DEVELOP3D October 2020

Swatchbook Mix P39

Siemens NX 7.0 P40 P43 Kubotek K-Compare

TECHNOLOGY FOR THE PRODUCT LIFECYCLE

SkyReal Suite P46

OCTOBER 2020 | £6 | € 7 | $10 | DEVELOP3D.COM

RETRO MODERN

Guild Guitars riffs on a new future inspired by its impressive legacy AI PROCE& SELEC SS TION HOW F O

USES RD MEXIC MAC O LEARN INE ING IH N ITS STA PROCMPING ESSE S

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24/09/2020 16:35

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WELCOME EDITORIAL Editor-in-Chief Al Dean al@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)7525 701 541 Managing Editor Greg Corke greg@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7312 Digital Media Editor Stephen Holmes stephen@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3384 5297 Consulting Editor Jessica Twentyman jtwentyman@gmail.com +44 (0)20 7913 0919 Consulting Editor Martyn Day martyn@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)7525 701 542

DESIGN/PRODUCTION Design/Production Greg Corke greg@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7312

ADVERTISING Group Media Director Tony Baksh tony@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7313 Deputy Advertising Manager Steve King steve@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7314 US Sales Director Denise Greaves denise@x3dmedia.com +1 857 400 7713

SUBSCRIPTIONS Circulation Manager Alan Cleveland alan@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7311

ACCOUNTS Accounts Manager Charlotte Taibi charlotte@x3dmedia.com

I

t’s definitely Autumn. How do I know? Aside from the Christmas stuff already lining the supermarket shelves, the air has taken a turn for the chilly. At least we still have that pale crisp blue sky to offset the need for digging jumpers out of the wardrobe. Autumn is also the time when the software industry would start to gather again at trade shows, conferences, user events. For those of us in the media, this is traditionally a time to pack a bag and hit the road – or at least, it used to be. It’s also when the kids go back to school – and this year’s return hasn’t been without its... issues. My own son was one of the cohort of GCSE students affected by the Covid pandemic, but still managing to excel (three 9s, one 8 and the rest were 7s – I’m a very proud Dad, let me tell you), so it’s interesting to consider what things might look like for our kids in the future.

All too often, schools evangelise the idea that ‘education, then career’ is somehow a linear process. All too often, the party line is this: “Do your exams and, if you screw them up, you’re in trouble for the rest of your life.”

The reality is often quite the opposite – and this was something brought home to me when I jumped on the phone with Josh Chapman at Guild Guitars in California for this month’s cover story. Josh went to high school in Kazakhstan, college in Minnesota, then worked for a huge instrument retailer. Hating the office grind, he then went to work for another guitar company as a finisher on the shopfloor.

There, he was recognised for his quality-process focus. Today, he runs design for a large guitar manufacturing group, focusing on his passion. His path was not linear and that’s by no means unusual. Careers are often non-linear, don’t appear to make much sense, but often ‘just work out’ – with hard work and luck, of course. I just wish schools recognised this.

Right then. Enjoy this issue and until next month, take care folks.

Financial Controller Samantha Todescato-Rutland sam@chalfen.com

ABOUT DEVELOP3D is published by

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

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CONTENTS OCTOBER 2020 ISSUE NO. 121

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14 15 16 20 28 31 34 36

NEWS Kia Motors places big bet on augmented reality, Formlabs starts shipping Form 3L large-scale printer and a new funding round for Gravity Sketch FEATURES Comment: Erin McDermott on stress and burnout Comment: Glen Smith on virtual conferences Visual Design Guide: The Carbon Stool COVER STORY Back to the future at guild guitars Brad Harper’s tips for smart job-hunting Interview: Paul Powers of Physna on 3D search Stamping out scrap at Ford Mexico Teradici thinks big on remote workstations

REVIEWS 39 Swatchbook Mix 43 Kubotek K-Compare Suite 46 SkyReal Suite 49 DEVELOP3D SERVICES 50 THE LAST WORD At a time when many ‘freemium’ software offers are being retracted or restructured, Al Dean wants to know: Who’s really paying the price?

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

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30/09/2020 12:49

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NEWS

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT TECHNOLOGY NEWS

KIA MOTORS TAKES AUGMENTED REALITY INTO DESIGN WITH VARJO XR-1 AND VRED » Korean automaker's Europe Design Center shrinks global design reviews from days to hours using advanced augmented reality and visualisation

K

ia Motors claims it has always been an industry leader when it comes to using innovative technology in its design processes. Now, with the Varjo XR-1 head-mounted display (HMD), supported by Autodesk Vred, Kia’s visualisation process is moving to a totally immersive, photorealistic environment. The company says this can shrink global design reviews from days to hours.

Thomas Unterluggauer is creative manager, CGI at Kia Motors’ Europe Design Center, which is based in Frankfurt.

He said that when his team tried out Varjo’s VR headset for the first time, they were blown away by the clarity and the resolution, compared to other headsets.

“For the first time, we could literally see the metallic flakes in the paint and perceive the depth and quality of the material shaders. We could see the beauty of the details more than ever before in the virtual world,” said.

Seeing more details in the car exterior was certainly a breakthrough. But there was more to come, because when Unterluggauer and the team got to explore the Varjo XR-1 mixed reality device, they realised they could also use it to advance their design work.

With Varjo XR-1, designers can work with their colleagues in the physical design space they’re used to and collaborate on photorealistic, real-scale virtual car models while seeing their hands and bodies. In an immersive mixed reality experience like this, they’re able to talk as they go, give immediate feedback and run more engaging reviews.

“Immersive collaboration works way more naturally than we expected. This is something I’ve always wished for and, with the Varjo device, it’s now a reality,” said Gregory Guillaume, vice president of design at Kia Motors Europe.

Kia’s Europe Design Center is aiming to change perceptions of the brand across the continent as well as worldwide. Its dedicated team of designers create concept cars of the future, as well as production models for both Europe and the global market.

The ability to design and collaborate with Varjo’s photorealistic VR/XR and Autodesk Vred is a total game-changer for Kia’s designers, the company claims.

As manager of the studio’s digital department, Frank Hübbe knows all too well that a 2D model is always a projection that lacks volume.

“Although you can use keyboard, mouse and screen to work efficiently in 2D, you’ll

never get a fully realistic impression of the car,” he said.

Today, Kia Europe’s designers are complementing their entire workflow with virtual and mixed reality. The teams are using VR/XR technologies to make their visualisation work more effective and to showcase projects in new ways. For example, designers are able to review a virtual model directly against a physical model in the same room, or even augment an existing clay model with virtual details.

“With VRED and the Varjo XR-1, you have the context of the real world and the flexibility of the virtual world,” Hübbe commented. varjo.com | kiamotors.com

Top: Thomas Unterluggauer, creative manager CGI at Kia Design Center Europe, in a Varjo XR-1 HMD Above: Gregory Guillaume, vice president of design at Kia Motors Europe, also gets to grips with AR technology

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NEWS

FORMLABS LAUNCHES FORM 3L FOR LARGER SCALE SLA BUILDS

Massivit targets large-build 3D printing in UK

M

assivit has announced plans to promote its large-format polymer 3D printing technology to UK engineering companies, on the back of a new partnership with Warwickshire-based reseller Solid Print3D. Company executives state that Massivit’s move into the engineering arena is fuelled by what they see as a market gap for designers and manufacturers when it comes to high-speed production of full-scale prototypes and tooling. massivit3d.com

F

ormlabs has begun shipping its Form 3L large-scale printer based on its lowforce stereolithography technology.

Launched alongside the Form 3, this is the first time the larger scale units have been available and shipping to customers.

The Form 3L offers a build envelope of 335 x 200 x 300mm, and companies interested in bringing largescale capabilities to their facilities may be pleased to learn that Formlabs has also announced that largerscale versions of its Cure and Wash post-processing units (pictured right) will be available in 2021.

At the same time, the company has also announced the Form 3BL, a dental and medical 3D printer optimised for biocompatible materials.

Max Lobovsky, CEO and co-founder of Formlabs, said: “Our large-format printers are poised to have the same disruptive effect on the 3D printing industry as our Form 1 launch did. The companies that have dominated large-format printing for the past 20-plus years have lacked the innovation and

agility needed to move the 3D printing industry forward,” he said.

“At Formlabs, we are changing that. With the Form 3L and Form 3BL, we are opening this powerful technology up to a whole new group of users at an accessible price while maintaining a professional quality. We are looking forward to seeing how this new technology will be used in industries like automotive and aerospace that need the large-build platform to best utilise 3D printing.” formlabs.com

Kenyan clean water design wins Lexus award

B

ellTower from Kenya is the Grand Prix winner of the Lexus Design Award 2020.

Its Open Source Communities project was selected from over 2,000 entries, received from 79 countries worldwide.

The winning design addresses challenges often found in developing countries by using smart, open-source planning to provide local communities with affordable and sustainable clean water resources. discoverlexus.com

Gravity Sketch aims to go hardware-agnostic HP updates DesignJet Studio with new $3.7m funding round with slick design ravity Sketch and its

G

immersive real-time 3D design and collaboration platform has been boosted by a new funding round that aims to propel it to wider use.

A $3.7 million [£2.9 million] seed investment, led by Kindred Capital, adds to previous funding injections from InnovationRCA and the James Dyson Foundation, as the London-based software company continues to develop its intuitive 3D design software for cross-disciplinary teams to create, collaborate and review.

The latest funding, according to the company, will enable it to scale up its platform to become “entirely hardwareagnostic”, say its founders. (It currently works with a range of virtual reality

H

hardware and is in beta for iPad, mobile and desktop.) The plan is also to make its full suite of tools more widely available to businesses and creative professionals alike. gravitysketch.com

Current Gravity Sketch customers include Ford, Nissan and Reebok

P has updated its DesignJet portfolio of printers, including the stylish new ‘customer-facing’ HP DesignJet Studio.

Contained in a sleek white facia with wood or steel finish, the HP DesignJet Studio printer is aimed at creative professionals with a client-facing workplace.

In addition, two new large-format HP DesignJet plotters have been added to the family: the compact, entry-level HP DesignJet T200; and the AEC-focused T600 series, which offers fast, simple and cheap large-format plotting for plans. hp.com

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23/09/2020 07:14

3DCONNEXION UPDATES THE COMPLETE CADMOUSE RANGE

3

Dconnexion has updated its complete CADmouse range, which now offers a full range of wired and wireless, large and small, and left- and righthanded products.

If you’re not familiar with the CADmouse, it’s a true three-button mouse, where the scroll wheel is separate from a third, middle button. It comes with a full range of customisation options to tailor its use to your CAD system and other applications.

Brand-new for this year’s line-up are the CadMouse Pro and the CadMouse Compact, both of which offer wired connectivity, useful for those who are looking to reduce wireless noise in their work environment or face security issues.

If you’re looking for all-singing, alldancing wireless options, you have the CadMouse Pro Wireless, along with its left-handed variant. If you’re looking for a smaller device (often more comfortable for larger hands, as counterintuitive as that may seem), then there are both wired and wireless options.

The products are available now, from £80 for the CadMouse Compact, up to £107 for the CadMouse Pro Wireless.

For customers that want to use 3Dconnexion’s SpaceMouse products to control 3D model with their nondominant hand, meanwhile, the company offers kits that bundle together mouse, 3D controllers and an excellent CadMouse pad.

