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I

have been trying to bring some order to the office in the last few weeks.

People who know me will find this as amusing and slightly unbelievable as I do myself. But the fact is that after six months of hardware testing, trying out 3D printers here and there and a hectic schedule, I was practically climbing my way to my desk through exhibition equipment, 3D printer flotsam and jetsam and those inevitable Amazon packages that pile up. Something had to give before I was found dead in here next spring.

During this tidying-up process, I discovered a box full of promotional items that have accumulated over the last 20 years of writing about design and engineering.

Amongst the pens, pencils, notepads and 25MB USB sticks, I found t-shirts and mugs from companies that are now long gone – victims of failed business models or subsumed in acquisitions. There was a mug from Kinetix (the brand name under which Autodesk published 3ds Max); a notebook from Delcam; a bunch of pens from Unigraphics Solutions; and perhaps my favourite, a cocktail shaker from a long since disappeared German standard parts library company whose name has worn off and which I’ll never remember.

All this stuff reminds me that, while plenty of companies and brands have come and gone over the years, many remain and continue to thrive, backed up by a regular influx of new developers and new products that always ensure that the cycle begins again.

ACCOUNTS Accounts Manager Charlotte Taibi charlotte@x3dmedia.com Financial Controller Samantha Todescato-Rutland sam@chalfen.com

Al Dean Editor-in-Chief, DEVELOP3D Magazine, @alistardean

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CONTENTS JULY/AUGUST 2019 ISSUE NO. 111

NEWS New Balance puts 3D printing through its paces, AMD unveils Radeon Pro WX 3200, Lenovo launches ThinkReality AR headset

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12 14 23 28 32

FEATURES Visual Design Guide: Husqvarna Automower 435X AWD COVER STORY Digital fabrication Event report: PTC LiveWorx 2019 Drip feed: Agrifac builds smart parts for smart farms Bold impressions: Inside HP’s new 3D printing centre

35 39 42 47

REVIEWS Solid Edge 2020 3dconnexion CADMouse Pro Wireless Lenovo ThinkPad P53 HP Reverb

49 DEVELOP3D SERVICES 50 THE LAST WORD If generative design starts to take off, everyday objects may start to have a very different look. This month, Al Dean wonders if the public is ready for the changes ahead - or if perhaps they don’t really give two Fuchs?

2020

16 April 2020 The wood used to produce this magazine comes from Forest Stewardship Council certified well-managed forests, controlled sources and/or recycled material

University of Sheffield

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FE ATUR ES

4K

NEWS

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT NEWS

NEW BALANCE LAUNCHES NEW INITIATIVE WITH FORMLABS FOR 3D-PRINTED SOLES » Two Massachusetts-based masters of their respective arts launch new initiative to explore the future of sports footwear design and manufacture

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lobal sportswear company New Balance has launched a new 3D printing platform, enabled by Formlabs, to produce custom lightweight shoe components. The company claims that this new platform, called TripleCell, further establishes it as a leader in advanced manufacturing.

New Balance is using TripleCell to launch revamped versions of two shoes from its product range: the 990 Sport, launched on June 28; and the FuelCell Echo, which will launch on September 15. The expected retail price of each will be $185 and $175, respectively.

The news comes hot on the heels of work that rival Adidas has been doing on its own FutureCraft range of sports shoes, alongside UV-curable resin machine vendor, Carbon.

Back in 2017, New Balance and Formlabs announced a partnership that would focus on developing high-performance materials, hardware and a manufacturing process for athletic footwear.

Through this relationship, a new proprietary photopolymer resin was created called Rebound Resin. This is designed to create springy, resilient lattice structures with the durability, reliability and longevity expected from an injectionmoulded thermoplastic.

According to the company, New Balance chose the 990 Sport to launch the TripleCell platform, in order to “reimagine a classic and venerable silhouette.”

TripleCell technology in the heel seamlessly delivers the cushioning experience found in the classic style,

but the new shoe is 10% lighter than its predecessor, the 990v5, while maintaining its Made in the USA designation.

For the FuelCell Echo, meanwhile, the New Balance Innovation Design Studio dropped TripleCell into the forefoot of the FuelCell Echo, based on the growing focus of forefoot technology and the company's learnings from its recent FuelCell launch.

“TripleCell will deliver the industry’s pinnacle expression of data to design, with seamless transitions between variable properties underfoot,” said Katherine Petrecca, general manager of the Innovation Design Studio at New Balance.

“This new, cutting-edge, digitally manufactured technology is now scaling exclusively within New Balance factories in the US, further establishing us as a leader in 3D printing and domestic manufacturing. Formlabs has been an integral partner to bring this to life.

We’re really going to be able to disrupt the industry, not only in performance, but also in athlete customisation and speed to market.” newbalance.com | formlabs.com

Above: New Balance is exploring the potential for structured foam manufactured using stereolithography Below left: The 990 Sport is made in the US at New Balance's Lawrence, Massachusetts factory

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NEWS

AMD TARGETS BUDGET BUYERS WITH RADEON PRO WX 3200

A

MD is going after the budget end of the workstation market with its new $199 Radeon Pro WX 3200 professional graphics card.

The low-profile card is focused on mainstream 3D CAD and is designed to fit into Small Form Factor (SFF) workstations like the HP Z2 SFF. With 1.66 TFLOPS peak single precision compute performance, the Radeon Pro WX 3200 is up to 33% faster than the previous-generation Radeon Pro WX 3100.

AMD reckons the new graphics card is best suited to small and medium-sized projects. However, in some heavily CPUbound applications, like Autodesk Revit or Autodesk Inventor, we expect it will deliver the same performance as the more powerful Radeon Pro WX 4100 or WX 5100 GPUs, regardless of model size.

The Radeon Pro WX 3200 features 4GB GDDR5 memory, 4 x Mini-DisplayPort 1.4 ports and supports up to four 4K displays.

It’s been ISV-certified for Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Revit, Bentley Systems MicroStation, Graphisoft ArchiCAD, Siemens PLM Software Solid Edge, Altair

M

solidThinking Inspire, Ansys and more.

The AMD Radeon Pro WX 3200 will be available in workstations from Dell, HP and Boxx later this summer. amd.com

The AMD Radeon Pro WX 3200 is designed for 3D CAD and will cost under $199

Lenovo unveils AR headset and enterprise platform for managing 'any' AR/VR device

L

enovo has unveiled the ThinkReality A6, a new AR headset designed for a range of applications including product assembly, equipment maintenance, real-time expert support and quality assurance. The device supports 3D visualisation, spatial mapping, object recognition, and digital information overlay.

The ThinkReality A6 looks to be a natural competitor to the Microsoft HoloLens, but is much lighter at 380g. It features a separate compute box, worn on a belt or strap, which includes a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC (system-on-chip) processor and removable battery.

The headset itself is packed with sensors, including an Intel Movidius vision processing unit (VPU) for computer vision,

ARRK invests in new moulding facility

and simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) technology for real-time mapping and tracking. It offers 1080p resolution per eye and 40-degree field of view.

Lenovo ThinkReality is not just an AR headset. It’s also an open cloud-based platform that lets enterprises remotely manage ‘any’ AR/VR OEM solution, including the HoloLens or Oculus Rift.

Importantly, firms can also use the platform to create custom AR and VR applications using pre-built functions, program logic and workflow builders.

Airbus is using the platform to industrialise and accelerate its mixed reality application development. lenovo.com

Lenovo's Microsoft HoloLens rival, the ThinkReality A6

ulti-faceted product development specialist ARRK Europe has opened a new 40,000 square foot injection moulding centre near Birmingham, UK. Having secured the premises in Kings Norton back in October 2017, it has since made significant investment, with the installation of 6 KraussMaffei injectionmoulding machines (ranging from 80T to 1600T), robotic arms, material handling systems and a CMM machine.

“With this geographical advantage close to the heart of the UK automotive industry, ARRK is well-placed to support customers,” said ARRK Europe MD Tony Lowe. An additional deal to partner with neighbouring Paintbox, an advanced automotive paint solutions provider, makes ARRK a competitive ‘one stop shop’.

ARRK is also able to provide injectionmoulding and tooling services at its Hampshire site, as well as elsewhere in Europe, with plants in France and Poland. arrkeurope.com

Aras boosts lowcode capabilities in Innovator 12

A

ras has announced the latest release of its product lifecycle management (PLM) system, Innovator 12, as the company looks to further connect all physical and digital engineering aspects of modern-day product development.

Aras has continued to extend the platform’s modelling engine, by adding new low-code capabilities designed to enable the creation of sophisticated data models, composed of content at the paragraph, section and field levels.

Possibly the biggest changes come to the Innovator user interface (UI), where a simpler experience is designed to boost employee engagement and productivity.

The new UI should make Aras easier to learn and use, according to the company, while a navigation redesign could help users find the information they need in fewer steps.

The supply chain is also a major focus for some of the biggest updates, which centre on enhancing secure web access to include new permission capabilities for need-to-know scenarios and geopolitical boundary-related access restrictions. aras.com

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WINDFORM POWDER GAINS FLAME-RETARDANT RATING

C

RP Technology has launched its first flame-retardant material for SLS 3D printing, maintaining the carbon fibre-reinforced qualities of previous Windform products.

The company says that Windform FR1, a halogen-free, polyamide-based material, is the first flame-retardant (UL 94 V-0 rated) material for additive manufacturing that is also carbon fibre-reinforced.

And because it’s flame retardant, the material is suitable for a wide range of applications in the aerospace, automotive and consumer goods sectors, and more widely for any parts that require a flameretardant rating.

According to CRP, the material has successfully passed the FAR 25.853 12-second vertical and 15-second horizontal flammability tests, as well as the 45-degrees Bunsen Burner test, and

is ideal for applications that require FAR 25.853 compliance. windform.com

Windform FR1: flame-retardant, but also carbon fibre-reinforced

WeWork’s new Labs initiative tools up for makers with Formlabs and Glowforge

ROUND UP Altair will hold its 2019 Global Altair Technology Conference (ATC) at MGM Grand Detroit, on 10 & 11 October. With keynotes by leading industry thought leaders and Altair executives, the agenda also includes presentations that "demonstrate the power when simulation technologies are combined with data science." atc.altair.com

Following the news of Windchill's availability on Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform, PTC has announced that its PLM software also now includes built-in linking and tracing between its native product data management capabilities and systems engineering, requirements management, source code management and testing ptc.com

Ansys has revealed it is working with Airbus on enabling safety-critical flight controls with sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI). Aiming at autonomous flight by 2030, the partnership with Airbus Defence and Space will build on an existing advanced unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) project ansys.com

G

lobal shared workspace provider WeWork has announced a pilot partnership with Formlabs and Glowforge with a view to creating maker spaces at its WeWork Labs locations in London, San Francisco, Houston, New York and Seattle.

WeWork Labs is the accelerator arm of the company and is dedicated to supporting the growth of early-stage start-ups. It brings together creatives and business types, in order to help get ideas off the ground.

Members will be given access to the Glowforge Plus 3D laser cutter and the

Form 2 3D printer from Formlabs.

“We see WeWork Labs as a platform for creators, innovators and makers alike, and believe partnering with Glowforge and Formlabs will give our members even more of an opportunity to take their ideas, and bring them to life,” said WeWork Labs creative director Katie Perkins.

“We are incredibly excited to welcome two leading brands and their products into our community, giving creators access to the tools they need and inspiring new creators to be makers themselves.” wework.com | formlabs.com glowforge.com

WeWork Labs aims to put new tools in the hands of creators and to inspire others to become creators themselves

3Dconnexion has launched its latest CADmouse Wireless Pro in a lefthanded version. While there's a paucity of lefthanded mice on the market, there's even fewer with three buttons. Available later this summer for £99 3dconnexion.com

NAFEMS has announced it will hold its 2020 UK conference on June 9 & 10 next year in Milton Keynes, so make space in your schedules. At DEVELOP3D, we are proud to be a media sponsor of this engineering simulation-focused event nafems.org

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VISUAL DESIGN GUIDE HUSQVARNA AUTOMOWER 435X AWD Husqvarna’s reputation for automated mowing products gets a boost from its latest model, offering a working area capacity of 3,500 square metres and over 100 minutes on a 30-minute charge time

DIRECT ACCESS

The new Automower Access user interface, with high-resolution colour display, jog wheel and status indicators, provides an intuitive way to control your mower. The icon-based design language integrates with the Automower Connect smartphone app, which will soon be enabled for Alexa

ALL-WHEEL DRIVE

Automower AWD models feature technology that optimises the control of each individual wheel, in order to enable superior operation in the most demanding terrain, with an impressive slope performance capable of handling 35-degree inclines

UNIQUE CUTTING SYSTEM The Automower’ unique cutting system cuts a little, but often, ensuring a nice, healthy lawn. It is equipped with sharp razor-like blades made of strong carbon steel, mounted on a robust cutting disc system. This provides for efficient operation and extremely low energy consumption

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VOICE COMMAND AND GPS NAVIGATION

An onboard GPS system creates a map of the garden, including details where the boundary lies and where its guide wires are installed.

