| CAD vendor Autodesk completed its acquisition of 3D graphics technology specialist Alias in January this year. Best known in the automotive industry for its Studio visualisation software, Alias is also a leading figure within the media and entertainment sector for its Maya and MotionBuilder products, widely used to create animation for film and video games, and complementary to Autodesk’s 3ds Max software.
Announced at the Siggraph event in August, the latest releases – 3ds Max 9 and Maya 8 – bring new advances in performance and speed and are designed to run on 64-bit processors and may utilise multi-CPUs to process extremely large and complex data sets. The two packages come under the control of Autodesk’s Media and Entertainment division.
3ds Max and Maya are seeing increased use within the automotive industry for enhanced concept design and the design review process. Alias has always been strong in this area but 3ds Max and Maya have enhanced rendering capability and are more suited to showing the product in context.
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Real, or star of the small screen?
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Thomas Heermann, product line manager for Alias, said: “Studio tools are excellent for rendering and visualisation but Maya and 3ds Max are far richer for creating the experience than Studio.” Using the animation qualities enables product to be seen in use; driving along a winding coast road for example. Autodesk sees this as more informative for decision making than a slideshow of static images.
“What we are seeing with our leading customers is them really taking advantage of the knowledge in the movie and game industry and taking that into design review sessions,” said Heermann. “In the past two years I’ve seen things from automotive companies that are truly movie production quality, just to convince an executive that it is the right car, and that the car conveys the right emotion as well. Just seeing a car on a turntable on screen isn’t enough anymore.”
Such capability also offers considerable savings in time and money over traditional processes involving full scale mock-ups or prototypes.
Kevin Ison, sales director, Autodesk manufacturing solutions division, Northern Europe, said: “It brings the ability to do this earlier in the process and experiment with different styles – explore ‘what ifs?’ And instead of taking prototypes on location, they can do it all on computer; they’re not shipping metal around the world.”
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| Even lacquer for metallic paint is an effect |
Accuracy can be further improved by importing the native CAD model and using this as the start point for renderings and animations. As is common with any software used in the automotive industry, the packages support the Catia file format.
Barriers to adoption
There have been barriers to this in the past because often the task of producing the material was given to advertising agencies. OEMs were cautious about releasing engineering data, so in many instances models were remade from scratch. This clearly impacts on quality, especially in the way light reflects from surfaces. Heermann said: “The best practice is don’t re-create: re-use CAD content. Walls between engineering design and advertising are starting to come down and the teams are starting to work more closely. Content is shared on a broader basis, with the right security behind it of course.”
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Summer in the City:
realism aided by Mental Ray |
Images used for brochures are as good as indistinguishable from real photographs, and accuracy is helped by the “Mental Ray” sun feature, whereby the sun can be set to its true position in the sky for any given time and location, making light quality digitally perfect. Even lacquer top coats can be applied to metallic paint finishes on the vehicles, giving the correct gloss.
“This industry is an emerging market but the number of advertising agencies and photographers coming to see us at Siggraph to look at 3ds Max and Maya was impressive," said Heermann. "I’m really surprised how much interest there is right now from people to change from the classic process.”
Overall, Autodesk now sees itself as covering the entire spectrum of design tools for the automotive industry. “At the front end, Alias is used for concept design of most vehicles on the road today. At the back end, fixtures, jigs and tooling used to manufacture the cars are designed in Autocad or Inventor,” said Ison. “Acquiring Alias gives us products and technology that nobody else has and gives us in-roads with customers who might have only considered Autodesk in terms of Autocad. It gives us the people and the expertise to begin to develop an integrated solution for the marketplace.” |
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