The SpaceMouse Enterprise Kit 2 contains the SpaceMouse Enterprise, CadMouse Pro Wireless and CadMouse Pad for £385. The SpaceMouse Wireless Kit, ideal for those on the road and needing more portable tools, contains the SpaceMouse Wireless and the CadMouse Compact for £179.

3dconnexion.com

New CADmouse options to address seemingly everyone and every need

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custom HDRI-based set-ups that mimic realworld lighting without the need to place 3D lights by hand, through time-saving features like LightPaint, which lets users position highlights on their model simply by clicking on its surface. lightmap.co.uk | blender.org

HCL CAMWorks has signed a partnership deal with CIMTechnology, a provider of Wire EDM (electrical discharge machining) software. The partnership will give CAMWorks users exclusive access to more advanced wire EDM programming functionality for precise and intricate part-cutting camworks.com

Unity Technologies has added Plastic SCM to its portfolio, having acquired Codice Technologies in order to bring version control to its real-time 3D workflows. Plastic SCM is geared towards distributed teams, providing users with a platform that is version-controlled unity3d.com

Renishaw has announced its collaboration with UK start-up business Additive Automations on a project to automate metal additive manufacturing post-processing. By using cobots to perform support removal, Renishaw reckons it could reduce cost per part by some 25% renishaw.com

Lightmap brings HDR Light Studio for rendering light design in Blender ightmap’s HDR Light Studio has a new connection for Blender, making the real-time lighting toolkit available to users of the leading open-source 3D design and rendering software, which was downloaded over 10 million times last year.

The new add-on creates a live link between HDR Light Studio and Blender, helping automotive, visualisation and entertainment artists to create accurate photorealistic lighting set-ups more quickly, intuitively and creatively. It brings the artist-friendly lighting tools used in production at companies including Porsche, Sony and Framestore to Blender users for the first time.

HDR Light Studio enables users to create

ROUND UP

Blender's recent investment from the likes of Unity means the rendering system's profile is rising in pro viz studios

Volkswagen is providing suppliers with 3D data based on EPlan Pro Panel as part of its VASS (Volkswagen Audi Seat Skoda) standard. The automotive giant is looking for complete digital twins of control cabinets and the components within to be integrated into projects eplan.com

Printing filaments Kimya ABS Carbon, ABS ESD, ABS Kevlar, PETG–S and TPC91A 3D are now available to purchase in the UK via reseller 3DGBIRE. The French company has developed the new filaments with the approval of 3D printing companies Ultimaker and Raise3D 3dgbire.com | kimya.fr

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NEWS

MICRO WORKSTATIONS GET QUADRO RTX GRAPHICS BOOST

HP revamps ZBook mobile workstations

H D

ell and HP have beefed up the graphics in their micro workstations, adding custom versions of the Nvidia Quadro RTX 3000 GPU to the new Dell Precision 3240 Compact and HP Z2 Mini G5.

Ultra-small form factor (USFF) workstations typically feature entry-level CAD-focused GPUs like the Quadro P1000, so this is big news for those who want more graphics performance without having to sacrifice valuable desk space, especially when working from home.

The Dell Precision 3240 Compact measures 18.8 x 7.0 x 17.9cm and starts at 1.71kg, while the HP Z2 Mini G5 has a slightly bigger footprint but is 1.2cm thinner. Both machines can be VESAmounted behind a display or under a desk.

The Quadro RTX 3000 GPU features dedicated RT cores for ray tracing and Tensor cores for AI denoising, making it suitable for entry-level GPU rendering, as well as real-time viz and VR. It is not a standard desktop graphics card, rather a custom version of an MXM form factor GPU typically found in mobile workstations.

In the HP Z2 Mini G5 and the Dell Precision 3240 Compact, we expect it will offer slightly better performance than Quadro RTX 3000 GPUs found in slimline mobile workstations. The HP ZBook Studio G7, for example, uses a ‘Max Q Design’ variant, so is clocked a touch lower.

Both workstations feature 10th Generation Intel Core CPUs, with up to 10 cores and up to 64GB of memory. zworkstations.com | dell.com/precision

The Dell Precision 3240 Compact is Dell's first Ultrasmall form factor (USFF) workstation

HP ZBook Power G7

HP launches 1U rack workstation to round off ZCentral remote workstation offering

H

P has filled a big gap in its Z workstation portfolio with the introduction of the HP Z Central 4R, a dedicated 1U rack workstation that allows users of CAD, simulation, rendering and other software to connect remotely over a 1:1 connection.

The timing of the launch is extremely relevant, as more firms re-evaluate their work-from-home strategies, due to Covid-19. But this isn't a knee-jerk reaction from HP. The HP Z Central 4R has been in development for some time and is part of a wider remote workstation strategy based around HP ZCentral, a software suite that includes dedicated remoting software and a software broker.

P has updated its ZBook mobile workstation family with three new additions.

The move completes a rebranding process that began earlier this year, in which HP has shifted further from an alphanumeric naming convention.

The ZBook Power, ZBook Fury 15 and ZBook Fury 17 now join the ZBook Create, ZBook Studio, ZBook Studio 360, ZBook x2 and ZBook FireFly in what is, without doubt, the largest range of mobile workstations from any single vendor.

The ZBook Power G7 is the follow on from the entry-level ZBook 15v G5 but is 19% smaller and 9.4% lighter. It features a Nvidia Quadro T2000 GPU, a big step up from the previous gen’s Quadro P620.

The ZBook Fury 15 G7 replaces the ZBook 15 G6 and is 12% smaller. The big news is that the new machine supports the Quadro RTX 5000 GPU, which is far more powerful than the previous generation’s Quadro RTX 3000.

The ZBook Fury 17 G7 is 29% smaller than the HP ZBook 17 G6 it replaces. It’s not as slender as the new Dell Precision 5750, but it does offer more expandability and faster graphics, with support for a range of GPUs up to the Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000. zworkstations.com

NXT BLD: online and interactive, 8-15 October

D

HP Z Central 4R is 100% workstation and is essentially the desktop HP Z4 in a 1Uform factor. Each user gets access to a dedicated machine – CPU, GPU, memory and storage – over a 1:1 connection. It does not support virtualisation. It features Intel Xeon W processors up to 18 cores, a single high-end GPU up to the Quadro RTX 8000, and up to 256GB memory. zworkstations.com

The HP Z Central 4R packs a lot of power for a 1U workstation

evelop3D's sister publication, AEC Magazine, will host its first-ever virtual event on 8-15 October and conference passes are free.

Topics for NXT BLD Virtual include robots in construction, digital fabrication, 3D printing in concrete, real-time viz, VR, remote working, parametrics and more.

The virtual conference will be spread out over a week, with five bite-sized 90-minute sessions, each comprising three 20-minute talks, followed by a live Q&A. nxtbld.com

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COMMENT

Stress and burnout are huge issues for engineers, but they simply don’t get discussed enough. We nerds need to do a better job of sticking together in difficult times, writes our regular columnist Erin McDermott

I

t’s happening again. I’m getting emails from distressed engineers. They think I’m a safe person to confide in and they’re not wrong. The first time this happened was five years ago when I abruptly quit my corporate job, sold everything I could and left the country on sabbatical. Everyone wanted to know: What new job was I jumping to? I didn’t have one.

When this fact became apparent, outsiders could easily imagine I wasn’t in the most ecstatic place in my life. These onlookers were also correct.

The optics at that time encouraged several engineers to feel comfortable messaging me privately. They were suffering from severe stress.

Some might call it ‘burnout’.

Their work environments were unbearable for a variety of reasons. Maybe the rules were too constricting. Maybe they were shipped to foreign countries at short notice, when they’d rather be attending their child’s sixth birthday party. Some struggled with expenses.

Many wanted a new job. Some wanted independence. Others longed for a travelling sabbatical, too. Yet another revealed he had jumped in a river during a suicide attempt. He was later mocked by his co-workers when he recovered and returned to work.

The flood of these messages shocked and horrified me. On one hand, it was comforting; I was not alone. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone realises how many of us tech pros suffer. It was only my unique and openly public position that afforded me this insight.

Normally, we don’t talk about the extent of these stressors too much. There’s a reason for that.

One time, while working at the most toxic work environment I ever experienced, my coworkers

and I threw an off-site party. It wasn’t long before the complaining started, but the stories were told as jokes. The tales were so unbelievable as to how we were treated that they easily translated to comedy.

At one point, one of the co-worker’s wives thanked us. We were perplexed. “For what?”

“I thought my husband was making up how terrible things were,” she said. “I thought there is no way the environment could really be like that.

But now I know it’s real. Thank you for sharing.”

Likewise, when friends and family members saw me ‘irrationally’ fly the coop from my fancy, science-y, cushy, lucrative, big-city cakewalk of a job, they also didn’t get it.

One of my cousins said, “That must have been a really easy job and you must have been making bank! Why did you quit?”

I replied it was because neither of those things were true.

Fellow engineers, designers and other tech nerds, our friends and family have trouble believing that our jobs sitting at a desk could involve stress! The truth is, the stress scale varies widely from industry to industry and from one geographic location to another.

Perhaps you’re reading this thinking, “Well, I don’t mind my job that much and the pay is OK.” Good! That’s great! I’m happy for you. However, I can guarantee that’s not the same experience across the board.

Today, the messages I get are slightly different.

The normal stressors are still present, but now an even wider swathe of engineers feels the brunt of economic instability.

Even some who I tried and failed to seduce last year into staying in Freelance Engineer Land are contacting me! Back then, they chose the stability



It’s happening again.

I’m getting emails from distressed engineers. They think I’m a safe person to confide in and they’re not wrong

 of a full-time, ‘permanent’ position over the instability of independence. Ironically, they’re now looking for work.

On the other side of the aisle, those who stayed in the world of independent freelancers are also shaken. But unlike those who woke up one day without a full-time job, their life structures are more flexible. Instead of only looking for extra work from me directly, they tell me of ways they might restructure their offerings. I’m doing the same.

So if you’re feeling extraordinarily stressed with no one in your circle who can sympathize, I humbly offer the following tips: 1: Know you’re not alone. Many of us with ‘cushy’ and ‘stress-free’ jobs have been close to snapping; 2: If you’re looking for more work, different work, or more fun work, don’t be afraid to shout about it! It’s the best way to make progress; 3: Give back. Let people know what you can offer and be open to helping. Make introductions. Give free technical advice on forums and LinkedIn posts.

Offer to advise more junior engineers.

Right now, I’m working on resources to help engineers make the leap into freelance life or grow their existing small business. So, if there are questions you want to ask privately or anonymously, please contact me.

Us tech nerds need to stick together and I’m more than happy to assist! We can help each other make it through this.

GET IN TOUCH: Erin M. McDermott is Director of Optical Engineering at Spire Starter and a digital nomad (read: vagrant). She travels the world meeting hardware engineers who don’t know that things using light (cameras, LED illumination, LiDAR, laser processes etc) need competent design, optimisation, and tolerancing like the rest of their widget. Get in touch at spirestarter.com or @erinmmcdermott 14 OCTOBER 2020 DEVELOP3D.COM

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COMMENT

As events for the Autumn 2020 conference season go online and virtual, Glen Smith wonders how the latest tech might be deployed to make them more compelling and capable of engaging wider audiences?

T

rade shows have long been a feature of the CAD and manufacturing space. I’ve personally attended many, in locations across the world, both as an exhibitor and an attendee: Solid Modelling, Pacific Design Show, Packaging Automation, Develop3DLive and SolidWorks World, to name just a few. All bar one followed much the same formula: Presentations given in a hall and rows of booth space manned by hopeful staff.