Husqvarna Automower will then register which parts of the garden it has covered and adjust its mowing pattern accordingly, ensuring optimised lawn coverage and an excellent cutting result.

A forthcoming update will also add command options using both Amazon Alexa and Google Home as well as IFFT integration

PIVOTING BODY DESIGN

Automower AWD models are built with an articulated rear body design that enables maneuverability for navigation on complex lawns and through passages. The rear body also has a pivoting capability, considerably enhancing the mower’s traction in rough terrain, and making the most out of the AWD operation

NEW SAFETY FEATURES The mower automatically stops if it is lifted up or turned over, and is now equipped with an ultrasonic remote object detection feature, which reduces its speed as soon as it senses a nearby object. Together with a front rubber bumper, a soft impact is ensured when the mower makes contact

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OPTIONS, PRICE & AVAILABILITY

The Husqvarna Automower 435X AWD is available now for ÂŁ4,400 and was recently awarded a Red Dot Award for its design husqvarna.com

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DIGITAL FABRICATION

EMBRAC DIGITAL FABRICA » The move to fabrication of buildings in factories is happening in the blink of an eye and owes more to the manufacturing world than the BIM-focused approach taken to date by the building design industry, writes Martyn Day

T

he architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry is undergoing a revolution.

We live in an era in which we will likely see its complete digital transformation, from concept to fabrication. While many in the AEC industry may think the adoption of building information modelling (BIM) is an end in itself, moving from 2D to 3D was actually just the initial phase in a longer process of digitisation that will take us into computationally assisted design, automated manufacture and assembly.

While this may sound far-fetched to those working in the construction industry today, others from the manufacturing sector have seen it all before. In that sense, AEC’s direction of travel and final destination is a case of history repeating itself.

There are firms now racing to get the benefits of digital prefabrication, the modular mass production of buildings intended for mainstream markets – houses, offices, hotels. This will be delivered through the convergence of many technologies and processes appropriated from the rather more mature market of industrial-scale manufacturing, particularly aerospace and automotive.

To add fuel to the fire, there has been a huge level of interest and

investment from venture capital firms hoping to back the ‘Tesla’ of buildings and later reap the returns. This has led to a massive increase in the creation and development of ‘building factories’, with new start-ups and mature players spending billions to be the first to dominate the market.

In preparation for this article, I found all sorts of new, wannabe building design and digital fabricators: FactoryOS, Katerra, D*Haus, Boklok, Go Modular, Connect-home, Popup House, Cube Haus, Fabcab, Kiss House, Plant Prefab, Blokable, Module, Kasita, Fullstack Modular, to name but a few. Then there are the players already deeply invested in housing or functional buildings, like Marriott, and in the case of the UK, Berkeley Group, Legal and General and Ilke Homes. There will be at least six more factories for producing prefab buildings in the UK within the next three years. Additionally, many architecture firms have experimented with producing their own in-house modular teams/brands and tried some form of off-site construction, with varying degrees of success and failure. Many are working with prefab makers in China.

There have always been innovators in the AEC space; few know that Thomas Edison (he of lightbulb and phonograph fame) was absolutely fascinated with concrete. He realised it could be used to make cheap housing and set up a firm around a 1908 patent for cast-in-place concrete houses made from single-poured facades in

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DIGITAL FABRICATION

1 reusable formwork. Edison didn’t stop there, either; he investigated concrete roofs, partitions, bath tubs, floors, picture frames and even a piano. He lost millions in the process, but it’s not a million miles away from fans wanting to see the 3D printing of buildings onsite.

In the context of this article, however, I believe that 3D printing will be an atypical way of mass constructing complete buildings for quite some time yet. That said, I will admit that there are cases where 3D printing has been used to great effect, such as by Laing O’Rourke on the concrete panels at the new Crossrail stations. Laing used a 6-axis gantry robot with a 3D printing attachment to make 1,400 moulds for the 36,000 concrete panels.

DIGITAL FABRICATION Signature architects, those pushing the boundaries of form and materials, have frequently had to look outside of the AEC industry to fabricate components, with amazing results. I’m thinking of Herzog & de Meuron/Arup Sports’ Bird’s Nest Stadium for the Chinese Olympics, or many designs by Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects and others, who turned to shipbuilders and their CAD systems and processes to fabricate large-scale components for buildings. Frank Gehry, who famously said he couldn’t find the power switch on a computer, let alone use one, has a team of experts who take his paper models and use Dassault Systèmes’ Catia to define the structure and digitise the metal cutting, so that his practice can make a warped wall for the same price as a straight one. What’s important here is that Gehry chose to be outside of typical providers of architectural design tools, opting for a system more commonly used in aerospace, automotive and shipbuilding, because the key benefit was in the digital fabrication element.

Prior to using this system to precisely model structures, Gehry’s buildings were seen as too risky and costly to make, due to their complexity, which generated wildly inflated quotes from fabricators. When 2D drawings were dropped in favour of explicit Catia models, Gehry’s

1 Hospital, designed ● fabrication quotes all came within 1% of each other.

by Nordic Office of In the mass market, there has obviously been a Architecture, includes longstanding prefab building market and many, many a high level of repetition attempts at modular modernist designs, but these have always been niche. Very few of these have benefited from true digital fabrication, as they are more often assembled within a factory by builders and then shipped onsite.

This offers the benefit of rapid assembly onsite, but the inefficiencies of manual labour remain.

However, connecting building design to digital fabrication has the potential to change the game, with automated cutting and configuration systems to enable customers’ design choices to be fed directly into the production system. The biggest steps forward in this methodology have been seen in countries where timber frame structures are popular, such as the US, Australia, Scandinavia, Switzerland and mainland Europe. These buildings range from tiny ‘garden offices’ to the famous German Huf-Haus and Katerra’s ‘off-the-shelf’ eight-floor office blocks. The current tallest cross-laminated timber (CLT) building, incidentally, is the 18 storeys high, 85.4 metre Mjøstårnet in Norway, by Voll Arkitekter.

This concept is now taking off, even in countries without a strong history of prefabrication. In the UK, Legal and General and Berkeley Homes are building huge factories, requiring significant investment, for the assembly of mass housing. They are just two of at least six UK housebuilders changing the way they will, in future, deliver residential new builds.

This has gone beyond the early experiment stage and is now a race for housebuilders to improve efficiency and adopt more automation. It will be interesting to see if timber frame takes off in the UK, and if timber frame will be acceptable to a population that has tended to shun wooden houses. Also, will these properties be mock Tudor, or brick-clad – or will people want something more modern? Developers such as Urban Splash, for example, have built a number of developments using modern prefab aesthetics.

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THE $4 BILLION ‘START-UP’ When examining this movement towards digital fabrication, it’s perhaps best to look at one of the more extreme examples of a firm attempting to significantly change everything about the process, from the role of the developer, through the manufacture of the building, to its sale, rental and lifespan.

Katerra is a Silicon Valley design build firm, owned

by Michael Marks, Jim Davidson and Fritz H Wolff.

Marks was former CEO and chairman of Flextronics (the electronics design, fabrication, assembly and test company) and a former interim CEO at Tesla. The company was only started in 2015, but has become a trailblazer following significant investment. It’s now worth an estimated $4 billion. In just four years, it has grown to over 5,000 employees and is working on $3.7 billion worth of projects in the US alone – but rumours suggest it may have ten times that much in its global bookings pipeline.

The mission of the company is to remove inefficiencies in the construction industry by defining its own processes to handle everything from the architectural design of a building to off-site construction and installation. To do this, it’s relying heavily on new technology and automation in its factories, as well as for site development, schematic design, fabrication of parts and onsite construction.

The scale of the company in terms of mass timber is really incredible, having its own cross-laminated timber

2

3

factory and aiming to be one of the world’s leading suppliers. In fact, owning resources has become a key part of the company’s mix, having expanded from timber frame assembly, to CLT production, to steel frame and now having acquired a concrete firm too, with eyes on markets in the Middle East and elsewhere.

In many respects, Katerra is aiming to be a ‘Boeing of buildings’. It will offer a range of scalable and configurable residential and office designs, which can be bought and ordered off the peg, or as a range of pre-configured modular parts, like floor systems, which have multiple applications. The company is refining its own end-toend production system, which utilises manufacturinglevel CNC precision, together with parts management, using IoT technology to track and deliver all the flat pack assemblies and components necessary onsite, requiring considerably less labour than before and enabling completion rates measured in days and weeks.

We attended the launch event of its new building platforms in Las Vegas in February and saw a number of residential and office designs created using manufacturing and assembly from the outset. The firm has its own integrated team of architects and engineers to define wall and floor systems, casework, bathroom and kitchen kits, as well as multiple configurable elements, such as finishes. Each design complies with 48 State building and energy codes, comes with a complete bill of materials and provides developers with swift feasibility, permitting and cost estimates.

But Katerra isn’t stopping at the building framework; it has completely developed its own energy-efficient windows, reinvented the heating and cooling system for each apartment and developed its own AI-enabled power cabinet for whole buildings. If the engineering team finds an element of a building that can be improved, it seems inclined to do it. Even the packaging for the bathroom, when shipped to site, forms part of the installation.

One of the interesting drawbacks to factory-assembled buildings is quite surprising. Katerra’s dry walls contain everything when shipped – electrical, plumbing, heating, controls – for fast assembly. Each US state has different rules on building inspection, but it’s usual that if a wall shipment crosses state lines, it has to be opened up during construction to be inspected to see it conforms to code. This is like buying a Ford motor car in London and driving to Scotland, only to be stopped to check its wiring conforms to UK specification. It’s clear that building regulations and inspection need to catch up with prefabricated components.

The rapid rise of Katerra from 2015 to today is just astounding – from zero to working on $3.7 billion in projects in around four years. The reality, however, is that it’s still early days for the company; it has only just begun to properly define its processes and it’s clear that a lot of what’s available on the market to help it in its work, such as building components or off-the-shelf software, won’t be up to scratch, so the company will need to develop these in-house.

‘‘ While BIM isn’t going to go away any time soon, there are certainly rumblings in the heartland.

In a digitally fabricated new world, today’s BIM tools will need to be rewritten or replaced

’’

KATERRA AND CAD The AEC market has suffered from tremendous inefficiencies. Building information modelling (BIM) was seen as an advance on old 2D systems, because 3D models could generate all the drawings legally required, with coordinated updates when edited. The additional benefits it offers of renderings, potential analysis and

2 ● 3 Katerra’s ●

Apollo software suite covers the entire building lifecycle from inception and design to operation

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DIGITAL FABRICATION providing a central repository for all relevant data has further excited the industry.

However, and there really are no two ways of saying this, all BIM systems currently on the market were never designed to drive a digital fabrication process, to generate the g-code that runs CNC machines. They have predominantly been written to address current workflows, based around documentation. The phrase ‘digital twin’ is now being used in the context of BIM, but the reality is that BIM models do not contain enough information to be a real ‘twin’; they are just geometrical representations, lacking fabrication-level detail.

To drive fabrication machines, models would have to be created with a much higher level of 1:1 detail and accuracy, a level that would quickly kill their performance and make them unusable. Today’s BIM tools will not provide an endto-end solution for any digital fabricator. Instead, these companies tend to use manufacturing-based tools like Solidworks or Tekla Structures.

From talking to the Katerra team, the company is reevaluating its product development technology stack and in fact has hired a host of ex-Autodesk employees to join its software division.

In the same vein of developing or redeveloping building equipment, which it thought it could do better, Katerra has outlined plans to deliver what it calls Apollo, a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. This will provide an operating platform with its own applications delivering “persistent data, so teams can better execute timely

ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS AND CATIA

Danjiang Bridge in Taiwan. Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects and MIR

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) is renowned for using a plethora of design tools: Revit, Maya, Rhino, Grasshopper and so on. The toolsets used by each team is determined by the digital skillsets that team possesses.

The firm, meanwhile, is perhaps best known for being one of the early adopters of ‘Digital Project’, an architectural flavour of Catia V5 which Gehry Technologies created.

Digital Project was used to design the incredibly

complex Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, because the software was able to handle huge, complex geometrical forms and send data to be directly manufactured from.

In 2014, Trimble bought Gehry Technologies.

Catia persists in ZHA today although in the form of what Dassault Systèmes (DS) calls its latest version, the 3D Experience Platform (3DX).

At a ‘BeyondBIM’ event in London earlier this year, held by DS reseller Desktop Engineering, Cristiano

decisions as well as increasingly automate tasks.”

This software provides a source of persistent data with zero loss from programme inception, across design, construction and the duration of the building’s life.

From what I can tell, the intention is to first develop an application, similar to Procore construction management software, for Katerra’s own internal use. Once the company has tested this system on its own processes, it will offer it to the wider development and building community.

Soon after, several other components will be added to Apollo. These will include Apollo Insight, for rapid site evaluation, automated site planning, early cost and schedule forecast, and 3D design analysis tools; Apollo Connect, for material selection, design configurations and design review; and Apollo Construct, for construction management, budget and schedule tracking, centralised documentation.

