surfacing tools. The biggest mind-bender about VR sketching? You can start drawing an interior from a driver’s seat point of view. Your visibility and reach zones are right there.
Those technologies are still emerging. For kids growing up with 3D headsets, those tools will be second nature.
Conclusion
It is an exciting time to be a modeler. It used to be a very straightforward job. Today new tools have made digital modeling a more open and more exciting field.
There will always be a need for ‘classic’ CAS and Class-A modelers. With the availability of new tools, modelers can now branch out and specialize in different activities.
That’s the current state of the profession. I am logged in today more than ever. Then there was visualization. We’ll save that for another column…