Looking back, the one event that deviated from this norm was back in 2010. There’s no point in asking me where it was held, because it was a virtual trade show. Strictly speaking, it was hosted from somewhere in Asia, and a couple of us had to set our alarms, in order to get up in the middle of the night to staff our virtual exhibition booth in that timezone. Doing so involved turning on an avatar, to show we were there.

This virtual booth had a basic graphic area with a logo and a strapline, plus a TV screen where visitors to the booth could watch a rolling video. You could see the avatars moving jerkily around the auditorium and trade hall. If you felt bold enough to strike up a conversation with a fellow attendee, you could click on their avatar and a chat window would open. But we found that scary. Would they type back?

It took me right back to being a lad of nine years old, when we used to ring Auntie Bessie’s doorbell, then scarper as fast as we could, before she could see us or catch us.

So, at this 2010 virtual event, being hosted thousands of miles away from Yorkshire, in what was for us the middle of the night, we tried to engage with virtual beings and we felt scared. We weren’t sure of booth etiquette and secretly hoped they wouldn’t play! I think we got 23 leads in total.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad we took part. In fact, the experience is proving very relevant and valuable now, ten years on.

Thanks to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Go to Webinar and many others, virtual meetings are something we’ve all become very used to in 2020. In tech terms, 10 years is like dog years or actually much shorter – thank goodness! Today, we’re now falling over ourselves to find new and better ways to engage with others virtually – because we can’t, or don’t want to, travel.

I didn’t want to mention The Virus, but it’s hard not to. The uptake in virtual meetings this year has been huge. They’ve become the norm in work and for engaging with family and friends. Technology has helped us all stay connected.

I’ve noticed a shift in attitudes, too. More people are using webcams, making it easier to gauge reactions through body language – albeit on a screen and looking slightly ridiculous in oversized headphones. We’re certainly more forgiving when we see people working in their kitchen, or when a meeting is interrupted by the Amazon delivery guy or a barking dog. And of course, I’m a big fan of screen-sharing, in order to show off our 3D software.

In October/ November, me and my team typically attend a wide range of industry events. In 2019, we travelled to 53 events in 14 countries, with 22 different resellers, and covering many thousands of miles between us. These events have always been a big part of our year. We enjoy the informal chatter, checking in on how the last year has been, keeping a finger on the pulse of the health of the industry and players in it, as well as sharing an after-show beer with our hosts and fellow exhibitors.

This year, those same events are all going virtual. We’ve been offered booths that we can brand with graphics, along with areas



More people are using webcams, making it easier to gauge reactions through body language – albeit on screen and looking slightly ridiculous in oversized headphones



to play videos, and engage with visitors.

The concept sounds very similar to our 2010 Asia-Pac experience, but the delivery of course is many thousands of pixels and megabits better. Ten years on, I’m looking forward to seeing how the latest technology is being harnessed to make virtual events engaging and valuable.

Right at the beginning of lockdown, we reimagined our own annual training event as a virtual one. We’re already working on dynamic content for the next one, in April 2021 – whether it’s physical, virtual or blended. Hosting our last event online enabled us to reach a much wider audience and gave more people from all over the world the chance to join in. We also have an opportunity to reduce travel and improve communities and engagement, by increasing learning and networking opportunities for everyone.

So maybe we’ll meet on a TV screen in the UK in November, or in virtual Nashville for 3D Experience World next year. If you do sign up, be sure to stop by our booth for a chat or a virtual beer. Don’t just ring the bell and run away!

The Driveworks team are missing their physical events

GET IN TOUCH: Glen Smith is CEO of DriveWorks. We agree entirely about missing physical events. A fond memory of Al’s is sitting after a particularly grueling Solidworks World, and chatting to Glen, both in recovery mode, and thinking, “This lad is going places.” Get in touch at driveworks.co.uk or @driveworks DEVELOP3D.COM OCTOBER 2020 15

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VISUAL DESIGN GUIDE THE CARBON STOOL BY SUTHERLIN SANTO The stool’s materials combine a better alternative to single use plastics and a means of improving air quality, seeing it chosen as a finalist for the Lexus Design Awards 2020

MAN + MACHINE DESIGN TEAM The designers, Garrett and Paul Sutherlin Santo, combined Rhino3D with their own scripts, customised hardware (CNC extruder, robotic end-effectors, etc.), and custom materials – using StyleGan2 to train the AI

PROJECT EXTENSION: WALL TILES An extension of the technology, these decorative wall tiles capture pollutants, but can also have healthy vitamins and nutrients mixed into the Biocraft material, releasing them into the air over their lifespan

14 16 APRIL OCTOBER 2019 2020 DEVELOP3D.COM DEVELOP3D.COM

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PLANT-BASED COMPOSTABLE MATERIAL Concerned by climate change and events CNC CONTROLLED PASTE EXTRUDER The design is printed through a

like California’s wildfires are affecting air quality, Sutherlin Santo designed a biopolymer, Biocraft. Derived from plant matter it’s biodegradable and compostable while binding carbon dioxide and VOCs to it

customised paste extruder mounted to a CNC mill, giving control over print speed, precision tolerance, multi-material and multi-colour extrusion, and patterning

3D PRINTED AI DERIVED FOAM The seat cushion was 3D printed from Biocraft foam, its aesthetics driven by an AI trained on seat pressure maps and high surface area textures found in nature for optimal carbon capture

NEXT STEPS

The Carbon stool was featured amongst the finalists of the Lexus Design Award 2020. The 2021 entries are now open discoverlexus.com

DEVELOP3D.COM NOVEMBER DEVELOP3D.COM OCTOBER 2020 15 17

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RETRO ROCKER

thi

Guild’s Starfire 1 Jet 90 combines vintage styling with modern production techniques and some fresh new thinking PHOTO CREDIT: JESSE CARMODY

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PROFILE

The Guild Guitar Company is combining vintage appeal with fresh new design thinking to reach new audiences. Al Dean speaks to Josh Chapman, Guild’s director of product management, to find out how it gets the balance right

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PROFILE

1

uitars from The Guild Guitar Company have helped to create some of the greatest music in history. From the New York jazz scene of the 1950s, to Richie Havens’ legendary performance at Woodstock, to the heavy riffing of Seattle’s Kim Thayil of Soundgarden.

Founded in 1953, Oxnard, California-based Guild is still building on its long-standing reputation for creating iconic acoustic, electric and bass guitars. In fact, under the ownership of the Cordoba Music Group, Guild has undergone something of a rebirth.

It still sends vintage designs, built on the principles of craftsmanship, quality and value, to guitar stores around the world. But, at the same time, it has also been developing a new range of products that combine both vintage styling and new features to appeal to a new generation of musicians and instrument owners. As the company’s slogan makes clear, whether the design is new or old, a Guild guitar is “Made to Be Played.”

To learn more about how Guild brings its products to market, we spoke to Josh Chapman, director of product management for Cordoba Music Group. Chapman’s personal journey reads like something out of a Jules Verne novel. From high school in Kazakhstan, via studying business and guitar design in Minnesota and working for one of the US’s largest instrument retailers

1 The Starfire 1 ●

Jet 90 is built for everything from blues to rockabilly to all-out rock

22 OCTOBER 2020 DEVELOP3D.COM

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on guitar repairs, he’s since risen quickly through the ranks at Guild to where he is today.

“I was initially hired as a finish technician in the factory.

There’s 1,000 or more guitars out there that I’ve worked on. After implementing some quality tracking ideas into the factory – using coloured tape in our finishing room, because we didn’t have a good system for marking when a guitar needed touch-ups or was ready - I ended up having a serendipitous meeting that caught the attention of Jon Thomas, our president. He approached me after the meeting, asking about my background and what I wanted to do,” he explains.

“This was my chance to tell him about my background in guitar design and how that’s where I’d rather be, but that I understood I’d need to work in a factory for a year before I could implement any changes or create a design,” he continues.

“As a result, over the next year, I was working partially in the factory and partially on the development team. I came over to the design team as a specialist, but ended up becoming the director of product management, covering all of our brands: Cordoba, as well as Guild, DeArmond pickups and HumiCase cases.”

CLASSIC APPEAL, CLEVER NEW TRICKS

‘‘

Much of what we do when developing new products is picking the vintage designs that work together and finding new inspiration

In order to explore how Chapman and his team take a guitar from concept to reality, we focused on the brandnew Starfire 1 Jet 90 – an instrument that combines classic Guild appeal with some clever new tricks up its sleeve.

As Chapman explains, there are four major aspects to consider when it comes to guitar design. The first is string physics – and this is the easiest part. In other words, you have a string and it vibrates. In the case of an electric guitar, it vibrates over a pickup and that generates a sound. So, the first thing to consider is angles and ensuring there is enough room for the string to vibrate as you work up the neck. All of this determines how the

2

’’

strings fit and the noise they produce.

The second consideration is playability. This is a word that’s used a lot in the guitar industry and Chapman sees it as an amalgamation of everything a musician thinks about when playing the guitar. Does the shape fit the body? Does it balance on a strap? How does the neck feel in their hand?

Can they make a chord?

As he puts it: “When we’re drawing that cool shape, does it translate into the physical world and can it be used comfortably?”

The third consideration is tone. With an acoustic guitar, that really means shape, braces and selecting the right wood. With an electric guitar, a lot of the tone comes from the electronics. Anyone engaged in the world of guitars will have heard the term ‘tonewood’, where specific wood varieties are credited with near-mythical tonal properties.

Chapman, however, bucks against this school of thought.

“I believe that 90% of the tone of an electric guitar comes from the pickups and electronics,” he says.

The fourth and final consideration is controls. Again, the guitar industry has been through conspicuous electronics-led phases in the 1980s and 1990s, from the headless guitars favoured by Reeve Gabriels and the synth-heavy prog rockers to the all-encompassing ‘hair metal’ abominations.

Chapman agrees that controls are key, but within the right context. “You’ll often find that a lot of those controls and switches have never been used by a musician on stage or in the studio, so you’re balancing giving musicians what they want but also giving them only good sounds.”

MIXING NOSTALGIA AND FRESHNESS According to Chapman, Guild’s design process is one that mixes together modern agile methods of development with Guild’s long-standing expertise and its iconic back catalogue.

“In the grand scheme of things, we work in an agile development manner. We do a lot of runs or sprints, where we come up with a concept or idea for a new product; then we think about the individual components,” he says.

“We don’t roll through a step-by-step process. We’re more shooting from the hip and experimenting to solve the things we’re not sure about.”

At the same time, the team takes its inspiration from the past, where appropriate. “Much of what we do when developing new products involves picking the vintage designs that work together and finding new inspiration.

Guild hasn’t had a lot of new models for the last 30 years, and we really wanted to release something that was new, that was fun, and that would bring people to the brand and announce that Guild is back in the game and making instruments. At the same time, we wanted it to look and feel like a Guild guitar,” he says.

“You can see that in the way we paired the headstock with the body. These are two shapes that already existed in Guild. The headstock shape came from an S-50 Jetstar from

2 Mike Fischer (left) and Josh ●

Chapman (right) are responsible for product development and management across the Cordoba Music Group family of companies

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PROFILE 3

If you ‘‘ were to pick

up other pieces and hardware, you’ll see a very homogenous feeling, because we’ve pulled shapes and curves from these vintage pieces and used them on our guitars today, so they blend in

’’

the 1960s. The Starfire single-cut body shape was also first seen in the 1960s. So we’re pulling from some very old designs – but we didn’t just match them up because they looked cool. We wanted to make a guitar that used the tremolo and vibrato tailpiece that was aimed at the rockabilly, to produce blues with a tone that someone could really go crazy with and have a lot of fun with.”