Apollo also features an open API for further third-party integrations. By all accounts, the launch and feature set did not go down too well at Autodesk HQ. Currently, the backbone of Katerra’s development work has been Autodesk Revit, with models having to be exported and then fed/remodelled through a range of other applications to get the g-code required to drive the cutting machines. As the process has become more automated, the building types larger and the company more reliant on digital fabrication, the gap between traditional BIM capabilities and those required for manufacturing have made for interesting conversations with the design team.

Ceccato, associate director at ZHA gave an example of how modelling in precise detail enabled the architects to convince the construction firm for the Danjiang Bridge in Taiwan to trust the firm’s innovative design and enabled distributed collaboration based on a common platform in the construction process.

The topic of collaboration was key for Ceccato, and it’s not just about sharing models, he stressed but tracking changes, tracking

issues and having all the information ‘unequivocally’ in the cloud.

Also at the event, Michael Sims, lead designer at ZHA, gave a demonstration of how teams use cloud-based 3DX in R&D to create a BIM Level 2 + workflow.

Given the complex geometry and detail of all ZHA buildings, the speed and power of Catia was self-evident. Sims admitted the learning curve was ‘a bit steep’ on leaving the file-based world. He also

explained how ZHA works very early on with engineers and fabricators to establish the limits of the design shape and how Catia is that common language.

From talking with the ZHA speakers, there seems to be a feeling that the practice does want to standardise on a single platform with one version of the truth, which easily links to fabricators and engineers with collaborative components.

The idea, they told us, is very compelling.

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The topic turned to CAD systems such as Dassault Systèmes’ Catia, the benefits of which had not been lost on them. In a conversation with the architectural team, the idea that you could model 1:1 with all fabrication details, not have the system slow down to a crawl and be able to natively produce g-code to drive manufacturing, together with other downstream processes such as analysis, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product lifecycle management (PLM) was judged to be extremely attractive – even if it meant having less architectural-flavoured tools at the design end, or possibly using one to drive the other.

Revit’s ‘family of parts’ methodology isn’t that far away from the way modular works. It would be possible to have a definition of an architectural model that linked to a pre-defined assembly in Catia. In fact, London-based Facit Homes has already developed a system from which g-code can be derived from the Revit model, for cutting onsite in a shipping container, although not at this scale.

Bruce Bell’s view of factories to make buildings offers a very different perspective. He spoke last year at NXT BLD (nxtbld.com/videos/bruce-bell).

Over the past year, there has been a growing interest and excitement inside Dassault Systèmes about what digital fabrication could mean, in terms of the potential its solutions have in the AEC market. Dassault executives tell us the company is working with six or more large modular fabricators to optimise design to fabrication processes, learning from automotive and aerospace.

The one key takeaway for me is that, in today’s AEC world, all the concern is on digital document or model management; it’s still all about PDFs and collaboration.

In a digital fabrication/modular world, it’s all about components, assemblies and process – and this is throughout the fabrication and lifecycle of the building.

PLM, championed in the world of manufacturing, most certainly becomes a new key repository for factorymade buildings, and connections to other fabrication systems like ERP for fabrication are essential – and more essential than BIM.

DESIGN FOR MANUFACTURE Another impactful role, in the drive for automation, resides with the initial designers. If architects have no concept of what is possible in the production process, then they can introduce inefficiencies or devise assemblies that increase the cost or reduce the quality of the finished building. In the engineering world, it is still possible to find design engineers who create product assemblies that the production engineers have to amend, in order to enable the manufacture of components.

There will be very few architects who fully understand the digital fabrication limitations of building fabrication systems. Design for manufacture and assembly (DFMa) is a separate discipline in itself and requires a holistic view of what is possible and what’s available, as well as the cost implications of early design decisions around processes, material use and serviceability.

With growing use of computational tools and algorithms, it is becoming increasingly possible to produce complex geometry, which may benefit from new digital manufacturing processes, such as 3D printing or Knitcrete. The software could also be deployed to check designs for manufacturability, based on rules, or take a form and approximate it with the tools used by a digital manufacturer.

In the manufacturing world, this is already possible; Autodesk has developed a system that can look at a part and optimise the geometry for the intended production

process. Sand casting (cheap) would look dramatically different to metal 3D printing (expensive), but both would meet the functional criteria. I envisage a future where you might simply state the material for a building structure and the geometry would change, based on whether it was timber or steel.

FLEXIBLE WORKFLOW The reality is that there won’t be one correct way to implement digital fabrication in the building industry, because everyone currently involved is having to work it out for themselves. We will see single-platform, end-toend players like Katerra develop and refine everything they need for themselves. Then there will be firms that choose not to be software developers, instead relying on existing systems, a more componentised approach to design and assembly and a network of trusted suppliers for components.

We’ve already seen design teams create modular designs and then go off to find a fabricator to work with, knowing their skill is in ideation, not fabrication. We will see factories of robots producing buildings, factories with humans producing buildings, and mixtures thereof – but the trend has to be towards full automation at some point, as it is in nearly every manufacturing sector.

Not all factories will survive. As with all trends, we are seeing a glut of investment, as people are betting big on backing the winners in a multi-trillion dollar industry.

The benefit of today’s federated approach to designing construction is its flexibility and ability to adapt to the ebbs and flows of building cycles, booms and busts.

When you have an asset like a factory, it really needs constant throughput to make economic sense. One only has to visit disused shipyards around Britain to see what happens when orders dry up.

Therefore, factories for buildings need to be as flexible as possible, in order to shift from creating low-cost residential buildings, to offices, to hospitals, to schools, to universities, to McMansions, as demand dictates. Today’s digital tools, programmable robots and flexible design systems, meanwhile, should enable well-planned factories to dynamically change to meet different economic winds.

‘‘ We will see

factories of robots producing buildings, factories with humans producing buildings, and mixtures thereof, but the trend has to be towards full automation at some point

’’

CAD COMPETITION Looking at the current focus within the CAD world, there are two standout companies that see the potential of the digital fabrication market: Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes (DS). Trimble does have strong capabilities in digital fabrication through the highly competent Tekla Structures but, with SketchUp, doesn’t have the same depth of functionality for front-end design.

Other traditional CAD/BIM software developers are not vocal within the space. Bentley Systems MicroStation and Nemetschek Vectorworks both use the Parasolid solid modelling engine, which is inside Siemens PLM NX, a CAD tool used by many automotive and aerospace companies, so the potential is there. Nemetschek is also progressing with McNeel Rhino for computational design. BricsCAD has the ACIS solid modeller and has a manufacturing feature set in the same tool, so also has some potential.

There is also always the chance that Siemens PLM could enter the fray as DS’s main competitor in manufacturing and PLM. It already owns 9% of Bentley Systems and has some co-developed AEC tools, based around factories.

PTC, another big player in the manufacturing space, has had aspirations in AEC before, but is showing no signs of rekindling its interest. (The company acquired Reflex

Learn more about digital fabrication in DEVELOP3D’s sister publication, AEC Magazine aecmag.com

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DIGITAL FABRICATION

4 He continues: “I’ve been to see customers that are prefabricating at a very large scale. They are modelling in Revit, which they are very good at, but then they are handcrafting shop drawings and bills of materials, because they just can’t get that level of detail out of Revit.”

The problem he sees, from an industry perspective, is that if you’re going to build something in a modular or componentised way, you pretty much have to design with that intent in mind, from the start.

“One of the things that we’ve been struggling with, and I’m just going to be brutally honest with you, is how you reverse-engineer a standard architect’s model, now how do you reverse-engineer modularity? You literally can’t,” he says. “You have a very ‘dirty’ BIM and trying to reverse-engineer modularity on that. It’s an incredibly difficult problem.”

Bray explains that his team is building a platform on top of Jim Awe’s Project Plasma (see last edition of AEC Magazine – aecmag.com). Autodesk has a proof of concept that’s about 18 months into development, with considerable research and prototyping. The concept is that there is a design model – this could be BIM, or even a bunch of PDFs – that the customer imports into the platform. Then, the software automatically creates what Autodesk calls ‘system structures’. These are AUTODESK MAKES ITS PLAY layout frames, a simple abstraction of all the geometry, We talked with Robert Bray, senior director of predecomposing the BIM into its elemental systems. From construction at Autodesk, who is responsible for there, the system ingests the design criteria for the Autodesk BIM360 Design and all offerings around elements to be fabricated – this data will never come from pre-construction, including Assemble Systems, which the BIM model. Instead, it will be the specification, the Autodesk acquired last year. manufacturing notes.

In January, Bray took ownership of a project that had “The second part of what we are doing,” he adds, “is taking been running for 18 months inside Autodesk, around the parts content and using Inventor at the moment. We the convergence of construction and manufacturing. are using that to prototype, but we realise in the future, we This project, the name of which has not been divulged by need to be open. We recognise the amount of Solidworks Autodesk, is not a commercial product yet. But, according to Bray, “We are certainly headed that way and there is very out there. Then there’s some logic as to how those parts fit together using a rules-based engine, based on logic much a need for an end-to-end solution, because people today are solving it with bits and pieces. But the problem is, and the captured design criteria. We could then automate the data doesn’t flow between them very well at all, so there the generation of a curtain wall system that knows the constraints, or in fact, that could be any panelised system. is a lot of manual reflows and remodelling. from Dr Jonathan Ingram, which it then spun off with the developers who created Revit, which, in turn was bought

by Autodesk.)

For now, we see Autodesk and DS jostling for position.

Autodesk has Revit for traditional AEC workflows, Dynamo and Maya for computational generation, Inventor and Fusion for manufacturing and has stated its vision to develop for digital fabrication in the building space.

Dassault Systèmes owns Solidworks, which is already popular in architectural component manufacturing, and Catia, which is already used by Zaha Hadid Architects and Gehry, and is certainly developing something with Vinci Construction, which for now remains top secret. It also has a range of limited AEC tools.

The interesting thing here is that the strengths of these two main competitors are diametrically opposed.

Autodesk is strong in AEC development to document, weak on large-scale digital fabrication. DS is strong in large-scale fabrication, engineering management, but weak in architectural design tools. Will the market opt for the manufacturing bias or the architectural design biased tools? Neither technology stack is quite perfect. This could be an epic battle between Titans.

4 ETH Zurich’s DFAB ●

house, with steel reinforcement placed by robots

5 Urban Splash ● has built a number of developments using modern prefab aesthetics 6 Urban Splash ● house factory 7 Factory_OS ● constructs modular units on a factory assembly line 8 Laing O’Rourke’s ● FreeFAB, a 3D-printed formwork technology

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From all this, we generate a fabrication solution, which will produce the BOM and the shop drawings.”

I point out that this won’t stop any architect designing something that can’t be made or perhaps doesn’t exist.

Bray replies, “That’s why firms that are doing this are vertically integrated, because at the end of the day, the only way this really works is if the designers are actually designing based on these parts catalogues that are robust, rich and have the fabrication of logic. So, my thinking is our initial target with all of this will likely be those already vertically integrated. That’s an easy target for us. Start with early proof of concept. We can work backwards towards broader industry after.”

I also raise the point of PLM being needed in the digital fabrication realm of AEC to manage the complex process.

Bray responds, “We need the part catalogue content, and it really needs to be managed inside of a PLM system, whether that’s Fusion Lifecycle, or some other future product, I don’t know yet. But there has to be a way for this content to be shared and consumed with Revit.

This is where Plasma workflows will really help us make representations of this and use it in a different context.”

He concludes, “We are working with a bunch of firms looking at how to optimise their process end-to-end. And we are building technology for them, not in a one-off way, but we’re trying to get to a point where we feel like we have a value proposition we can offer them that solves some subset of their problems and then start working outward.”

5

6

CONCLUSION It only feels like yesterday when it seemed that BIM would finally revolutionise the building industry and deliver the efficiencies it so sorely lacks. I think the reality of BIM is that it is a stepping stone to the automation and industrialisation of mass-produced buildings. In a digitally fabricated world, the 1:1 fabrication model holds more value than a rough approximation.

The current generation of popular tools were all designed to enhance the nineteenth-century workflow of documents in federated processes. While this isn’t going to go away any time soon, there are certainly rumblings in the heartland. In a digitally fabricated new world, today’s BIM tools will need to be rewritten or replaced.

Digital fabrication and modularisation will bring lower cost, higher quality, more speedily delivered solutions. We could see a dramatic phase change in the industry within the next ten years.

That said, one wonders where all the talent and knowledge will come from. Possibly, we will see manufacturing engineers enter the industry.

While traditional design build is nothing new, and is frequently looked down on, I think it’s a matter of when, not if, this new segment sequesters a permanent percentage of the building market.

In the manufacturing space, aerospace led the way, streamlining its supply chains and defining process efficiency. Similarly, I think leading advocates of digital fabrication will come up with best practice.

In manufacturing, the software vendors learnt from aerospace and codified these processes, for all to benefit.

There will be design build firms that invest deeply and define their own processes to make them industry leaders.

I suspect again the traditional CAD vendors will learn, codify and popularise best practice.

Until then, everything is going to be a little bit ‘Heath Robinson’, getting tools to drive systems with which they were never intended to work.

7

8

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EVENT REPORT

COOL THREADS

» At its LiveWorx event in Boston, PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann explained how a ‘digital thread’ connects the company’s diverse product line-up, with the potential for significant benefits for customers, as Jessica Twentyman reports

F

or manufacturing PTC CEO and chairman companies of all kinds, Jim Heppelmann the ‘digital thread’ addresses LiveWorx attendees seems pretty promising, with its purported benefits of improved product quality, reduced cost and increased productivity.

The idea of a continuous, seamless strand of data, connecting every stage of a product’s lifecycle, is by no means unique to PTC. Oracle, IBM, Aras and others are all banging the same drum. But it’s certainly one that plays rather well with the company’s overall strategy, neatly tying together an increasingly diverse product portfolio.

So it wasn’t a big surprise to see the digital thread take centre stage during PTC chief executive Jim Heppelmann’s opening Volvo Group’s manufacturing innovation A CASE IN POINT keynote at the company’s LiveWorx annual This isn’t just smart marketing-speak, either: and technology manager Bertrand Felix. user conference in Boston this June. As he In 2018, he explained, Volvo Group built PTC was able to present as evidence a number told attendees, “A digital thread means that of large, industrial customers at LiveWorx for some 260,000 trucks, with almost every single information that was originally created for one configured slightly differently. Windchill whom the digital thread idea seems to make one purpose – say, an engineering prototype sense. One of them is Volvo Group, the global thus provides the ‘recipe’ for each and every – gets reused for many different purposes. truck, many parts for which are designed manufacturer of trucks, buses, construction In this way, the digital in Creo. More recently, thread weaves its way Volvo has equipped across the value chain.” factory-floor staff with A digital thread means that information that was In other words, and as that overlay their originally created for one purpose – say, an engineering iPads PTC executives see it, the view of an engine with prototype – gets reused for many different purposes data relating to a product information about the designed in its 3D CAD inspection tasks they [and] weaves its way across the value chain product Creo should need to perform, using subsequently flow into ThingWorx and Vuforia. its product lifecycle management (PLM) “We are convinced that, through a solid equipment and industrial engines. product Windchill. From there, it can provide and trusted digital thread, with consistent “There are two main reasons for our the basis for newer applications on the smart interest in the digital thread. The first is data from design to production down to factory floor, using the company’s Internet quality, which has always been a major focus aftermarket, we can enable operators to of Things (IoT) platform ThingWorx and its receive the right instructions, at the right time for our company; and the second is the cost augmented reality (AR) toolset Vuforia. and matching the right product,” said Felix. of managing great product diversity,” said





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EVENT REPORT

1 PRODUCT NEWS For PTC to successfully sell this digital thread vision to more customers, of course, it must persuade them that each product in its wide portfolio stands on its own merits. To do that, it must keep them all moving along at a steady clip, in development terms. While Heppelmann’s LiveWorx keynote was notably lacking in big product news announcements, many emerged during the conference and over the weeks following the event.

There’s the release of Creo 6, for example, which introduces new simulation capabilities with Creo Simulation Live, thanks to PTC’s tie-up with simulation specialist Ansys. Creo 6 also includes new AR capabilities with Creo AR Design Share and new features that enable users to design with additive manufacturing in mind. (Read our full review of Creo 6 at tinyurl.com/D3DCreo6).

On the PLM front, there was the news that Windchill will be made available on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

In addition, PTC’s Integrity tools for application lifecycle management and systems engineering will be integrated with Windchill and rebranded with the Windchill name.

It’s a clear nod to the world of smart, connected devices, where the operating systems and software updates that a product relies on need to be managed just as efficiently its mechanical components.

For Vuforia, there’s the introduction of Vuforia Expert Capture, which enables employees to create step-by-step instructions for colleagues to follow, by performing tasks – setting up a piece of machinery, for example, or performing a repair on it – wearing a Microsoft HoloLens headmounted device (HMD).

With Vuforia Engine 8.3, meanwhile, PTC is combining AR with artificial intelligence (AI). The point here is to enable products or machines to be automatically recognised during an AR experience, even from difficult angles or in poor lighting, based on the customer’s 3D CAD model for it – another good example of the digital thread at work.

Finally, on ThingWorx, there was the announcement that version 8.5 is due to be made commercially available later this summer. A big focus here is making it easier for customers to deploy industrial IoT applications, by

2 offering more pre-built and pre-configured capabilities in the platform.

Another is service automation, with sensors on a product already in use by a customer alerting its manufacturer to any potential issue – an electrical fault with an officeblock elevator or a factory-floor bottling machine that is running more slowly than usual, for example. In this way, manufacturers can build their service revenues, through offering more responsive maintenance and repair services.

1 LiveWorx ● attendees get to grips with augmented reality 2 Entrance to the ●

event’s 200,000 square foot Xtropolis Exhibit Hall

IN SUMMARY In 2018, PTC used LiveWorx to focus on its ThingWorx and Vuforia solutions, both acquired technologies, to a far greater degree. This year’s event, by contrast, took a more holistic view of how the different parts of the PTC product stack fit together, enabling the digital thread and, in particular, helping manufacturing employees in their day-to-day work.

All in all, it was a confident performance by a company seemingly in good shape to take advantage of the significant opportunities ahead. Heppelmann certainly didn’t appear to lack ambition, telling attendees, “I want to make it easy to decorate the industrial world with real-time information that your workers need to be as safe and productive as humanly possible. That would be hugely transformational.”

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EVENT REPORT

INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN THOMPSON SVP CAD SEGMENT, PTC “There’s something special going on right now in CAD,” says Brian Thompson, senior vice president of the CAD segment at PTC. Customers, he claims, are starting to get a real sense that a mature engineering practice, built on strong CAD and product lifecycle management (PLM) products, is critical to their overall digital transformation strategies.

“They’re finally seeing that link and that’s forcing them to go back and rethink their processes, right at the core, in engineering, where the digital thread begins,” he says.

At the same time, he adds, a host of new technologies are coming down the line that promise nothing less than a ‘renaissance’ in industrial design, and will ultimately assist those customers in identifying better ways to compete, increasing internal efficiencies and getting products to market faster.

There’s plenty to dissect here and there’ll be plenty of engineers who

2018. This will debut in Creo 7, now less than a year away.

Thompson concedes that there’s always potential for slippage on projects of this kind, and he certainly won’t rush things, but he’s confident his team is on track. “We refuse to deliver a point solution to the market. I will not do that,” he says.

“We’re going to deliver a solution to market that’s deeply integrated with Creo, so that every customer who wants to can get access to the technology as part of their core workflow and not be forced to leave the core design environment that they use every day in order to get the benefits of what generative technology can do for them.”

Simulation is also a vital part of this renaissance picture, says Thompson, adding that it’s been great to see how Creo Simulation Live, powered by technology from Ansys, has been received by customers. “There’s a huge amount of interest around this,” he says.

3



I’m really excited, but I’m trying not to be too crazy about it all. But customers are really paying attention, there are all these new technologies, and I feel like we’ve got some serious mojo going

 don’t see that kind of thinking at work within their own organisations.

But the signal that PTC wants to send to the market is clear: the company’s strength (and its value to customers) lies in the sum of its various parts – CAD, PLM, Internet of Things (IoT) and augmented reality (AR). While IoT and AR may be seen as growth drivers for the company, it’s still the mainstay CAD and PLM products that account for the vast majority of revenues.

So tying them all these products together with a compelling overall message makes definite sense.

What’s indisputable here is that CAD technology is changing fast and that Thompson and his team will need to work hard to incorporate new developments into Creo.

Take, for example, the integration of Frustum’s generative design technology, acquired in November

So much interest, in fact, that the company has taken the decision to back-port the live simulation capabilities into Creo 4.0, in order that a wider group of customers can experience it for themselves, without having to upgrade to Creo 6, as Jim Heppelmann revealed on the company’s second-quarter earnings call with financial analysts in April.

Looking ahead, once the integration of Frustum is complete, its AI-driven generative design capabilities will combine with Creo Simulation Live, to enable customers to first automatically generate a design and subsequently iterate it to reach the best end result, all directly within Creo.

At the same time, PTC has also added design for additive manufacturing and AR-enabled design review to Creo, on the basis that the CAD product that best

4 encapsulates this renaissance, and incorporates as many of the new technologies as possible without forcing users to rely on point solutions, will ultimately win the battle for customers’ attention and budgets.

In short, there’s more of a buzz around CAD at PTC than there has been for some time. Heppelmann admitted as much on that recent earnings call, saying, “Our longterm view of the CAD opportunity is more bullish now than it has been for years.”

3 Brian Thompson, meanwhile, is buzzing. ● Thompson, senior “I’m really excited, but I’m trying not vice president, CAD segment at PTC to be too crazy about it all,” he says.

4 Some of the best “But customers are really paying ● AR applications close attention, there are all these rely on data that new technologies, and I feel like originates in CAD, we’ve got some serious mojo going.” say PTC execs

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PROFILE

DRIP FEED » Having designed an end-use part for additive manufacturing, managers at Agrifac found that not all 3D-printed parts are created equal. Stephen Holmes explains how the agricultural equipment maker found a solution with the help of some Silicon Valley thinking

A

grifac is in the business of precision farming and food production. With its range of agricultural machinery, it focuses on ‘growing the growers’, and, having started life selling crop sprayers to farmers in its local area around the small Dutch city of Steenwijk, it is now targeting a global market.

The company’s current line-up of crop sprayers differ in size and propulsion. The large, selfpropelled Condor machine has already won design awards and the affections of farmers around the world. The other, the Milan, is a compact crop protection sprayer, pulled behind a standard tractor.

The Milan sprayer is hailed by Agrifac as one of the most innovative sprayers in the world, and the only trailed machine on the market with selfpropelled sprayer technology.

Its overall design is a testament to Agrifac’s R&D department, of which Jarno Habing, product manager for the Milan range, is extremely proud.

“We’re an innovative company,” says Habing, speaking from the company’s HQ. “R&D is 20% of our company. We’re driven by technology revolution and we’re almost always first to market.”

For example, key innovations focus on 20 spray nozzles positioned at strategic points on each boom. These nozzles ensure that every drop of spray arrives at the right moment, at the right size, exactly where it is needed.

The nozzles for Agrifac’s larger crop sprayers are designed as three connecting parts, comprising two metal components and one injection-moulded plastic part.

Given the smaller footprint of the Milan model, however, there was no way this approach could be reused, even in a shrunk-down format.

This challenge gave Agrifac the opportunity not only to redesign the component to add extra efficiencies, but also in a way that made it possible to use additive manufacturing, with its knock-on production benefits.

Agrifac follows a ‘4e’ design philosophy, based on efficiency, economy, ergonomics and ecology.

In keeping with this, and given the initial quantities of parts required, it was decided that 3D printing the nozzles would prove the most efficient and economical means of production.

In addition, 3D printing would enable Agrifac to trial different dimensions in the early stages of production.

However, the choice to use additive manufacturing threw up new challenges.

Constant exposure to chemicals, the weather and the need for regular removal and adjustment needed to be taken into account.

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The Agrifac Milan is the only trailed sprayer on the market with selfpropelled sprayers

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PROFILE

‘‘ We knew we

1

could deliver on efficiency and economy with just some minor tweaks to the design

’’

In addition, these parts need fine apertures and even finer (but robust) screw threads, which means that most polymers used in laser sintering or stereolithography (SLA) printing aren’t up to the task.

Agrifac was sending out at least five replacement nozzles a week to every farmer using the Milan sprayer, primarily as screw threads were being damaged when nozzles were removed and replaced for regular cleaning.

INTRODUCING DIGITAL LIGHT SYNTHESIS Determined to find an additive manufacturing solution, the R&D team turned to experts Paragon Rapid Technologies in the UK, and a range of tough materials designed for use with the Digital Light Synthesis (DLS) process developed by Silicon Valley-based Carbon.

Agrifac and Paragon identified two potential Carbon resins with the suitable attributes of toughness, stiffness, temperature- and water-resistance for producing the part. These were Cyanate ester CE221, a highperformance material with excellent strength, stiffness and high temperature resistance up to 231°C ; and rigid polyurethane RPU70, a tough material comparable to ABS, but with added strength, toughness and very little water absorption.

While the first CE221 parts proved workable, they required a greater number of support structures and the material proved brittle in comparison to those built in RPU70.

Paragon’s knowledge of the Carbon DLS process helped improve both parts, simply through further edits to parameters and orientations, but it was ultimately decided that RPU70 was the appropriate material choice for the final production part.

“Designing for Carbon is a slightly different process than for traditional 3D,” explains Paragon’s DLS manager Roy Crombie. “We really wanted to comply with Agrifac’s 4e philosophy, and we knew we could deliver on efficiency and economy with just some minor tweaks to the design,” he says.