A lot of the company’s guitars are more classic, “aimed towards a jazz bar or something like that”, he says. “We wanted to give our younger customers something that was new and exciting, but also offers a different tonality and different style, while clearly still Guild. It’s not just about looks; that six-in-line headstock and the way that the strings come through the nut is going to be a little better when you’re using your vibrato and it won’t disrupt the tuning.”

On the way to a final form, the team ran up against some issues, many of which were solved with ageold prototyping methods. For instance, the Jet 90 features three P90 pickups (which convert the vibration of the string into an electrical signal), which Guild had not tried before. According to Chapman, the team grabbed a guitar in the office and added the same configuration to see how it would work. Other issues, as we’ll see, were only

worked out when the guitar moved closer to production.

When it comes to shape development, both for the large iconic parts as well as the hardware details, Chapman is keen that the design team again takes inspiration from the past. “I implore our design team to take curves from our history. For example, if I’m working on a pickguard, I’ll open up my CAD files of previous guitar shapes and hardware, and see if I can take curves and lines from those historic pieces and utilise them on that pickguard,” he says.

“That way, it’ll look new to you, but if you were to pick up other pieces and hardware,

3 Plug it into a Marshall and away ●

you go. The Triumph is entirely optional (Courtesy of @helloengine on Instagram)

4 Details include three P90 pickups, ●

as well as a six-way rotary switch and selection indicator pins

4 DEVELOP3D.COM OCTOBER 2020 25

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PROFILE vintage pins that you would see on a 1960s Guild electric guitar to mark each position.”

5

INTO PRODUCTION

‘‘

We have to make instruments that speak for themselves to a new generation, while not insulting those who have stuck with our brand for so long

’’

5 The six-in-line ●

headstock, taken from a 1960s model, provides better tuning stability when using the tremolo arm

While Cordoba has built a guitar factory in California, the facilities for US-based production of electric models are still a few years away. So, once a concept has been developed into a final product, the Guild team works with manufacturing partners in either Korea or Indonesia to get it ready for production.

The process begins with the manufacturing partner producing a series of samples, which are then examined in fine detail by Chapman and his team.

“One of the beauties of being in California is that we can go to a lot of the major guitar retailers and get their feedback on that sample,” he says.

Several sampling rounds might be carried out, not only to finetune the design, but also to ensure that the product can be put into production in a consistent manner.

At the same time, a lot of prototyping and testing is carried out in-house in the US, says Chapman. This includes making pickguards out of plastics and putting them on guitars. “The same is true of our hardware, such as bridges – anything that will directly interfere with how the instrument plays or sounds, we definitely prototype all of that in our US office,” he adds.

The sampling process can sometimes throw up dramatic design changes – as happened with the Starfire 1 Jet 90. “We wanted to make sure that it had some bite and attitude and could handle higher gain to get that rock distortion sound from a turned-up amplifier,” he says.

“One of the issues with a hollow-body guitar like the Jet 90, is that you’re more prone to feedback, so we added a block into the centre of the guitar. That’s not something you’ll see a very homogenous feeling, because we’ve pulled that’s new in guitar construction, but it’s new to this body style.” shapes and curves from these vintage pieces and used When the first round of guitar samples arrived, the them on our guitars today, so they blend in. That’s not team loved the product, he says, “but we also noticed that, to say we won’t develop something new, but we will pull because it was a clearly hollow body with f-holes and such, inspiration from vintage pieces as much as possible.” the additional block meant it was a lot heavier than your In terms of technology, Chapman and his team use a brain expects.” combination of Rhino3D, Solidworks and DraftSight. As So on the next round of samples, material was cut from he told us: “We primarily use Rhinoceros 3D for our design work. Rhino’s NURBS functionality is phenomenal for 3D that centre block, preserving the ability to play at high gain, but reducing the weight of the instrument. As Chapman work, but for initial instrument designs, a lot of our plans recalls: “It was one of those interesting moments where the are in 2D, much like instrument plans of yesteryear. We guitar itself was ready to go, but we went into a redesign also use Solidworks, mainly in our US factory, when we loop and another round of sampling.” are designating drawings for specific tools and tool-paths.

DraftSight has also been a great resource for us on the fly and eDrawings Pro has a mobile app which can view CAD IN CONCLUSION files on your smartphone.”

Chapman’s enthusiasm and pride when it comes to the One feature on the Starfire 1 Jet 90 of which Chapman Starfire 1 Jet 90 come across loud and clear - but what does is particularly proud is its rotary switch control. Electric he have planned for the future? The answer is to keep guitars often have three- or five-way switches, but the combining vintage strengths with fresh new thinking. rotary switch is something that’s typically only found on “Many of our customers have been with us for years. more esoteric models.

Also, because there haven’t been a lot of new models, and For Chapman, the combination of three pickups even fewer for less than $1,000 over the past 10 or 20 years, and a six-way switch means that his team can give a we realised that a lot of our customers are on the older side. musician as many good tones as possible, but without So, one of the things we are looking at now is how do we get overwhelming them. those new players, who walk into a store, pick up a guitar “Looking at the three pickups, we knew we wanted to give and start playing, to pick one of ours?” players a stripped-back choice for rock, but we also wanted That makes first impressions very important. “We to give the option of those jazz tones you’re used to in a want customers to pick our product, not because it’s a Guild guitar,” he says.

Guild, but because it’s a good-looking guitar. We can’t “There are a lot of switches that are standard in guitars, rely on our legacy and word of mouth; we also have to but they are quite limited for the Jet 90’s set-up. The final make instruments that speak for themselves to a new choice was a six-position rotary switch which gives the generation, while simultaneously not insulting those who consumer six different tonal choices. One of the really have stuck with our brand for so long.” cool things is if you zoom in on the Jet 90, you’ll see guildguitars.com

26 OCTOBER 2020 DEVELOP3D.COM

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JOB SEEKING

SO, YOU’RE

UNEMPLO 1 S » With the global pandemic turning lives upside down, even as it morphs into an economic recession, what should product designers do if they can’t find work?

Design recruitment insider Brad Harper has a few ideas that could help

o, you’ve read the headline and you’re probably thinking, ‘Who the hell is this guy, and how come he thinks he’s got all the answers?’

Well, my name is Brad Harper and I’ve been working in product design recruitment on a global scale for the last six years.

During that time, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some pretty awesome brands and design agencies, and have found new jobs for designers in the UK, US, China, Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand and parts of Europe. I’ve spoken at universities, held live design events, started an industrial design podcast that has been downloaded thousands of times and I’ve seen more design portfolios than you could shake a stick at.

The reality right now is that it’s tough out there. My sympathy for any jobseeker is off the scale. Designers may be trained for solving problems, but I’m not sure we ever signed up for problems of this scale.

But let’s think positively and look for solutions. Where might you go – and how do you get there?

GO SOLVE A PROBLEM

Before we kick on, any advice here needs to be viewed within the context of your own personal situation. Most of you have bills to pay. Maybe you have a mortgage. You don’t necessarily have redundancy pay to fall back on. A portfolio of riches, or the last five years of your career, might be tied up in confidentiality agreements. We all have our own unique challenges. But regardless of circumstance, the longer you are out of the game, the rustier you become.

My advice? The world is fraught with design problems – go solve one. What might your idea become? Where could it lead you? Working on a live project not only keeps you honing your craft but also gets those commercial juices flowing. A Kickstarter project is an option for good reason: you will learn marketing, branding, finance. Think beyond just applying for jobs and plugging away at the portfolio.

How proactive can you be right now?

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LOYED...

2 CLUB TOGETHER

Collaborate. Your colleagues and wider network might be in the same boat. That annoying one you remember from uni, or Jamie’s friend who can sketch a bit.

Whether you take on the Kickstarter concept, or think about setting up your own agency, or take part in these weekly rendering challenges on Instagram, just make sure you are collaborating with other people.

One of my predictions is that, over the next six to 12 months, many people will use their time to experiment and fail. You will see an influx of start-ups and small design consultancies, particularly when you factor in some of the heavy redundancies being made at big employers such as Dyson.

If the right job is not out there, sometimes you just need to create it.

Right now, that most likely means setting up for yourself.

How you scale that, win clients, and find your niche is for another article. But right now, you have to leave every option on the table.

If you can, make sure you have a partner in crime for the journey ahead.

3

PIVOT

Doing this gets far more difficult as you get older. So much content and energy right now is aimed at students, and probably rightly so. Let’s be clear: they will eventually find work.

They have time to retrain, pivot, and in some cases, shape the future direction of the market. Pivoting is far easier when you’re young, particularly if you are well-educated and have some strong design skills and a decent attitude. You will not be signing on.

As you get older, the market turning like this makes pivoting tough. But you can do it! There are a few options to consider and LinkedIn is your friend on this one. Start any consideration just by getting in touch with those who’ve already made the jump you are contemplating. They will be able to provide you with clearer directions than any course, video or article.

Popular options tend to be UI/UX with ‘digital design’ in place of the word ‘product’. I mean, you buy an iPhone for the software, right?

There is no denying that a good industrial designer can pivot into digital, but it does require training, a software refresh and training

You will not be walking into any new industry, particularly as you are up against those with direct experience for open positions.

Other alternatives can be design research, design strategy, product management, design education, service design, structural packaging/ branding and design visualisation. In other words, you have many possible paths to explore.

4

CREATE CONTENT

Okay, here’s the wildcard. Let’s look at value for a second here, or even perceived value. Having a kick-ass YouTube channel or Instagram page does work.

Marketing in industrial design is an activity only ever explored when things are quiet. We are a little bit behind the curve when it comes to breaking away from the cloak-and-dagger approach, in favour of something more open, transparent and ram-packed full of insight.

Start a podcast. Create tutorials. Get in front of the camera or behind the microphone. Design businesses should be doing this anyway.

Why? It creates relationships. Outsiders see you as an authority. You can add new strings to your bow, whether that be in graphic design, social media marketing, video editing. There’ll be new pieces of software to learn and the chance to get creative again.

You will be seen by employers as someone who can communicate, who can take on a variety of tasks, who is commercially aware and could potentially bring in a little bit of business as well. These are all go-to traits in desirable job candidates.

So, what should product designers do if they can’t find work? Do their job: find a kick-ass solution to a problem.

BIOGRAPHY Brad Harper is an industrial design recruiter.

As well as doing his day job, you’ll often find Brad speaking at universities, rambling about portfolios on LinkedIn, or talking about that time his podcast ‘Design Truth’ ended up 8th in the Belgian charts. You can catch the Design Truth podcast on Apple and Spotify. More info at designtruth.co.uk

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SEARCH YO

THANG » Thangs is an online search tool for 3D, powered by a geometric deep learning engine. Stephen Holmes speaks to founder Paul Powers about its underlying technology and how it could transform parts procurement

T

he promise of a ‘Google, but for 3D parts’ has often been made, but little has emerged to live up to the hype. Launched in August, Thangs claims to be different, with the team behind it adamant that its geometric deep learning engine will fill this gap in the market and, in the process, democratise the world of 3D data.

According to parent company Physna, Thangs is able to search for any physical object, including complex assemblies and parts within parts, using text input and 3D file uploads. The cute example we’re given begins with a text search for the name of a Pokemon character: Pikachu.