“We advised on some slight adjustments to a couple

of radii and trialled the design on two or three different orientations to see which yielded the right results.”

Agrifac now has a reliable source of nozzles that can withstand all the forces that farmers, and sprayers, can throw at them.

“The DLS solution was not the cheapest option for us when we compared it with other 3D print technologies,” says Habing. “However, it was the most robust. I believe that we are close to offering a lifetime guarantee with these nozzles and, compared with the other options, that is a significant cost saving,” he says.

“We’re not being called up by frustrated farmers every five minutes demanding new nozzles. We’re not delaying their spraying processes trying to keep up with demand.

We’re not impacting our ecology ethos with throwaway pieces. Our customers are very happy. That always means great savings for us.”

1 With some minor ●

tweaks to ensure build strength and efficiency, the team at Paragon Rapid Technologies built the tough parts using Carbon’s DLS technology

2 Printed in a rigid ●

polymer, the nozzles are able to withstand water pressure, chemical exposure and outdoor conditions

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EVENT REPORT

PROFILE

BOLD IMPRESSIONS 1

» HP’s brand-new 3D Printing and Digital Manufacturing Centre of Excellence in Barcelona aims to help the company meet demand for new technologies in both polymers and metals, as Steve Cox reports

W

hen HP announced its intention to enter the 3D printing arena back in 2014, it took almost two years for a machine to actually hit the market. The end result was a significant dilution of the impact originally promised. Fast forward to today, however, and things are now moving rapidly in terms of how HP is developing its 3D printing and digital manufacturing offering.

The June 2019 opening in Barcelona of a brand-new global Centre of Excellence for this area of its business is ample evidence of the changes underway and the scale of HP’s ambitions.

This new facility is large, covering over 150,000 square feet – the size of three football pitches. HP executives claim it’s “possibly the largest of its kind in the world”, and it will house the company’s R&D efforts and ongoing development around its Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) technology.

HP used the grand opening as an opportunity to showcase exactly what the company is currently doing in this area and where it’s heading next. The 300/500 series covers prototyping of functional parts, with the opportunity to make them in full colour if required.

The 4200 series, the mainstay of its offering until now, is suitable for

prototyping and short production runs, and the newer 5200 series expands on this, with its focus squarely on using 3D printing for mass production.

SCALING UP FOR VOLUME PRODUCTION The ability to offer 3D printing for volume production is interesting, with HP executives admitting that scaling up to this level is a complex proposition. It requires a fully developed quality management system (QMS) to provide the necessary assurances that customers look for when using parts produced in this way in the products that they sell.

This was the first time I’d heard HP execs talk about applying standard measures such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and Process Capability Index (Cpx) to 3D printing. More specifically, these measures can be used to assess product equipment utilisation and the accuracy/repeatability of parts produced, respectively.

According to HP executives, their ability to discuss these indices in relation to 3D printing is changing the conversations they have with customers, as the technology moves beyond the technology centres of manufacturing companies and onto the wider factory floor.

For the recently launched 5200 series printers, for example, HP has achieved an OEE of 80% and Cpk of 1.3. This very credible OEE rating, they claim, demonstrates that many of the failure-rate issues that often plague 3D printing can now be overcome, while

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the Cpk value indicates that 99.993% of parts remain within specific tolerances, in comparison to the tolerances achieved with injection moulding. It was interesting to hear the company state that getting to that Cpk figure was the result of software advances, and from exploiting machine learning, rather than improvements in hardware.

PARTNERS AND CUSTOMERS HP views partnership as key to the way it continues to develop its MJF technology – a first for the company in this particular area. That’s perhaps because HP executives still view 3D printing technology as being in a ‘start-up’ phase, with outside assistance needed to offer fully integrated systems. Examples of partnerships here include those with Siemens, which is developing software systems to integrate 3D printing with established manufacturing workflows, and BASF, which is developing new materials.

In terms of the applications demonstrated there was relatively little here that we haven’t seen before, with one exception being the first examples of parts made with HP’s first flexible material, a TPU called UltraSint 3D TPU01, developed for HP by BASF. And, given the move into volume production, the real stand-out use case to be showcased was that involving SmileDirectClub, a company that produces dental aligners. Its goal is to produce 20 million 3D-printed dental impressions over the next twelve months, using an army of 49 HP MJF printers. That means producing over 50,000 prints every day – a serious commitment indeed, in highvolume manufacturing terms.

It was also interesting to see that, as a very large manufacturing company in its own right, HP is benefiting from its own 3D printers. Where it makes sense to do so, economically and in design terms, it is using MJF to build some of the parts contained within its own 3D printers.

One example is a fan duct that has been redesigned using software from Siemens to optimise airflow. Computational Fluid Dynamica (CFD) simulation was used here, as was topology optimisation, to create a part that takes advantage of some of the design freedoms offered by 3D printing. The result is a part that replaces a six-piece injection-moulded part, offering a 34% cost reduction, a 22% improvement in airflow and a development time 75% faster than that associated with its predecessor.

It’s not just the 3D printer division at HP that’s using MJF, either. Ten manufacturing areas within HP are hard at work with the technology, creating new parts for textile printers, spare parts for out-of-production large-format printers, and fixtures for the company’s packaging lines.

HEAVY METAL Having assembled a solid line-up of polymer printing solutions and applications, HP is now firmly focused on developing MJF for metals, with what it calls Metal Jet, scheduled to debut in 2020.

The company has a clear idea on which markets it will target with this technology – and it’s not aerospace, where a great deal of metal additive manufacturing activity is already focused, but instead sectors such as medical and industrial equipment, and automotive, where metal injection moulding (MIM) is widely used.

Metal Jet builds on five years of learning accrued in the development of MJF for polymers, because it utilises the same print heads as current machines. At the same time, it promises to be 50 times faster than laser-based metal machines and offer several advantages over MIM, including greater design freedom. Metal Jet machines

2

3 from HP are expected to cost less than $399,000 at launch.

Partnership is equally important to Metal Jet as to other areas of HP’s push into 3D printing, as evidenced by the involvement of GKN’s powder metallurgy division, which brings its specialist expertise in MIM to the table. GKN has seen MIM use flatlining, so in strategic terms, metals 3D printing makes a great deal of sense to the company as a possible new growth area, with the potential not just as an alternative way to produce parts made with MIM today, but also larger, more complex parts.

PEOPLE SKILLS One final theme that was mentioned several times is the skills that will be needed to take advantage these new technologies and approaches. As Ramon Pastor, HP’s global head of plastics solutions, 3D printing and digital manufacturing put it: “The more engineers and designers we educate in design for additive manufacturing, the quickly this business will scale.”

Here, the new Barcelona centre has an important role to play, as a venue where HP can engage with customers, assisting those with expertise in established manufacturing techniques to better understand how they can design for MJF, as well as ‘training the trainers’ who will take these skills development out into the field.

In summary, this latest step in HP’s commitment to 3D printing advances is impressive, especially the move into using MJF for volume manufacturing and the clear potential of Metal Jet. This new facility in Barcelona will clearly be a vital tool in delivering the company’s vision of where 3D printing and digital manufacturing should go over the next few years. hp.com

1 HP’s new facility ● in Barcelona incorporates ecofriendly construction materials including a photovoltaic canopy, 110kW of power, rainwater reuse for irrigation and sanitary purposes, and HVAC and natural light optimisation 2 The facility focuses ● on development of HP’s 3D printing portfolio, providing a large-scale factory environment where customers and partners can collaborate on digital manufacturing technologies 3 The Centre boasts ● more than 150,000 square feet of cuttingedge innovation space and will bring together hundreds of the world’s leading additive manufacturing experts

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REVIEWS

SOFTWARE REVIEW

1

Siemens Solid Edge 2020 The 2020 release of Siemens’ mainstream 3D CAD tool enhances and improves a wide range of its capabilities. Some of the new functionality may even leave users wondering why other vendors don’t offer them as standard, as Al Dean reports

T

he Solid Edge 2020 release covers a pretty wide swathe of the system’s capabilities, extending existing tools and introducing a few new ones as well.

So for this review, let’s start with the most widely applicable updates for this release, before investigating the more specialist or niche areas. With that in mind, a good place to begin is with a subject that everyone is familiar with – sketching.

While Solid Edge’s sketching capabilities have been consistently in line with how any CAD user would expect the system to work, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement. For this release, sketching gets autoscaling and some new patterning options. Autoscaling is a curious feature because once you see it work, you realise that CAD systems should always have worked this way. When you’re laying out a sketch, you’ll typically sketch out the lines, circles and arc you want, fairly roughly, and then apply dimensions to firm things up.

Only a pervert would do anything else.

The issue is that, in most systems, unless you’ve sketched to almost precisely the right scale, when you go to apply that first

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dimension, you can blow out the whole thing. It then takes 10 more minutes to work out how to do it properly.

With autoscaling, as you add in that first driving dimension, the entire sketch scales to meet it, meaning your geometry remains in approximately the right shape, without requiring you to wrangle it all back into place. Autoscaling is switched on by default, but to be honest, I can’t see why you’d want to switch it off again (although you can of course choose to do just that).

On the patterning front, you’re now able to pattern sketch elements (not just reference points) in both circular and linear/ rectangular patterns; you have control over angle (to rotate a pattern during creation); and more interactive previews, which show you results more clearly (particularly useful when patterning more complex features where orientation is key).

SHEET METAL & NESTING

1 The new remesher ● makes light work of complex and dense meshes

The part modelling tools haven’t seen a great deal of work done for this release – the existing tools are pretty rich and mature, covering solid and surface modelling, using both traditional, history-based approaches and the more direct synchronous

technology techniques.

What has seen some work is the sheet metal environment. Solid Edge has always had a strong reputation for sheet metal design and documentation, but this release sees some important enhancements. One such area is in the construction of lofted bends, as are typically found where you’re looking to transition between two shapes; for example, from a cylindrical duct to a square vent or outlet.

For some time now, Solid Edge has allowed you to model up these forms and have in place ‘hit’ lines on the surfaces, but only now does it allow you to also carry out a full conversion of them from analytic surfaces into a series of flat, connected profiles that can be laser- or plasma-cut and folded in a single piece.

Solid Edge 2020 updates the tools already there to allow much more control over the conversion process, affording you not only a mix of automated and manual controls, but also more freedom to define how these rounded forms should be converted into flat sections. For example, you can define how many bend lines you want and control chord height, maximum segment length and angle. There are also more advanced DEVELOP3D.COM JULY/AUGUST 2019 35

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SOFTWARE REVIEW

2 2 There are now a ● whole host of new tools for building manufacturable complex sheet metal forms using the lofted flange operation

controls over how bend relief is added (with trimming options), as well as support for documenting these forms in drawings, with bend tables that allow you to fully prepare fabrication documentation.

Elsewhere in the sheet metal tools, there’s a new option for dealing with instances where bends (particularly on thicker gauge material) would cause bulges at the edges of parts. While the system doesn’t let you model these, experience will tell you where they’re likely to occur, so at these points, the new Bend Bulge Relief command will let you insert a relief feature to those bends in circular and ‘U’ or ‘V’ shapes on the bends that need it.

Perhaps the last sheet metal-related update discussed here should be the new 2D Nesting add-on module – something that for some time now, Solid Edge has been crying out for. This will allow you to bring together all of the parts you need to nest in a production run (be they native Solid Edge parts, or imported DXFs), define the sheets you have available and have the system work through a nesting algorithm that will match your parts to the sheets available (using multiple sheet sizes in the same job).

It’ll nest parts within space, within other parts and more. Once you’ve got that data, you can then use it to feed into your laser, waterjet or plasma cutter software.

ASSEMBLY MODELLING & PERFORMANCE Assembly performance is something that every vendor involved in mechanical design focuses on in every release. Why? The simple answer is that as soon as these systems catch up with how hard their users push them, then users push even harder.

For the Solid Edge 2020 release, Siemens’

team has developed a new, highperformance large assembly mode set of tools that will apply best practice depending on your part count.

These best practices are focused on both display (such as shading, tessellation of models), as well as interaction (selection highlight glow), hidden edge display and will switch off those that most impact performance. There have also been a few tweaks made to how the system handles dragging and dropping components from Pathfinder, Solid Edge’s assembly structure browser. It’s a quick way to add in multiples of the same part, but sometimes the system would experience a little lag, causing the system to add in unwanted duplicates.

The last assembly-related update is not associated with creating or editing assemblies, but rather searching for components within complex assemblies.

The existing query select tools have been enhanced to allow you to use any of the metadata associated with your data as the basis for a search, such as name, keyword, material, creator and so on.

MESHING MODELLING & REVERSE ENGINEERING If you’re a current user or have been keeping up to date with Solid Edge’s most recent developments, you’ll be aware that the team has been focusing on greater integration of mesh-based geometry into standard ways of working and allowing users to perform operations on meshes just as they do with solids and surfaces.

While much of this is covered under the ‘convergent modelling’ technology label, it has also meant that Solid Edge has received a lot of additions, in terms of working with mesh-data to repair and repurpose

it before you even get to the convergenttype operations. These are proving useful to many users I’ve spoken to recently, and in particular, those regularly working with laser scanning and other reverseengineering processes.

If you’ve worked with the results of laser scanning, then you’ll be aware that the resultant datasets, even when decimated in post-processing systems, are typically quite large and as such, represent a challenge for most 3D design systems. While Solid Edge will allow you to open these up and work with them (within your workstation’s memory limits), it’ll be heavy going. To help combat this, the new remesh tool is going to make this process much easier.

Based on remeshing technology originating elsewhere in the Siemens stable (specifically, CD-Adapco’s StarCCM product), the new remeshing tool will rebuild your mesh according to the requirements/ options you have set.

There are controls over target size (for facets), and how you want the system to maintain certain features, such as sharp edges and boundaries, as well as how the system handles areas with rapid curvature change (so the system refines the mesh, adding more facets to more accurately rebuild that area).

Whether you’re looking to simply reduce the size of the mesh, or to gain a more consistent mesh (useful for simulation or for downstream processes such as feature recognition), this will be useful to many.

Elsewhere on the reverse-engineering front, there’s a new tool that I wish every vendor would include, as it solves the ageold issue of reverse-engineered data not being in a sensible, orderly, co-ordinated space, making it more difficult to work

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with when you need to integrate it with other geometry.

Solid Edge 2020 introduces a Mesh Align tool that allows you to rectify this in a couple of ways. You can move and align a mesh using either a principle set of axes; a best-fit bounding box; a custom bounding box (which allows you to orient it to align better with the part’s geometry and your needs); or using geometry references to selection a coordinate system’s origin, then X, Y and Z references.

When you combine this with the region extraction tools that identify planar, cylindrical faces and so on, then you’ve got a nice workflow for making your mesh objects more sensible and usable.

The last item that we’ll cover on the mesh modelling front is going to greatly assist with reconstructing models or taking references from meshes by giving you a quick method of placing a section sketch (or multiples thereof) through a model.

Essentially, you choose the position (and direction and spacing, if you’re creating multiples), and the system creates a section through your model and will create a standard section which can be reused as

needed. It’s worth noting that this works on both meshes and solids and, where appropriate, will recognise lines, circles, arcs and ellipses.

3D MODEL COMPARE A new addition for this release, the 3D Model Compare tool comes at a time when engineering organisations are looking to work smarter with their data and reduce complexity. Essentially, it allows you to load together two versions of a geometry model file and perform a comparison.

Assuming that the two parts are in the same coordinate space, it’ll give you a visualisation showing how the two differ and where those differences are found – both in terms of additional and removed material.

This is a pure geometric comparison, rather than inspecting build history or metadata, but it’ll prove useful, particularly if you’re using geometry-based search to narrow down duplication of work or finding areas where stock count can be reduced.

If you want to formalise your findings as a report, then you can automatically generate a basic output from the system, with images already in place.

3 3D Model Compare ● will give you visual feedback on the differences between two parts 4 The new 2D ● nesting add-on will be a godsend for those who are already using Solid Edge’s legendary sheet metal design tools

3

SOLID EDGE PORTAL & AUGMENTED REALITY (AR) The final update we’re going to cover is the addition of a new 3D model visualisation method, built into the Solid Edge Portal.

If you’re not familiar with the portal, it’s a free-to-use project collaboration service that Siemens offers.

You get 5GBs of storage, integrated model viewing (based on the same HOOPS3D technology from TechSoft3D that other systems like this use), and collaboration (viewing, mark-up, commenting and so on). This has been extended for the 2020 release to include augmented reality (AR).

Essentially, it allows you to upload your model to the portal and generate a QR code. (Remember, most smartphones automatically decode these with the camera now, so no special reader app is required.)

You can share it with those who need it and scan it with your smartphone/tablet using the Solid Edge Mobile Viewer app.

This should then show the model in 3D, in situ, linked to the QR code, allowing you to view it at near-1:1 scale.

We haven’t had a chance to test this out yet (it hadn’t been released as we went to press), but it looks in line with similar offerings from other vendors. If you’re looking to take Solid Edge data out to external AR/VR systems, then it’s also worth noting that Siemens has added OBJ support too, which will prove useful for third-party visualisation systems.

IN CONCLUSION

4

We’ve only covered the updates made to the core of Solid Edge for the 2020 release, but there’s a whole lot more in store. There are new additions to the simulation tools (with the fluid flow simulation tools, in particular, getting some attention), and to the manufacturing, technical publishing and PCB/electricalrelated add-ons for the system.

As I stated at the start of this review, what this amounts to is a wide spectrum of updates that add new functionality and enhance existing tools. That said, there are certain updates in 2020 that make huge sense, to the point of leaving you wondering why these aren’t standard in every design tool (in particular, I’m thinking of autoscaling in sketches and mesh alignment).

Elsewhere, the Solid Edge team is demonstrating its eagerness to innovate and its willingness to take advantage of technology from other areas of the Siemens product stack.

As ever, if you’re looking for a 3D design system that offers you a deep and rich set of mature functionality, then Solid Edge is just as worthy of further investigation as it was two decades ago. The good news is that, over the intervening period, the system has continued to grow, to become something of a hidden gem. solidedge.com

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From BIM to digital fabrication Building Information Modelling (BIM) for Architecture, Engineering and Construction

Building Information Modelling technology for Architecture, Engineering & Construction

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06/06/2019 15:25

HARDWARE REVIEW

CadMouse Pro Wireless When 3Dconnexion launched its take on the professional mouse, adding in a third button, many rejoiced, But can it achieve a market-leading position with the latest update to its wireless CadMouse products? Al Dean reports

W

e’ve been fans of 3Dconnexion’s products for many years. From the first SpaceMouse launched under the Logitech3D name, through the merger with Labtech, and on to more recent times under the 3dconnexion brand, the company has been one of only a handful developing this kind of hardware for the professional 3D CAD user.

Its SpaceMouse products have occupied a unique place in the market, providing 3D motion control over 3D models, along with a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts, macros, commands and more. For those who own them, these devices become an extension of themselves. Many claim they’d be lost without them.

In more recent times, the company has also released a series of more traditional mouse devices. Named the CadMouse, these take full advantage of the company’s robust engineering and its knowledge of how to integrate with professional applications.

What differentiates them from more widely available mice is the inclusion of a third mouse button – and not just the one commonly found beneath the ubiquitous scroll wheel, but rather, a proper third button.

Depending on your CAD system tool of choice (and in many respects, your age), you may be familiar with the use of the threebutton mouse. You may also have found, as many have, that combining the scroll wheel with a button can lead to less-than-accurate results. So it was nice to see the return of the true three-button mouse, rather than trying to track down older models on Ebay.

Initially, CadMouse was only available as a wired device, but a wireless version soon followed in 2016. So where does the new CadMouse Pro Wireless fit in?

In short, it’s a new, larger version of the CadMouse Wireless released a few years back. Back then, the company took the form factor of its wired mouse and simply added in USB receiver and Bluetooth support, but also scaled it down for portability.

For those of us who prefer a larger device, then, this will be a godsend (Note: a larger mouse isn’t always about a user with larger hands.) It’s also worth noting at this point that the features and functions we’re discussing here are also available in a left-handed device as well. This alone will be huge news for a whole swathe of prospective customers.

So let’s see what this device has in store for both righties and lefties, shall we?

GETTING SET UP The first thing to do is get this bad boy extricated from its box. You’ll find it safely snuggled in there, along with its soft-shell travel case, the Universal Receiver USB dongle and the ever-present Micro USB cable for charging and connecting.

If you have one of 3Dconnexion’s other devices and the USB receiver already plugged in, you just need to switch the CadMouse on and add it as a device.

If not, you have a couple of options. If your workstation has Bluetooth, you can use that; or, you can plug in the Micro USB cable. A quick download of the drivers is all that’s needed and away you go.

It’s worth noting that there’s a toggle underneath the unit to switch between USB receiver and Bluetooth. While this might not make much sense for use with a single workstation, if you’ve got multiple machines (perhaps a desktop and laptop), having the hard switch between the two makes a whole load of sense. Those who bounce between machines with a Logitech MX will known just how useful it can be.

From this point onwards, you’ll discover that you’re using a well-built product. You’ll also find that the middle mouse button soon becomes second nature, rather than the hard press on your scroll wheel. Of course, your adventures could end there, but you’d be missing out of on some of the best features that 3Dconnexion’s mouse devices have to offer.

First, there are a number of other buttons on the device. The most obvious is the radial menu button, located just behind the scroll wheel. This will pop up a radial menu at your cursor on the screen and can quickly be customised to show exactly what you need it to show, giving you direct access to either four or eight different commands.

Then you’ve got the two thumb buttons just by the thumb rest. By default, these are assigned to a 25% zoom function, enabling you to zoom backwards and forwards, in and out of your model or drawing. But again, these can be customised. (For example, I have one set to replicate the ‘Print Screen’ key press, so that I can easily take screenshots when reviewing software.)

APP-SPECIFIC CUSTOMISATION Once you’ve explored your buttons and options and got a feel for how the device works, you’ll be just about ready to start to explore one of 3Dconnexion’s greatest assets – its ability to integrate closely with a whole host of the professional applications

A B C D

E

F

G H

I A The all-important middle ●

button gives users greater accuracy

B The scroll wheel also includes ●

a button and offers adjustable smart scrolling speed

C Pressing this button pops up ●

a fully customisable radial Menu that appears at your cursor D By default, the two thumb ● buttons provide zoom in/out, but can be customised for shortcuts, triggers and macros

E Micro USB charging port. A full ●

charge gives 3 months of daily use

F Power button, useful for days ●

away from the office

G You can connect via Bluetooth ●

or by using the supplied USB Universal Receiver dongle, useful for users of two or more workstations

H 7,200 dpi sensor polling at ●

1,000 Hz means it captures every movement

●I PTFE feet for smooth mousing fun

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HARDWARE REVIEW we all use on a daily basis.

It’s this that separates 3Dconnexion’s products from those offered by more mainstream vendors, as the company has the deep knowledge needed in order to be able to link its hardware to the operations, commands and inputs that you need from these systems.

IN CONCLUSION The CadMouse Pro Wireless is a nice bit of kit – as it should be, for the princely sum of £99. That prices it well above generalpurpose mouse products and even a little above some premium examples out there.

It’s a tenner more than the manufacturer’s recommended price for the Logitech MX, which was the most popular among our readers in a recent poll. So it’s entirely valid to ask what exactly you get for that premium price.

The answer is you get a very well-built product with a 3-year warranty. It’s one that’s suited to those applications that take advantage of a third mouse button and to use cases where you want to customise your mouse. Some folks want to do this, others don’t.

The battery life is pretty incredible: it’s claimed to be around three months, based on its use for eight hours per day, five days per week. We’ve had a test unit in the office for a while now and this claim seems to be well-grounded and in line with our experience of similar products.

But ultimately, what might really provide the big market breakthrough for the CadMouse Pro Wireless may not be these capabilities, but instead the fact that 3Dconnexion has made the smart decision to offer this product in both right- and lefthanded versions.

3dconnexion.com

1 1 3Dconnexion’s control ● software, where all customisations take place 2 The CadMouse comes ● with a cable, a Universal Receiver USB dongle and a carry case

2

MICE FOR THE PROFESSIONAL: OTHER CONTENDERS

LOGITECH MX 2S

LOGITECH MX VERTICAL

RAZER DEATHADDER

MICROSOFT INTELLIMOUSE

CORSAIR M65 ELITE

Product: MX Master 2S Supplier: Logitech Weight: 145g Wireless/Wired: Both Price £89.99

Product: MX Vertical Supplier: Logitech Weight: 132g Wireless/Wired: Both Price: £92.99

Product: DeathAdder Supplier: Razer Weight: 105g Wireless/Wired: Wired Price: £69.99

Product: Intellimouse Supplier: Microsoft Weight: 100g + cable Wireless/Wired: Wired Price: £39.99

Product: M65 Elite Supplier: Corsair Weight: 95.3g to 115g Wireless/Wired: Wired Price: £59.99

Notes: We picked up one of these in Maplin’s Closing Down sale and it has been my secondary mouse for a good year or so. It’s perfect for those with larger hands, doesn’t need much charging and has enough customisability to keep the nerdiest of mouse nerds happy.

Web: logitech.com

Notes: Recommended by a number of readers, particularly those with RSI. The vertical orientation of the device leads to better posture and also reduced strain on those muscle groups associated with RSI. We found it pretty easy to get accustomed to the new hand position.

Web: logitech.com

Notes: Recommended by reader Deri Jones as suitable for lefthanders. “A nice and big leftie, so you actually get a thumb button that works and doesn’t get triggered by the slightest touch of your pinkie,” he told us. As he also pointed out, it’s a great mouse with a daft name.