Thangs quickly gets to work on searching both its own database of over one million models and a plethora of free 3D file sites on the Internet.

Top of the results list is an STL file for Pikachu, found on Thingiverse. As well as several variants, the search also throws up a PokeBall from the same franchise.

“Why?” asks Physna founder and CEO Paul Powers. “It’s not called Pikachu. There’s no Pikachu in the name. There’s no mention of a Pikachu in the metadata.”

The answer, he explains, is that Thangs performs a search based on model geometry alone, using its own proprietary technology to codify the part. This helps it not only find 3D models quickly, but also identify them accurately and understand the relationships between models and similar components.

The same process applies when uploading a 3D model. Say you have the 3D file of a bolt, but you need to know the vendor’s part number or how much it costs. Thangs can search all the available online databases, including those from suppliers such as McMaster-Carr.

In addition to its powerful search capabilities, Powers promises that the Thangs platform is set to grow in its capabilities. Collaboration tools, for example, have already been added to the core technology.

SEARCHING HIGH AND LOW Long-term, Powers wants the wider public to use Thangs to explore the 3D world without needing to learn a CAD software package.

“We took an approach that was purely mathematical and that allowed us to take any kind of file, from any kind of format, and understand every possible relationship – all existing relationships – regardless of whether it’s a part within a part, or a similar part, or a modification of a part, it doesn’t matter,” he explains.

This method lends itself to many other applications. Powers cites use cases like identifying tumours at an earlier stage with 3D artificial intelligence (AI) versus 2D AI, and the automation of mobile phone tower inspection.

“We can’t build all those user interfaces and businesses,” he says, “but we can make Thangs the springboard, where you can use an API to create your own tools using the technology that we’ve developed.”

Powers tells the story of how it all began. By his own description, the “biggest nerd you can imagine”, he travelled from his native US to study law in Germany, where his interest in technology saw him focus on intellectual property (IP) law. While cases of plagiarism

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INTERVIEW or someone stealing a logo were simple to corroborate, the same didn’t apply to CAD models. There were no algorithms to perform this kind of search and existing online geometric search tools proved no use at all.

“I tried everything that was out there, and nothing worked,” he confirms. The main stumbling block, he explains, was that they couldn’t differentiate between the three-dimensional relationships of parts and assemblies.

With his co-founder, he built the technology for what now forms Physna’s core product offering, able to codify the geometry of nearly 30 different file types and search for them without the need for information on file hierarchy, metadata or BOMs. Thangs, meanwhile, is a free, online offshoot of this core technology.

Physna’s enterprise SaaS offering, with its raft of intuitive features, has been adopted by Fortune 500 companies and US government agencies, many without designers or engineers on their payrolls. It offers amazing benefits for procurement executives, but Powers is adamant that this technology can also help designers and engineers.

SMARTER DESIGN “There are a lot more software inventions than hardware inventions. The reason for that is because of the complexity of inventing something with hardware,” says Powers, explaining that unless it’s a very simple design, components need to be sourced.

“The old adage is that if it takes you two weeks to design something in CAD, it could take you two years to actually source [all the parts],” he says.

What it comes down to, he continues, is identifying, for example, “Who creates that very specific gear that you need, and how do you Google it?”

Powers uses the example of a new watch design uploaded into Physna. The software can show all the components that go inside that watch, and provide information on where the user can source them.

As mentioned, the power of Physna is what powers Thangs, too, with even the free tool offering some neat enterprise-level features. Once logged in, users can create a folder of private models and share it with a team. They can then see how their private models match against everything that’s public, but nobody else can find them. There’s no limit on users or models uploaded.

Another example is of a team of 20 working on building an engine, where the relational database that Thangs builds acts as automated revision control, just like how software designers can pull out, reuse and edit code from GitHub. “If you’re working on a group project – say, designing an engine, and you’re assigned to design a sections – you’re able to work independently of the rest of the team, but still know how it relates to the greater assembly, because the software has the intelligence to identify the geometry in that workflow and know how the parts relate to one another in an engine assembly,” says Powers.

Naturally, the abilities of Physna go beyond this, into the realm of making predictions for users, based on their habits and behaviours when it comes to cost, manufacturability, volume requirements, materials and so on.

Additional tools take things even further. Powers explains that the Component Finder tool, for example, allows the user to start by designing as little as 1% or even 0.5% of a completed assembly. Once uploaded, Physna will still automatically find parts to build out a complete assembly, all without the need for file hierarchy, file instruction or questioning the 3D CAD system. “Think of it like autofill text,” he laughs.

Physna can help teams speed up the process by not producing duplicates, which in turn, is better for the supply chain. Instead, it can find interchangeable parts, leading to consolidated ordering for things like bolts for different assemblies. That can help to avoid the shutdown of a production line due to a single missing component, a big attraction during the current pandemic, when supply chains are already very vulnerable to disruption.

Physna Founder and CEO, Paul Powers

FINDING PARTS NOBODY ELSE CAN Powers shows us an uncompleted 3D scan of an impeller that clearly went bad. The Scan Match feature in Physna uses the codification of the data to search for completed scans of the same part (including higher resolutions) and, if available, the CAD model for the part.

Because of the way the geometry is codified, you can find CAD with CAD, scans with scans, and CAD with scans.

“Any direction you want, which is great,” notes Powers.

“If you pair this with Thangs, you have the ability to scan something and run a search against the public database, to see if the CAD model for the part you’ve just scanned is already out there in the public world.”

Text search, measurements, CAD file and scan data upload can all be used to find whatever it is you are searching for.

Next up? 2D pictures. Powers says it’s coming in the not-too-distant future, claiming that Physna’s proprietary system for 2D-to-3D machine learning puts it way ahead of the likes of Google, Facebook and Adobe in achieving this impressive goal. thangs.com DEVELOP3D.COM OCTOBER 2020 33

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PROFILE

STAMPING OUT SCRAP » To enhance its stamping process selection and boost its first time through (FTT) rates, Ford Mexico is using insights gleaned from its implementation of Altair’s Knowledge Studio machine learning and predictive analytics software

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S

heet metal stamping is fundamental to the automotive manufacturing industry. A vast array of different tool, die and process combinations are employed to create an equally diverse array of components. Traditionally, identifying the optimum stamping process for a given part design has been a labour-intensive and time-consuming task, one that relies heavily on the stamping engineer’s knowledge and skill level.

To address this issue, Ford Mexico began documenting successful metal stamping production runs over a fiveyear period. Management’s goal was to capture in-house domain knowledge and best practices in order to explore ways to speed the selection of the best stamping process for future production runs. The aim was to deliver business benefits including increased plant efficiency and part quality, reduction of scrap material and more rapid training of new personnel.

2

Materials Used

7%

Materials Wasted

16%

Man Power Machines

TACKLING THE CHALLENGE In many production facilities, multiple sheet metal stamping processes are deployed to form nested and individual parts. These include progressive, transfer and tandem press lines. For any given part design, many factors are involved to determine the best or most efficient stamping process, such as the material type, thickness, part width and desired surface finish.

Success or failure in selecting the right process relies heavily on the experience and expertise of the individual manufacturing process engineer involved in making it.

However, growing design complexity, non-conventional material types and numerous process combinations can challenge even the most senior process engineer. That often results in a labour- and material-intensive, trial-anderror prove-out process.

Material utilisation is a particularly critical benchmark.

Most automotive plants expect around 60% material utilisation in their stamping mills. The remaining 40% goes to waste. Ford’s objective was to improve on these numbers, while simultaneously improving the initial selection of the right stamping process and increasing first time through (FTT) rates.

To move towards achieving these goals, Ford Mexico began documenting processes and quickly amassed a valuable asset: vast quantities of clean data associated with successful production runs.

Spanning a five-year period, process engineers recorded successful stamping processes for thousands of parts.

Captured in this historical data were valuable insights, but the question now was how could they use this information to help automate and guide the selection of the best stamping process for a given part design.

APPROACHING ALTAIR Ford has had a relationship with Altair for the last 50 years, but the team there first learned of Knowledge Studio, Altair’s machine learning and predictive analytics solution, via a technology briefing. That led them to approach Altair with a view to implementing the solution.

Leveraging the data Ford had collected for over 3,000 stamping processes already identified as being representative of future requirements, Ford’s stamping domain experts and Altair’s solution architects collaborated to develop an accurate, reliable machine learning model with Knowledge Studio.

Mark-Ups

11% 40%

26%

3 1 Ford’s entire ● The software offers 15 different machine learning product range, models, enabling users to explore, select and train the including the new model that best fits their data. Using subsets of its data, the Bronco, features team at Ford Mexico ran a series of tests to determine which a wide variety of stamped forms in a was most effective. With an accuracy rate of over 90%, the range of materials decision tree model produced the most consistent results.

2 Selecting the right ● In the process, a surprising – and valuable – discovery stamping process can be a trial-and-error was made. In terms of selecting the optimal stamping business and relies process, the most important factors are the overall heavily on the skills dimensions and thickness of the finished part. Alone, these and experience of individual engineers factors are not enough to make a final decision; however, 3 Wasted (or scrap) when combined with all the other data points, Knowledge ● material represents Studio’s machine learning algorithm provided Ford with roughly 26% of the results close to 100% accurate. total cost to produce

PREDICTIVE POWERS The machine learning-enabled predictive power of Knowledge Studio proved to be highly accurate and successful in largely automating stamping process selection at Ford Mexico.

By minimising manual trial-and-error process validations and rework, more time was freed up for stamping process engineers to address the most difficult and complex part designs, further enhancing production efficiency and business value.

Overall, projected throughput increased by a factor of three and increased FTT rates resulted in reduced rework time – all without increasing resources. In addition, the Knowledge Studio machine learning model was effective in capturing Ford’s in-house domain knowledge to support a faster learning-curve for training of new personnel.

a stamped part, so reducing scrap and increasing FTT rates directly benefit overall profitability

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THE BIG PICTURE

» With its PCoIP protocol, Teradici has always targeted the most demanding users of remote workstations. Now it’s aiming even higher, delivering ultra-high image quality at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second. Greg Corke caught up with Teradici’s Ian Main to find out more

W

ith 15 million endpoints using its PC-over-IP (PCoIP) display protocol, Teradici has built a strong footing in high-performance virtual desktops. The company places a big emphasis on highfidelity ‘lossless’ image quality that preserves every little detail when remotely accessing graphics-intensive applications like 3D CAD, visualisation and visual effects.

The PCoIP protocol is widespread. It is used by VMware for its desktop and app virtualisation software VMware Horizon (although, more recently, VMware has developed its own called Blast Extreme).

It helps Nutanix deploy workstations and virtual desktops in on-premise or hybrid cloud environments, and it can be found in the public cloud through Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Computing Services. “Our software product is available as a marketplace instance and along with reference designs, is in all three public clouds,” confirms Ian Main, Teradici’s technical marketing principal.

Teradici’s PCoIP technology is also being used extensively to deliver 1:1 connections to rack workstations from Dell, Fujitsu, Boston and many others. There are plenty more

doing similar for desktop workstations.

More recently, there has been a lot of interest in PCoIP from smaller managed service providers looking to provide remote solutions for their graphics-hungry customers through GPU-accelerated cloud workstations.

Main explains that service providers are becoming an increasingly popular choice for customers that want to outsource everything.