Web: razer.com

Notes: During our meticulous research (namely, asking people on Twitter), we discovered that there’s still a lot of love out there for the Intellimouse. And, much to our surprise, Microsoft has just updated it. It’s wired, it’s cheap (comparatively) and it’s just as you remember it.

Web: microsoft.com

Notes: The gaming hardware industry may be obsessed with ridiculous naming conventions, but product-wise, it does throw up the odd winner. This one’s fully adjustable (including weight) and doesn’t resemble a customised Fiat Panda on a Friday night out in Slough.

Web: corsair.com

40 JULY/AUGUST 2019 DEVELOP3D.COM

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HARDWARE REVIEW

Lenovo ThinkPad P53 [pre-production] » In this exclusive review, Greg Corke gets hands-on with the ThinkPad P53, which delivers the kind of 3D performance never seen before in a 15.6” mobile workstation » Intel Xeon E-2276M processor (2.80GHz, 4.70GHz Turbo) (6 Cores) » 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4 memory » 2 x 512GB Intel SSD 760p Series SSDs » Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 GPU (16GB) » 15.6-inch 4K (3,840 x 2,160) OLED Touch, 400nit display » Windows 10 Pro » 377mm (w) x 252mm (d) x 28mm (h) » From 2.45kg » Think 3 year on-site warranty Price on application (from $1,799) lenovo.com/ thinkworkstations

W

hen it comes to mobile workstations, the 15.6-inch form factor is by far the most popular – and has been for years. It’s not too heavy, fits comfortably into most bags and the display is a reasonable size for detailed design work. Specs-wise, most models are ideal for 3D CAD, but when the GPU needs to be pushed harder for realtime viz, virtual reality (VR) or GPU rendering, performance often leaves users wanting more.

This is where the more powerful Nvidia Quadro GPUs come into their own. But historically, anyone who wanted a ‘5000’ class Quadro (e.g. Quadro M5000M or P5000) had to go for a bulkier 17-inch mobile workstation. These are OK if you only ever move between desks or from home office to garden, but if you need your machine to be truly mobile, the extra size and weight soon become a drag.

On June 11 at NXT BLD (nxtbld.com), Lenovo unveiled a new mobile workstation that looks set to have a major impact on the market. The ThinkPad P53 is the first 15-inch mobile workstation from a major OEM that offers the kind of GPU typically only found in a 17-inch machine. The GPU in question is the new Turing-based Quadro RTX 5000 (16GB).

Packing more GPU power into a 15-inch chassis gives Lenovo a distinct advantage over the competition. By comparison, Dell and HP can only offer up to the Quadro RTX 3000 (6GB) in their flagship 15-inch mobile workstations, the Dell Precision 7540 and HP ZBook 15 G6.

As one would expect, the Quadro RTX 5000 offers more processing power in general. It has more CUDA cores for 3D graphics or other parallel processing tasks such as ray trace rendering or simulation, more RT Cores for ray tracing and more Tensor Cores for deep learning

1

(You can learn about the relevance of these cores and the impact RTX is set to have on rendering in our Quadro RTX 4000 review at tinyurl.com/RTX-D3D).

Importantly, the Quadro RTX 5000 also has nearly three times the memory of the mobile Quadro RTX 4000. And for many of today’s GPU heavy workflows, 6GB simply won’t cut it.

Lenovo might currently have one over on HP and Dell, but it isn’t the only manufacturer to put a Quadro RTX 5000 in a 15-inch laptop. MSI, Asus, Acer and Razer also have brand new machines with Nvidia’s top-end mobile GPU, but some are based on gaming chassis and none have the enterprise credentials and durability track record of the ThinkPad brand.

QUADRO RTX 5000 BY NAME… The Quadro RTX 5000 in the ThinkPad P53 might be built from the exact same silicon as other RTX 5000 GPUs, but to keep power draw and thermals under control, Lenovo has used a Max-Q Design variant, which is clocked slower and is rated at 80W, compared to the standard 150W. Naturally, this has an impact on performance, but not as much as you might think. Lenovo reckons you get about 85% to 90% of the performance of a standard Quadro RTX 5000, since when you go above 80W, the performance curve flattens off, so pumping more power into the GPU only gives you a small gain.

To put things in perspective, 80W is still high for any mobile workstation component. The Intel 9th Gen Xeon and Core class CPUs used in the ThinkPad P53, for example, are all rated at 45W.

HANDS-ON WITH THE P53 The ThinkStation P53 does not ship until later in July, but we were lucky enough to get hold of a pre-production version with a special test mode build of Windows

2

10 Professional. For those who know their prototype hardware, it’s a System Verification Test (SVT) model, which is a very early build.

It goes without saying, then, that the performance metrics quoted in this review should not be taken as gospel. By the time the machine ships next month, it will likely have gone through several driver and BIOS optimisations. The 430.63 Quadro driver installed on the machine, for example, dates back to May. For our testing, we decided to bypass CAD entirely, as 3D performance in applications like Solidworks, Creo, Revit and ArchiCAD is really a given for a machine of this class.

Instead, we focused on workflows that will benefit most from the high-end Quadro RTX 5000 GPU – in other words, real-time viz, VR and GPU rendering.

Real-time viz: For professional 3D graphics, applications don’t come much more demanding than Autodesk VRED Professional. This automotive-focused 3D visualisation, virtual prototyping and VR tool uses OpenGL 4.3 to deliver very high-quality visuals in the viewport. To increase visual quality and smooth the jagged edges of lines, models can be displayed with different levels of real-time anti-aliasing (AA), which stresses the GPU considerably.

We tested at FHD and 4K resolution with a complex automotive model and the ThinkPad P53 performed extremely well. It delivered almost identical results to a Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000-based desktop workstation with an Intel Xeon W-2125 CPU (4.0GHz, 4.5GHz Turbo) and was about 25% to 33% faster than the Dell Precision 7720 we reviewed in Jan 2018 (tinyurl.com/D3D-7720). This 17-inch mobile workstation came with a Quadro P5000 GPU, which is one generation behind the Quadro RTX 5000.

1 The ThinkPad P53 ● features the classic chiclet keyboard, which is solid and responsive 2 The Quadro RTX ● 5000 GPU is the star of the show, although it probably doesn’t shine like this is real life

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 Next, we turned our attention to Enscape, a popular real-time viz tool for architects. Unfortunately, while the ThinkPad P53 worked fine in windowed mode, whenever we tried to go fullscreen, the application crashed, so we couldn’t get any meaningful results.

Virtual Reality: To test the ThinkPad P53 in VR, we used an Oculus Rift. To get it up and running took a little bit of work.

First, we needed to change the BIOS settings to ‘discrete graphics only’. This was to force the Oculus headset to see the Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 and not the Intel integrated graphics that it was choosing by mistake. This is not an isolated issue for mobile workstations with switchable graphics. We experienced the exact same problem last year with the Dell Precision 7720.

Second, the ThinkPad P53 only has two USB Type A ports, so we had to buy a USB Type C to USB Type A adapter (the Oculus Rift needs one for the headset and two for the sensors).

Of course, adapters won’t be needed for new-generation HMDs, which tend to use a single USB Type C port.

Once up and running, we loaded up a 7 million triangle automotive styling model in Autodesk VRED Professional and enjoyed a good solid VR experience. With anti-aliasing (AA) set to low, everything was very smooth. Even when AA was set to medium, the experience was OK (with only the odd flicker when viewing the model from certain angles). We had a similarly good experience with Autodesk Revit Live.

Subjectively, we felt there was a general improvement over the Dell Precision 7720.

To get an idea of relative performance, we ran the game-centric VRMark benchmark. The scores were a little lower than we expected – around 10% to 20% behind the desktop Quadro RTX 4000.

However, the ThinkPad P53 was 20% to 30% faster than the Dell Precision 7720.

GPU rendering: Momentum continues to grow for GPU rendering in design through applications like V-Ray GPU and Solidworks Visualize. From our testing, however, it looks like Lenovo (or Nvidia) still has some work to do before the ThinkPad P53 ships.

In the V-Ray 1.08 benchmark (GPU), for example, we found our machine was about 40% slower than our desktop Quadro RTX 4000 and only marginally quicker than the Quadro P5000-based Dell Precision 7720.

It was also off the pace a bit in Solidworks Visualize – around 17% slower than a desktop RTX 4000 workstation.

BEYOND THE GPU The Quadro RTX 5000 might grab the headlines, but the ThinkPad P53 is certainly not a one-trick pony. It also offers a significant step up in terms of the CPU and comes with a choice of 9th Gen Intel Xeon and Core processors.

At the top end, you can get an 8 core Intel Xeon E-2286M with a base frequency

This has the potential to truly be the only workstation you need for GPUheavy workflows – on the road and in the office



6 3

MEMORY AND STORAGE The machine offers a maximum of 128GB DDR4, spread across four DIMM slots, which should be plenty for most pro users. Two of the memory modules can be accessed easily through the service panel on the bottom of the machine, as can the M.2 NVMe SSDs. Simply remove seven screws and you’re in.

In order to accommodate the more powerful GPUs, Lenovo has had to make some compromises to the storage.

When configured with a Quadro RTX 3000, 4000 or 5000, you only get a choice of up to three M.2 NVMe SSDs. If you want a 2.5-inch hard disk drive (HDD) to get the best price/GB you’ll need a Quadro T2000 or below.

For those with deep pockets, there’s plenty of storage capacity from the three NVMe SSDs (up to 6TB) and they can also be configured in RAID 5, which gives good performance and protects against drive failure. If one drive should fail, data will not be lost. You just pop in a replacement SSD and it should rebuild the array. Our test machine came with two 512GB Intel SSD 760p Series SSDs and 64GB of RAM.

of 2.40GHz and a Turbo of 5.0GHz. Our test machine’s Intel Xeon E-2276M is one level down, featuring six cores, a base of 2.80GHz and a Turbo of 4.70GHz. In our single-threaded tests, the machine performed extremely well, standing shoulder to shoulder with the HP Z2 Mini G4 desktop workstation we reviewed in April (tinyurl.com/D3D-Z2G4), which features an 80W Intel Xeon E-2176G (3.70GHz, 4.70GHz Turbo) (6 cores).

In multi-threaded tests, however, it suffered a bit because of its lower base clock speed. During our KeyShot render

4

test, for example, it started off with a 3.0GHz Turbo but all cores soon went down to 2.40GHz - 2.50GHz. Render times were significantly slower than the HP Z2 Mini G4, which maintained 3.90GHz for the entire test, but slower ‘all core’ clock speeds like this are typical of mobile workstations with 45W CPUs. At this point, it’s worth talking about cooling. Like many mobile workstations in its class, the ThinkPad P53 features dual fans — one for the CPU and one for the GPU. Throughout all of our tests, there was very little fan noise, much less than we would expect from a machine with such powerful components. By the time the ThinkPad P53 ships, one wonders if Lenovo will have tweaked the BIOS to increase performance at the expense of acoustics.

THE CHASSIS The machine itself is classic ThinkPad — solid and extremely well-built. In this respect, it can’t be faulted, but in terms of aesthetics, it’s starting to look a bit dated,

5

63

Underneath the service panel you get easy access to: 3 Two of the four ● memory modules 4 M.2 NVMe SSDs ● 5 90WHr battery ● 6 The 230W power ●

4

supply is 35% smaller than its predecessor but still weighs 0.89kg

5

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 lacking the premium look and feel of the Dell Precision 7540 or HP ZBook 15 G6.

The 377 x 252 x 28mm, 2.45kg chassis is larger and heavier than the Dell and HP, though this comes as little surprise considering it has a much more powerful GPU. To get an RTX 5000 mobile workstation from any other major workstation OEM means a 17-inch chassis which is significantly bigger and heavier.

The ThinkPad P53 is exactly the same size as the ThinkPad P52 it replaces.

The datasheets are a bit confusing as they show an increase in thickness from 24.5mm to 28mm, but this is simply because Lenovo has changed the way it measures.

Externally, the chassis looks and feels pretty much identical to the ThinkPad P52, bar some changes to the I/O ports.

It has more USB Type C ports (one on the right and two at the rear with Thunderbolt 3) and fewer USB 3.1 Type A (two on the left). There’s also an HDMI 2.0 port (left) and an RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet (rear).

For wireless connectivity, the machine includes Intel WiFi 6 AX200 (Gig+), which is designed to give a better experience in environments where multiple WiFi networks co-exist — which, if you live in a major city, is pretty much everywhere these days.

The backlit ThinkPad Precision ‘chiclet’ keyboard is identical to the P52 and has a CAD-friendly numeric keypad to the side. In use it feels great – the keys are responsive and there’s virtually no flex in the middle. There’s also the classic threebutton Touchpad and Trackpoint and a touch fingerprint reader to the right of the palm rest.

Sound is vastly improved, thanks to a new Dolby Atmos speaker system. It might not deliver pumping bass (can there ever be enough bass?) but the richness and fidelity is superb.