While public cloud means firms don’t need to manage physical workstations, they still need to have some experience of DevOps. There are several service providers that offer PCoIP-based solutions to the media and entertainment (M&E) sector, including BeBop technologies. Main explains that M&E has proved a key industry for Teradici over the years because of PCoIP’s lossless encoding, colour accuracy, security and, more recently, its ability to support multiple monitors at 4K. “We think about 80% of all remote workloads in the visual effects industry are using either our Remote Workstation cards or our Cloud Access Software,” he says.

To date, there hasn’t been as much interest in the Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC) and manufacturing spaces but, with Covid-19 and the ongoing shift to working from home, this could change. In the last few months, BOXX and Avatera have launched remote graphics

services designed specifically for CAD. BOXX is well known to readers of DEVELOP3D for its high-performance overclocked desktop workstations. Its newly formed Cloud Services Division is now making those exact same machines available to customers over a 1:1 remote connection via the cloud.

The big value proposition here is performance. Most cloud workstation services use dedicated rack workstations, which tend to feature virtualised CPUs with lots of cores and relatively low frequencies. BOXX workstations, on the other hand, are commonly overclocked to 5.0GHz+, so CAD users should see a significant performance benefit.

Cloud computing specialist Avatara recently launched its own range of GPUaccelerated virtual machines that use Teradici technology. CAD users get access to a dedicated 1:1 resource through a 1U rack mounted server with its own CPU, GPU and memory, to run applications including Catia, MicroStation and AutoCAD Civil 3D. This is one of several datacentre VDI user environments which come under Avatara’s CompleteCloud brand. “Our relationship with Teradici enables us to deliver a unique solution that incorporates the hardware, software and support into

THE POWER OF THE PEN Teradici has traditionally worked well with input devices, including the 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse and Wacom’s tablet-andpen displays, which are increasingly used in product design.

In the early days, Wacom devices were best supported through Teradici hardware at both ends,

but the company has now expanded the capabilities of its software, so users can get a better experience when using Wacom devices on high-latency networks.

Wacom devices are supported in one of two ways: either ‘bridged’ or ‘local termination’.

With ‘bridged’, all of the pen data is sent to

the Wacom driver on the remote workstation, which processes things like pressure, and then sends the response back to the local device. This works fine over LAN (<25ms) but as soon as latency increases, which is typically the case with cloud, the screen can start to lag behind.

‘Local termination’

improves responsiveness by adding a lightweight version of the Wacom driver, client side, which displays a local cursor.

This means the user can instantly see lines as they are drawn, with the detail then filled in a split-second later, once it’s been processed by the full Wacom driver on the

remote workstation.

‘Local termination’ was first supported in the firmware of the zero client, but has now been added to the Cloud Access Software.

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PROFILE a per-user, per-month pricing model accessible to businesses of all sizes,” says Rob McCormick, CEO of Avatara.

FROM SILICON TO SOFTWARE Teradici made its name using dedicated hardware for encoding and decoding.

This includes PCIe cards that sit inside a workstation or server and PCoIP zero clients for the endpoints. These hardwarebased solutions remain popular with many customers, but the company’s long-term strategy is to do the encoding/decoding in software.

From a product perspective, this started out with Teradici’s Workstation Access Software, which we reviewed in 2015 and was sold by Dell, BOXX and others, but this product has since been discontinued and everything now comes under the Cloud Access Software brand.

On the client side, Teradici has PCoIP software clients for pretty much every platform – Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS and Android.

Teradici’s first PCoIP software was singlethreaded, so it ran on one CPU core, and the original software encoder is still used inside VMware Horizon. But huge improvements have been made over the years and a newer version, PCoIP Ultra, which uses Intel AVX2 instructions, can take advantage of multiple CPU cores. According to Main, this has enabled Teradici to dramatically improve the user experience.

It has gone from being able to deliver 30 frames per second (FPS) at HD resolution to 60 FPS at 4K or 30 FPS at 4K with dual displays. “PCoIP Ultra is a single codec that takes you all the way from lossy to lossless, so we can adapt to the network at any quality level. You get a really fluid experience, no matter what your network bandwidth is,” says Main.

Main adds that firms that use Teradici technology on premise will be able to operate at a very high image quality, compared to the other remote computing protocols. “Our default quality is significantly higher and then we can go all the way up if the network can take it,” he says.

Teradici is not wholly reliant on the CPU though. Working closely with Nvidia, it can now offload the encoding to the GPU using Nvidia’s NVENC encoder. Teradici is also working on optimisations for AMD GPUs. “You can choose between using the AVX2 for that high quality, up to lossless encoding, which is what our protocol was renowned for; or, for bandwidth-efficiency use cases, or when you want to avoid using CPU encoding at all, you can switch to the NVENC encoding,” says Main.

When DEVELOP3D first tested PCoIP technology in 2014, everything was done through hardware and Teradici made a big noise about the benefits of using dedicated

silicon for encoding/decoding.

However, much has changed since then, as Main explains.

“Ten years ago, an encoder would have absolutely saturated the CPU, but I now have machines here with 24 cores. I can dedicate four or six cores to PCoIP encoding for very high performance use cases and the rest are for the [application] workloads. Now, there are a few occasions where you want all the cores for rendering, so then you can use NVENC.” Teradici has not forgotten about its remote workstation cards, which can now support 4K at 30 FPS, but Main admits that PCoIP hardware is really at the end of its lifecycle and the focus is now on software going forward.

“As HDR and 10-bit and BOXX uses PCoIP all these new resolutions and users to be either on-site or offto give remote formats come on board, those site in all these cases.” cloud access to its will all move forward in the overclocked desktop software regime,” he says.

CONCLUSION workstations This shift to software is also Teradici has carved out a niche happening on the client side. “Historically, for itself with its PCoIP remote graphics our zero client was very high-performance protocol, focusing on high-quality, lossless because you have a dedicated silicon decoder, image compression. While this has and our software client was almost like your traditionally appealed to those in media and secondary axis,” says Main. “But over the entertainment, it’s also extremely relevant to last year, and as our overall focus shifts to design, engineering and architecture. Supersoftware, we are needing to get that very high sharp linework and text is important for performance on Windows, Linux, and Mac – CAD, while high frame rates at 4K resolution tablet and mobile clients as well.” are a big benefit for real-time visualisation.

Indeed, Teradici has been a key technology partner for Nvidia Omniverse, a new MOVING TO THE CLOUD platform technology that brings together The availability of public cloud instances is architects and other stakeholders in a visually growing fast, but Main believes that hybrid rich, real-time collaborative environment. cloud will continue to be the favoured The challenge for Teradici is how to approach for some time. In addition to effectively communicate these benefits to firms wanting to make the most of existing its customers. In the public cloud, PCoIP on-premise hardware investments, there’s also plenty that ISVs could do to make their is generally offered as an option, with most software fully compatible and optimised for providers having default protocols, so firms would actively need to make the switch. For cloud. those using smaller service providers like Teradici has been working to make it Avatara and BOXX Cloud Services, education easier for firms to manage local and cloud workstations together through an integrated is less important as PCoIP is only one part of a complete managed solution. service called Cloud Access Manager, part While Teradici’s main focus is on cloud of Teradici Cloud Access Software. “[It] does the connection management and connection or on-premise virtual machines, it still gets good business from adding remote brokering for on-premise workstations capabilities to desktop workstations. Here, it and workstations on any three, or all, of the faces increased competition from HP, public clouds under a single management which is finally making some noise about environment,” explains Main. its RGS software (now rebranded ZCentral “We’ve been spending a lot of effort on Remote Boost), which comes free with that and, of course, features for brokers take a long time, so the adoption was quite HP Z workstations. Meanwhile, there’s also Mechdyne TGX, which recently partnered slow because we didn’t have key features like groups and pools and things,” he says. with Lenovo ThinkStations. Microsoft RDP is also prevalent, but this is at the other end “We always had that connectivity across of the scale in terms of end-user experience. public clouds, and it includes the security gateway component too, so that allows teradici.com DEVELOP3D.COM OCTOBER 2020 37

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REVIEWS

3

1

Swatchbook Mix Analogue material specification processes can’t keep pace with the speed at which today’s industrial design and product development specialists work. Al Dean looks at Swatchbook Mix, a system designed to take these processes fully digital

O

n a mission to revolutionise the exploration, visualisation and sharing of materials, Swatchbook was set up in Irvine, California back in 2017. It’s the brainchild of former executives from Luxion (KeyShot) and Foundry (Modo) and, while we talked to that team around the time of the company’s launch, a more recent chat has shown us just how far Swatchbook has come since then. So now seems like a good time to provide a solid update on its capabilities.

At its core, Swatchbook’s rapidly expanding product offering focuses on the management and visualisation of materials – for now, primarily in the areas of apparel, footwear and home goods.

But the platform is built to host any type of material and asset. Its services, meanwhile, aim to provide a way for designers to explore materials in a variety of ways, browsing either their own internal

» Product: Swatchbook Mix » Supplier: Swatchbook Price: $2,000 user/year swatchbook.us

1 At any point, ●

photorealistic renders can be output directly from Swatchbook, thanks to the new integration with Otoy’s cloud-based rendering service

libraries or the growing library of materials provided by Swatchbook’s partners. Those partners are typically vendors of fabrics, technical materials and associated items such as fasteners.

Whether they’re exploring their own materials or those from suppliers, Swatchbook’s library provides the user with an intuitive way to explore, group, collect and manage materials captured in a highly realistic way.

This is a process that’s traditionally analogue in nature, based on collecting physical samples (swatches), managing spec sheets and datasheets and using a number of basic digital tools. Swatchbook, by contrast, is looking to move that process into the digital realm, with significant advantages for everyone involved.

Consider, for example, the sharing of material swatches: a physical swatch would need to be selected and shipped, which has time and cost implications. Using Swatchbook, the swatch is scanned once

and then made available to whoever needs it. It can be visualised using photorealistic rendering, both within Swatchbook’s own services (which we’ll explore shortly) or downloaded for use in your own visualisation applications.

The supplier of the material, meanwhile, is connected to the designer/potential customer, and the designer benefits from having a managed set of data about that material, immediate access to the supplier and assets ready for use downstream.

But how does that material get captured?

This is an area where Swatchbook has made great strides since we last covered the company. It has established a servicing centre in China that can take material samples and create the assets needed quickly and very cost effectively.

Assuming you are a subscription customer, for the princely sum of $15, you can have a swatch scanned using a Vizoo scanner. Visualisation materials and textures are prepared for use in DEVELOP3D.COM OCTOBER 2020 39

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SOFTWARE REVIEW

HOW TO: EXPLORING SWATCHBOOK’S CAPTURE SERVICE CENTRE

A digital material goes way beyond what designers have been accustomed to working with for decades. According to Swatchbook, it can’t be fully represented by a spreadsheet, a dataset, an entry in a PDM or PLM system, a shader or a photo.

Instead, the Swatchbook team believes that the definition of a digital material should adhere to a new standard – one it calls ‘digital twin’. It’s a term borrowed, of course, from the whole concept of Industry 4.0. This digital twin, Swatchbook argues, should provide a more exhaustive list of material characteristics. These include: Visual characteristics: How the material looks, in both 2D and 3D, and in true scale.

Physical characteristics: How a material behaves, when it moves, for example, or is draped.

Metadata: Supplier information, including pricing, composition, availability, minimum order quantity, as well as sustainability scores.

Custom data: Any additional data a user might want to store, of any type and in any format.

With this in mind, a true, digital material, fit for use in 2020, is not a ‘file’ in the traditional sense. It is instead a digital asset, a source of truth that contains four layers of information, which can then be compiled and utilised by any 2D or 3D application. It’s a material with solid links to a supplier, which can sourced just like any physical material.

In order for the physical material to turn into a digital twin, the digitisation process has to be performed correctly. And, given the hardware and software options currently available to do this, the process is typically neither cheap nor easy.

It’s therefore of the utmost importance, Swatchbook argues, that services aimed at turning a material into a digital material as defined here are provided by experts equipped with the appropriate hardware, software and knowledge to assist suppliers in the digitisation process.

Leaving the task up to the supplier at this point in tech history could easily result in frustration and failure for both suppliers and brands.

2 rendering systems and assets are created for Swatchbook’s library, such as demo videos that showcase, for example, how the material moves. We’ll walk you through that process in more depth shortly, but it’s worth noting that using China as a location for this service centre means prices are kept low and the centre is within easy reach of many of the major material suppliers and manufacturing centres.

Alongside material data generation, Swatchbook has been doing some interesting work on how it presents the information provided to it by suppliers and clients. The system focuses on presenting materials as they would appear in the real world – not giving an idealised view, but a realistic one.

Even on mobile devices, materials are shown at 1:1 scale. The system works out your screen size and uses that as the base scaling value, a capability the Swatchbook team has patented. Viewing tools have been expanded, so that alongside the roll view, you get a number of draping visualisation methods and the ability to show views of how the material moves.

Finally, the Swatchbook team has also expanded the range of visualisation systems supported. The goal here is that if you have a material in your library, you

should be able to very quickly use that material in your visualisation processes.

In terms of formats supported, this starts at a base level with texture maps; also encompasses standardised formats such as AXF; and expands to include support for a growing range of applications. These include KeyShot, Modo and Octane, as well as Adobe Substance, Unity, Unreal, Vray and Vred, and moves on to more specialised systems commonly used in the soft goods design workflow, such as Clo3D/ Marvellous Designer and Vstitcher.

CMF EXPLORATION WITH MIX All of this work has culminated with the release of what will take up the greater part of this review: Swatchbook Mix. I’m going to step through how this is used and, along the way, that should bring out a true sense of its purpose.

Let’s start with a little thought exercise and consider this scenario: you have a digital model of the product you’re working on, but you want to experiment with different colours, different material choices and different styling options.

In many cases, you have a number of materials that your team has decided on for that season, for that geography or for some other reason. Within Swatchbook,

WORKFLOW: FROM DIGITAL 3D MODEL AND MATERIAL DATA TO...

1 Creating a ‘mix’ begins with selecting ● an asset. Swatchbook does the preparation work by converting the file to USDz, modifies the UV maps and calculates all surface areas of the individual parts.

2 It’s then time to select the materials that ● are going to be used for the mix. Materials in Swatchbook are gathered in collections.

You simply download the collection you want to use and select.

3 Rules allow you to group parts of the ● object, assign certain collections to part groups etc. The user defines the extent to which the machine takes over, versus the ‘happy accidents’ they want to create.

4 Hitting the mix button lets the machine ● take over. Based on the user’s material selection and rules, Mix throws up the first 16 combinations. Hitting the re-mix button will come up with the next 16.

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This is by no means an entirely new idea.

In the engineering world, this type of work is typically conducted using simulation technology for structural optimisation, based on different materials and physical loading conditions (for example, in Fusion 360). Here, we see much the same principle at work, but instead applied to colour, materials and finish.

Just as this article went to press, Swatchbook also announced it is adding a cloud-rendering service through Otoy’s RNDR service, so you can render your variants or entire ‘mixes’ directly from your iPad Pro. It pushes a variant into the RNDR cloud, and returns 10 views plus a turntable (24 frames) that will be stored inside of Swatchbook along with the variant.

2 Swatchbook Mix ● allows you to explore material and finish combinations on a scale that humans would find challenging to manage manually 3 Swatchbook ● links advanced visualisation technology with materials and supplier sampling and data management in a unique platform

IN CONCLUSION

3 these would be organised and grouped under a ‘collection’.

In a traditional workflow, you’d be working with physical prototypes and digital renders, along with physical samples and swatches, to try and extrapolate combinations. That’s a lengthy process and one that comes with a number of limitations – physically, financially, mentally and organisationally.

Instead, imagine adding in a few rules about how and where those materials should be applied to your digital model, then having the system start to churn out possible combinations. This happens not manually, but automatically, according to your predefined rules, and providing you with a huge number of options. All possible variants are presented on screen in a grid, with thumbnails of the size you want.

These variants can be quickly dismissed with a swipe (left for no, right for a design direction you like) and more can be generated. If you want to dig deeper, you can engage with a variant, dive in, rotate a realistic model of how the product looks, select or reject it, tweak it.

If you want to see how it looks in the real world, you can flip it into augmented reality (AR mode) and position it in front of you. Alongside this, because your

material definitions are based on realworld supplier metadata, you can access additional information, such as rough cost, geographic data, sustainability impacts and more.

It’s worth noting here that sustainability data is based on the composition of the material and Swatchbook uses publicly available data from the Sustainable Apparel Coalition to calculate its HIGG-Index rating.

Suppliers and brands can provide their own sustainability data if they have it and add this to the material in place of the data that Swatchbook provides by default.

In this way, in the space of a few short minutes, your team can uncover new combinations of materials that it might not have considered, explore how a product or product range might look using that material, generate a set of actionable data for further exploration with a BOM, and the assets are all ready to be pushed into visualisation processes that rely on other systems. Now imagine all of that working on an iPad Pro. The goal here isn’t to replace the highly specialised skills that industrial and product designers have to offer. The goal is to augment those skills with a set of tools that can rapidly generate design concepts using a set of inputs.

Swatchbook is a unique offering and the way that the team behind it has approached its development shows a deep understanding of the needs of the audience it is targeting – far deeper, in fact, than many other organisations could muster.

The analogue nature of traditional material specifications processes – supported by physical samples and cobbled-together spreadsheets – no longer suits the speed at which today’s industrial and product development specialists work.

They need something more organised, more shareable and more centralised.

Going fully digital makes huge sense, especially when you consider the rapid move towards more distributed ways of working and the vast geographic spread of modern supply chains.

In summary, the work that the Swatchbook team has done to flesh out its service offering, in terms of material capture, scanning and preparation at a reasonable cost, and to launch the Mix tool for exploration, rapid experimentation and conceptualisation, is first class.

While Swatchbook is clearly aimed at the retail apparel and footwear industry, the tools it has built are applicable to a far wider product development audience.

If CMF specification and management forms part of your team’s work, there are some unique and impressive tools here that are definitely worth exploring. swatchbook.us

... CMF EXPLORATION & VARIANT ITERATIONS WITH SWATCHBOOK MIX

5 By simply clicking on a view, the variant ●

will open in a full-screen, interactive 3D view. From this view, you can go back and forth to the next variant in the mix. As an added bonus, you can also do this in AR.

6 Selecting the designs you like or don’t ●

like is done by simply swiping right or left.

Each of these swipes is recorded and helps build a personal profile. The more you use it, the more accurate the profile will be.

7 Mix is not a designer replacement. It ●

helps you to explore many combinations of materials quickly, and gets you maybe 80% to your final design. Any of the variants can be edited to come up with the final design.

8 At any point, variants can be sent for final ●

rendering directly from within the Mix app.

Utilising Otoy’s distributed rendering cloud RNDR service, Mix will render out 10 views plus a turntable of the variant.

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SOFTWARE REVIEW

1

Kubotek K-Compare Suite When it comes to data translation, many systems mark their own homework.

But what if you need to be able to compare data from two sources, identify any differences and document changes? Al Dean looks at what Kubotek has to offer

T

he process of translating 3D CAD data is one that, on the surface, appears to have become less fraught in recent years. As vendors have better embedded data translation capabilities into their systems, and component providers have built up a set of robust and intelligent tools, you’d be forgiven for thinking that, in most cases, data translation is a done deal.

But when you start to consider real-world use cases, you’ll quickly discover that it’s still a problematic process. Yes it’s true that everyday translations probably work better than they did traditionally. But in edge cases, the movement of data between incompatible systems, particularly complex and large-scale ones, is always going to throw up issues.

Additionally, there’s also a need in some industries (say, aerospace or automotive) for data translation to be validated once complete. In other words, companies in these industries don’t just rely on the automatically generated translation log with which we’re all familiar. The translation process needs to be properly verified and validated.

» Product: K-Revision & K-Validate » Supplier: Kubotek Price: On application kubotek3D.com

On top of all of this, there’s also the issue of change management. As the 3D model becomes the lingua franca of production, with 2D drawings providing associated documentation and GD&T or providing data that is embedded in the 3D model using a model-based definition (MBD) approach, we need to ensure that changes between different versions of the same part (note: part, not model) are first identified and then documented.

It’s into this environment that Kubotek has stepped with two tools: K-Compare Revision and K-Compare Validate. Here, we’re going to look at both individually, starting with the more broadly applicable K-Compare Revision.

INVESTIGATING DESIGN CHANGE

1 K-Compare Revision ●

serves a very specific purpose: hunting down and identifying changes between two sets of CAD data

K-Compare Revision is simple to use. You load up the two datasets you want to compare. The system can read data from standards-based formats such as IGES, STEP, JT et al. It can also read data from Solidworks, Solid Edge, Inventor, Catia, NC, Creo, Catia (V4 to V6), as well as kernel-level formats such as Parasolid and ACIS. If you have two parts in different orientations (perhaps one has been output

for manufacturing readiness, while another is in assembly space), then there are tools to align them as well.

The system then carries out its analysis of both and presents the findings on screen.

The two datasets are presented in side-byside, synchronised model windows, with a more textural dialogue to the right. This will list out the content of those two parts, face by face, volume by volume, annotation by annotation and group them in a sensible manner. It also identifies parts that have moved (but retain the same face reference) and any areas that are missing.

This description perhaps underplays the complexity of what the system is actually doing behind the scenes. Rather than relying on geometry kernels from other vendors and different translation providers, Kubotek has used its experience in geometry wrangling and data translation to build its own geometry engine. This is designed to read data from almost any source and gives the company a huge advantage, as well as a position of independence that is really key.

Other mainstream engineering design tools may now have part-comparison tools of their own, but these effectively carry out Boolean operations to find areas that DEVELOP3D.COM OCTOBER 2020 43

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SOFTWARE REVIEW



Kubotek’s systems have been developed to serve a specific purpose and they carry it out without fuss or overcomplexity

 are different, moved or missing. Kubotek’s approach to analysis is much more in-depth.

When your two parts are loaded, you can then use a combination of the interactive dual viewport display, the textural browser and dynamic highlighting on the geometry to explore how the two parts differ. The system helps this process along by carrying out both a categorisation of the faces (face, fillet, hole, chamfer) and grouping them into folders marked ‘Revised’ (which is a size or positional change), ‘Removed’ and ‘Added’.

As you explore these changes, it’ll very quickly become obvious that a number of those faces belong to a single feature that has been modified, added or removed.

The system allows you to group these faces together into a single feature with a more sensible name in the exploration window. Alongside all of the geometryrelated tools, K-Compare Revision also has the ability to do the same work, but with PMI (product manufacturing information), model-based definition (MBD) data – as you may have guessed from previous references to annotations.

K-Compare Revision treats PMI data as separate from the geometry and puts these entity types in their own branch in the tree. It performs a semantic entityto-entity compare in the same manner as it does with geometry, and then lists and displays differences via the same interface methods. If the system has any trouble reading these differences, they will be highlighted and listed in a ‘Review’ folder for manual investigation. At present, the system supports PMI data from Catia (V4 and V5), PTC Creo, Siemens NX and Solidworks.