OLED 4K DISPLAY Arguably the most significant change to the chassis, particularly for those into design viz, is the new optional 15.6-inch OLED 4K (3,840 x 2,160) 400nit touch display. OLED, or organic light-emitting diode to give it its full name, is relatively new to laptops, but is already used widely in phones, tablets and TVs. OLED is different to IPS panels traditionally used in mobile workstations in that it lights each pixel individually, rather than filtering an always-on backlight. As pixels can be shut off completely, you get incredibly deep blacks and much better contrast ratios.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have a top class IPS panel to do a side-by-side comparison, such as the UltraSharp IGZO4 4K Infinity edge display in the Dell Precision 5530 2-in-1. But we were exceedingly impressed with what we saw. Our render output from KeyShot looked particularly stunning, especially with low-lit scenes. Compared to a budget IPS panel, the blacks were

significantly less washed out.

3D CAD models and 2D drawings were also super sharp. Notably, when viewing the display from an angle, colour and brightness remained very consistent.

The OLED panel is only available at 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolution. If you want FHD (1,920 x 1,080), there’s an optional IPS. Alongside the new display, Lenovo has made a tweak to its ThinkShutter webcam privacy cover, which is now integrated behind the screen with a small slider above. It’s a much more elegant solution and feels more solid.

POWER AND BATTERY With the combined power requirements of the Quadro RTX 5000 GPU and Xeon CPU coming in at well over 100W, it will come as no surprise that the ThinkPad P53 needs a 230W power supply. This weighs in at fairly substantial 0.89kg complete with US plug, more than one third of the weight of the actual machine (2.45kg), so it’s an important consideration if you travel a lot.

However, Lenovo says the slimline power supply is 35% smaller than the previous generation 230W unit, which came with the 17-inch ThinkPad P72.

The Li-ion battery is rated at 90WHr, the same as the ThinkPad P52. However, with the Quadro RTX 5000 drawing more power than the ThinkPad P52’s Quadro P3200, battery life is likely to be shorter in GPU-heavy workflows, but only if the GPU is running at full speed.

In the quick tests we did running off battery, the GPU clocked down considerably, even when Windows and the BIOS were set to high performance.

This had a huge impact on 3D frame rates and render times. We imagine Lenovo will address this by the time the machine ships. There was nowhere near as much throttling of the CPU. The OLED panel can also have a big influence over battery life. Theoretically if what you view on screen is dark — say a white CAD line drawing on a black background — it should conserve energy as the dark pixels do not need to be lit at all.

The battery itself is located under the service panel and can be changed by the user. But this is not something you’d do on the road, only to replace at end of life.

Like most modern laptop batteries, it charges quickly. From empty it took 29 minutes to reach 50% charge and 50 mins to reach 80%.

Historically it’s only been viz specialists that need high-end GPUs, but with workflows changing, architects and designers are starting to hit the limits of their CADfocused machines



There are better machines out there if you only do 3D CAD, but none come close for more demanding 3D workflows.

For Lenovo, the timing couldn’t be better. In design and engineering firms, historically it’s only been viz specialists that need high-end GPUs in their mobile workstations. But with viz software getting easier to use, VR becoming more embedded within design and GPU rendering more prevalent, architects and product designers are starting to hit the limits of their current CAD-focused machines.

Of course, it’s too early to pass judgement on the ThinkPad P53 – after all, we’ve only had a very early pre-production unit. But we really like what we’ve seen so far and, once Lenovo brings its GPU rendering performance up to the levels we would expect, it should offer a great blend of performance and portability.

But even with the anticipated optimisations and tweaks, it’s important to set a realistic level of expectation.

Because of its Max-Q Design, the ThinkPad P53 will likely perform more like a desktop workstation with a Quadro RTX 4000, than one with a Quadro RTX 5000, albeit with 16GB of GPU memory.

One thing we haven’t mentioned is cost, which is still to be finalised. The ‘from’ price of $1,799 is almost certainly for very entry-level specs. A fully loaded Quadro RTX 5000 version will cost significantly more, but then the ThinkPad P53 does have the potential to truly be the only workstation you need for GPU-heavy workflows – on the road and in the office.

CONCLUSION With the ThinkPad P53, Lenovo has broken the mould for the 15-inch mobile workstation. Over the years, we’ve seen them become thinner, lighter, more stylish and shiny. But, generation on generation, we’ve never witnessed such a big leap in 3D performance — at least from a major workstation manufacturer.

The Lenovo ThinkPad P53 is ideal for GPU rendering in applications like Solidworks Visualize

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HARDWARE PREVIEW

HP Reverb Professional Edition » Greg Corke gives his first impressions of HP’s new enterprise-focused VR headset which boasts a much higher resolution than the competition » Product: HP Reverb VR Headset Professional Edition » Supplier: HP Price: $649 hp.com



When you move up close to objects, you start to see remarkable detail in the textures.

Edges also appear much sharper

 p47_D3D_JULAUG19_HP.indd 47

N

o one forgets their first virtual reality (VR) experience. Mine came in 2016, and the combination of an HTC Vive and my irrational fear of heights meant that I failed to walk the virtual plank. But despite being overwhelmed by the sense of immersion, I also recall feeling a bit underwhelmed by the resolution and the clearly visible pixels.

Fast-forward three years and we now have the stunning ‘human eye’ resolution of the Varjo VR-1. But while £6,000 for a VR headset of such quality may be nothing for an automotive multinational when it considers the benefits it can bring to product development, for small design, engineering or architecture firms, that kind of price tag is probably asking a bit much.

The new HP Reverb offers a welcome middle ground. It boasts an impressive per eye resolution of 2,160 x 2,160 – four times as many pixels as the original HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The Pro edition, meanwhile, comes at a very palatable $649.

The Reverb is HP’s second-generation Windows Mixed Reality headset. The first was built on a platform design, so was very similar to other Windows Mixed Reality headsets. The Reverb uses the same Microsoft Windows Mixed Reality ‘inside-out’ tracking, but HP has designed the rest of the headset from the ground up, including its own display panels and optics.

With inside-out tracking, you don’t need additional sensors, so it’s significantly easier to set up than the original Vive or Rift. This makes it particularly well-suited to portable VR, which is important if you share devices or want to set it up quickly in the boardroom or a client’s office.

I got to try out the Reverb at the recent AR & VR World Summit in London and was very impressed. The first thing you notice is it virtually eliminates the ‘screen door effect’, the grid you see due to unlit gaps between pixels. Then, when you move up close to objects, you start to see remarkable detail in the textures. Edges also appear much sharper.

For automotive and product design, where form and aesthetics are key, this should offer a massive benefit. For architecture, perhaps less so, but this does depend. At the design/development stage, having a sense of proportion and scale is arguably more important than visual fidelity. But when selling a penthouse apartment off-plan, some will place a huge value on being able to see the grain on the leather sofa or the fabric of the curtains.

The benefit of higher-resolution VR goes beyond model fidelity. With the HP Reverb, text also appears much sharper, so you can read smaller fonts. This could be a major benefit for the UI design or for viewing object data. Pro VR may still focus predominantly on the model, but there’s huge potential to expose the underlying attribute information in PLM or BIM applications. I can even envisage it being used to view complex Gantt charts for planning construction projects.

Of course, rendering at higher resolution means you need a more powerful GPU. HP recommends a Nvidia GTX 1080, Nvidia Quadro P5200 or AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200, more than the minimum requirements for most other VR headsets, but it really depends on your workflows and datasets.

With an HTC Vive, your workstation may have been able to handle texture-rich automotive models in Autodesk VRED, but with an HP Reverb, it could struggle to deliver a flicker-free experience.

However, if you only work with simply shaded, conceptual architectural models, the additional pixels shouldn’t present too much of a challenge.

THE HEADSET The HP Reverb Professional Edition comes in at $649, which is $50 more than a consumer version.

For this price, you get a leather faceplate that’s both removable and wipeable (as opposed to washable foam). In addition to the standard 3.5m DisplayPort + USB 3.0 cable, there’s a 0.6m mini DisplayPort + USB 3.0 cable for use with the HP Z VR Backpack. A DisplayPort to mini DisplayPort adapter comes in the box.

The headset looks quite similar to the Oculus Rift, with three soft adjustable straps (two on the side and one on the top), as well as built-in headphones. But it feels more comfortable to wear and weighs a mere 498g without the cable.

It comes with standard Windows Mixed Reality controllers, which pair to the Reverb headset via Bluetooth. We’ve heard reports that the tracking coverage is limited and doesn’t go beyond the 114° field of view, but we didn’t notice any problems in our brief testing of the product.

Theoretically, any limits could be less of an issue for enterprise VR applications where hand movements are typically more controlled than they are in VR games.

(My mum playing the first-person shooter ‘Serious Sam’ is a good case in point here.)

CONCLUSION First-generation VR headsets, including the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, were pretty low on resolution, but they still did an excellent job for many enterprise applications, especially in architecture.

Last year, HTC upped the ante with the Vive Pro (1,440 x 1,600) and now there’s the Oculus Rift S (1,280 × 1,440) with inside-out tracking. But neither come close to the Reverb (2,160 x 2,160), which looks set to give HP a significant advantage in workflows where visual fidelity is of paramount importance.

Of course, in order to deliver a smooth VR experience at enhanced resolutions, you’ll likely need a more powerful GPU. The impact of pixels on performance is something we’ll explore when we review the product later this year. For now, the device is sold out everywhere, so it could be a while yet.

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THE LAST WORD

If algorithmic design is going to take off, then aesthetics are going to get weird.

Al Dean wonders if the public is really ready for the look of generative design – or will they not give two Fuchs either way?

A

utodesk issued a blog post recently about work it has done with Volkswagen’s Innovation and Engineering Center California (IECC) to celebrate the 20th anniversary of VW’s largest vehicle research facility outside of Germany.

The project focused on the retrofitting of a 1962 Type 2 Microbus with an all-electric drive system, voice command technology and more. The vehicle also features a number of components that had been run through Autodesk’s generative design software – specifically, seat supports inside the cabin, the wing mirrors, the steering wheel (which is lovely), and perhaps most impressively, the rims.

While you can debate the merits of reducing fractions of a kilogram from a steering wheel when you’ve just added a half tonne of battery, or the point of redesigning an assembly and removing almost all adjustability for the sake of it, some of the components look amazing.

Personally speaking, I really like the steering wheel and the rims. The rims, in particular, have some interesting properties.

Autodesk executives claim that these are 18% lighter than the standard steel wheels – presumably due to changes in manufacturing processes, materials and geometry. Of course, these parts also have that certain look that I’ve seen described many ways: ‘bird bones’, ‘alien autopsy’, ‘giegercad’ or, most recently, ‘barbed wire dipped in fresh cow dung’.

I like them, because I have an interest in the technology that drives those forms, in the design system chooses certain pathways over other options and makes the decision to remove material elsewhere. As with all aesthetic choices and preferences, it is entirely personal. It’s an aesthetic that wears its heart and its origins on its sleeves, in the form of conspicuous computation.

This reminds me of a story I read recently about how the truly iconic Fuchs rim design came to be. The background is that the Porsche 911S was the first to be designated the S suffix, denoting a more powerful engine and, eventually, the iconic five-spoke aluminium rims.

According to Porsche’s official history, during development, it was merely specified as an alloy wheel and that it should be a lighter weight rim than the standard 911 – with the target weight saving to be 3 kilograms per wheel, compared to the steel rim already in use. In 1965, this was a pretty hefty design goal for cast aluminium wheels, as lighter weight designs could often not handle expected loads.

Enter Otto Fuchs (the company, not the man); it took on the challenge of resolving that eternal quandary of lower weight versus greater durability. What Fuchs did was avoid cast aluminium and instead, a blank was forged, and the entire rim area from outer to inner flanges was rolled out.

The design presented to the Porsche board always had a five-spoke design, but the spokes tapered towards the end (you can see them in Figure 4). According to the minutes from the meeting, “In contrast to our proposal, Mr. Porsche Jr. changed the shape of the five connecting pieces between

1

2

3

4

the hub and the rim for reasons of style and appearance. While our design was welladapted to the shape of the series vehicles now being retired, the shape developed by Mr. Porsche Jr. appears more harmonious with the new vehicle.”

I think this is the perfect example of how this technology might be applied in the future to the greatest effect: computation and adoption of new methods and techniques where appropriate, certainly - but with the designer/engineer on hand to take those novelties and new ideas into fruition and production, lending both mechanical and aesthetic steers and rework where needed.

Will folks take to the automated output from design systems if presented without a filter? I think most would prefer something a little more considered and thoughtful.

●1 ●2 & ●3 Details from Volkswagen's project with Autodesk to lightweight some of the components on a vintage 1962 Microbus.

Images courtesy of Volkswagen US 4 The first Fuchs ●

design next to the final cloverleaf design.

Image courtesy of Porsche AG

GET IN TOUCH: at al@x3dmedia.com or @alistardean — Now he’s staring at the 911S Hot Wheels on his monitor and wondering if he can 3D-print a closer match

50 JULY/AUGUST 2019 DEVELOP3D.COM

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