It’s also worth considering the documentation process, which will require an image to show the change. To make this more efficient, it’s a good idea to get your models into a useful position/orientation and hit the ‘snapshot’ icon next to the face or feature group. This will record the model orientation at that moment. At the same time, you can also add explanatory notes to each change found in a very similar manner.

As you’ve probably guessed, the final step in the process is to create some documentation based on your findings.

K-Compare Revision includes a pretty slick set of report generation tools. It’ll take the snapshots you’ve already defined, along with any notes and use these to build a fully configurable report that can be stored and shared when needed. Interestingly, the reports aren’t static. Instead, they include dynamic, interactive 3D images. At any

PART NO.

1234-5678

CHANGE NO.

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REASON AND DESCRIPTION FOR CHANGE: Slots enlarged for additonal clearance

WAS: Console-Tower-RevC.stp

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point, you can edit these, even add labels and other mark-up notes. These reports can then be stored in the native SVG format or exported to formats such as PDF as needed.

VALIDATING DATA TRANSLATION While K-Compare Revision handles the process of comparing two data files to find changes as a result of design change, K-Compare Validate is intended to provide an environment for comparing the results of data translation.

Why would you need to do this? The fact is that, as you move data from one format to another, errors can creep in. While in many industries, this issue is rarely addressed, others are hotter on the subject. Aerospace is a perfect example and it’s quite often a legacy of the adoption of earlier 3D design and engineering systems, where translation issues were much more prevalent. If you want to see how concerned some OEMs are about this issue, just take a look at Boeing’s D6-51991 Rev N standard.

So, what does Kubotek’s system do?

The workflow is similar to that previously discussed. The primary difference is that, instead of looking for differences in two different sets of geometry, we’re looking to ensure that two sets of geometry that document the same part are exactly the same. You load the originating part in its native format and then the translated part – whether that’s to a standard, neutral or native format.

The system then carries out the same analysis, looking for any discrepancies between the two. With the Revision variant, the next step is to explore these differences; with Validate, by contrast, you’re looking to document whether the translation process was 100% accurate. If not, you’re going to need to document where discrepancies lie.

Also, because of the go/no-go nature of validation testing, K-Compare Validate does not provide the basic feature recognition seen in K-Compare Revision. It only works with face-to-face comparison.

As a result, the reporting process is more rigid and protected. The system can output reports, based on your own customised templates, but these are certified Quality Documents or Test files.

These will contain all of the text you need, as well as any images you’ve added into the port as well. Both the text and PDF versions of these documents are then locked and made read-only, so they can’t be tampered with, which will help with compliance and traceability issues in more sensitive environments.

2 Sample report from ● K-Validate, perfect for those compliance and traceability audits

IN CONCLUSION Both of Kubotek’s systems covered here are first class. They’ve been developed to serve a specific purpose – and they carry it out without fuss or overcomplexity.

While the need for compliance and validation of data translation is always going to be a more niche requirement, driven by industry-specific and supply chain requirements, there are huge benefits to be had by a wide audience from the use of an independent, third-party set of tools for data comparison and design change evaluation.

Kubotek’s history and expertise in CAD development has clearly helped it develop a set of tools that excel in performing this work. They also operate outside of the closed environment of CAD system verification and reporting. If you have a need for this kind of capability, I’ve no hesitation in recommending you take a look at these tools. kubotek3D.com

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SOFTWARE REVIEW

1

SkyReal Suite As industrial interest in virtual reality rises, Al Dean takes a look at a software product born at Airbus and designed to help engineering and manufacturing companies dive into VR as a way to interact with complex 3D CAD datasets

S

kyReal Suite was born out of an internal development project at Airbus to build up a set of virtual reality (VR) tools for design and production planning that could take advantage of the company’s high-end cave and powerwall environments, as well more affordable head-mounted displays (HMDs). These provide the means to view, manipulate and interact with large, complex 3D CAD datasets.

Today, the company exists as a separate entity, SKYDEA, dedicated to developing the engineering-focused VR software, which I recently got the chance to see in action.

While the underlying graphics technology is Epic’s Unreal Engine, the SkyReal Suite is built not only to provide a set of tools that make the process of working with CAD data in VR easier, but also to add in specialist functionality for a variety of engineering and manufacturing workflows.

The Suite comprises two main elements.

First, there’s XR Centre, which contains SkyPrep, which handles pre-processing of CAD geometry to ensure it’s suitable for efficient VR workflows, scene set-up and model adaptation and enhancement. You

» Product: SkyReal Suite » Supplier: SkyReal Price: On application sky-real.com

can set up more forms of interaction and handle data storage and sharing in XR Centre, too.

Second, there’s SkyVR, where you view and interact with the data you’ve created, via a wide range of VR headsets, caves, powerwalls and standard 2D displays. So, shall we take a look at what SkyPrep and SkyVR can do?

SKYPREP: PRE-PROCESSING FOR VR

1 While the focus ●

is on engineering data collaboration, SkyReal can also take advantage of Unreal’s photoreal capabilities

Anybody who’s engaged in a meaningful way with the world of VR, particularly when using general-purpose tools such as Unreal or Unity, knows that getting hardcore, super-precise engineering CAD data into a state that’s useful and efficient in a VR engine can be a proper pain in the arse, not to put too fine a point on it. Data from CAD isn’t suited to VR and needs to be tessellated as a starting point.

The issue here is that the tessellation process takes something that’s already complex and heavy-weight and, in many cases, makes it more so. So a process of decimation, of filtering out inconsequential detail and small parts (particularly in large assemblies), in order to make it more

efficient, is fundamental. Then you move on to the process of setting up materials (assuming they haven’t ported across from the CAD system or via the export format), as well as lights, scenery, animation and interaction items.

SkyPrep assists you with this work. Its dashboard manager will provide tools to import geometry from a variety of sources, filter it and convert it into SkyReal assets.

The system, due to its background in the complex world of Airbus, offers a pretty impressive set of import options. IGES, STEP and STL are all there, along with Parasolid and Acis. Alongside these, there is also a good level of native data support, from Catia (both as 3Dxml and CATproduct), Delmia, Creo, Inventor, Rhino, Solidworks, NX/ Solid Edge (using JT data), as well as some simulation results formats.

The import process provides you with a number of options to simplify your geometry and these need to be understood to get the best visual quality while maintaining performance.

Aspects like levels of detail are also key to understand. Each data entity within a scene can hold multiple levels of detail, from coarse to high quality, and the use

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2 of those is dependent on the viewers’ distance from them. Getting this right is key, particularly when you’re dealing with large-scale, heavy scenes. The system also handles aspects like generation of a physical envelope (critical if you want to use the system’s physics engine for collision detection, which we’ll discuss later), as well as handling of duplicates (SkyReal is capable of using a single instance of a part and simple replicating it where needed in a scene).

Once you’ve set your parameters and options, you then need to define your output. The main option is, obviously, to generate a set of data that can be read into the SkyReal application set.

It’s also possible to export native Unreal engine project files without any of the added SkyReal functionality.

combination of tools in SkyReal, you’re able to move about the scene, inspect geometry and get a sense of position and scale – all the core benefits of VR. A number of tools enhance the process, including inspection tools for sectioning, visibility controls and, of course, the ability to pick up and rotate parts or subassemblies.

What’s interesting is that this can also be performed with full collision detection enabled. It’s also possible to start to define more complex interaction methods



takes a little more effort.

SkyReal is taking this same approach to build out a number of tools to enable specific workflows and processes. One example is the classic use case for VR in training and evaluation, using intelligence models combined with realistic VR. Using this, you could get a team ready for an assembly line before that line is even built, for example. Another use case might be getting an on-site maintenance team ready for a job, familiarising them with potential challenges, long before they ever travel to that site in person.

There’s also the Manikin tool, used for placing digital humans into your 3D scene to evaluate configurations of assembly processes.

Using the HMD controllers, you can become the digital manikin yourself, seeing what they see and manipulating their hands.

There are even advanced controls to link the digital manikin on screen to a fully tracked set of markers (such as Vive Trackers) on a real human in a 3D space.

It would be entirely feasible to have an assembly technician work through a virtual assembly sequence, record their movements and see that applied to the digital manikin. With the use of collision detection, that digital manikin would also stop at points of collision, allowing reach and accessibility to be very quickly gauged. And of course, when finished, you have a virtual recording of how tasks are performed and where problems might lie.

2 One of SkyReal’s ●

main focal points is providing a realistic environment in which to evaluate and experiment with 3D data, by taking advantage of modern gaming engines

The team’s roadmap is also looking interesting, with highlights including the ability to import simulation results and CAD geometry together

INTO THE VIRTUAL WORLD The next part of the workflow is to use SkyReal to view, interact and collaborate with the data you have just created.

What’s interesting is that SkyReal has built this system to be collaborative from the very beginning. Here, the underlying Unreal technology on which it is built pays dividends, making it a multi-user environment from the ground up. SkyReal takes this technology and extends it, making it much more usable for the engineering and design user.

In the most basic mode of operation, you have a set of product geometry and a scene into which you’ve placed it. Using a

 and triggered events. Push a button, for example and an elevator will rise or descend; walk into a specific area and the lighting changes.

The implications of this are two-fold.

First, you can keep things simple and static, enabling quick and efficient design review. But second if you want to start adding in more complex interaction, you can. To help with this, SkyReal provides a large library of pre-baked interaction tools that you can quickly apply to your scene. The same is true of your visual representation of your geometry and your scene. The display can be pretty standard fare for engineering VR, but if you want to get more complex, add more lighting, more realistic materials, it’s all possible – it just

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SOFTWARE REVIEW

3 This could then be replayed, with third parties watching the same session to find room for improvement – either via a standard monitor or by walking around a replay in 3D. The SkyReal team has also showcased an interesting set of tools to overcome the unidirectional nature of VR. More often than not, a workflow is linear: you take your CAD geometry, convert it, put it into the VR world, collaborate around it and you’re done.

What the SkyReal team has done is built two sets of tools that allow you to conduct design review as normal, make changes and then pass that data back into the associated CAD/PLM system.

Annotation methods, meanwhile, enable you to position mark-ups and notes on your model, which are then made available for further review in the CAD/PLM system.

Extending this idea further, consider retrofitting an older-model aircraft or marine vessel: you would have an existing set of data and a new set of cables, harnessing and/or pipework you’d want to route through that product to update its functionality.

SkyReal has built a Pipework design tool that supports the visual positioning of these pipes (and soon, wiring looms) directly in a full-scale, virtual mock-up, while respecting the minimum bend radius, which can then be passed back through to the authoring design and engineering system for full workup.

The benefits of doing that in a VR environment are subtle, but powerful. As

well as being able to see precisely where fit and routing works (or doesn’t work), it would be possible to iron out accessibility and reach issues at a very early stage of the design process, saving a ton of time downstream and perhaps rework later in the design cycle.

COLLABORATION WITH XR CENTER All of these tools are, for the most part, available in the SkyReal product and are intended to be used predominantly by a single user, perhaps with others observing via a connected display.

But what if you want to bring together a more extensive collaboration session? In today’s world, connecting parties might be spread right across the globe, rather than based in centralised office locations.

This is where SkyReal’s third application set, XR Center, comes into play. This is a web-based hub through which collaboration sessions are driven. Data is centralised, managed and distributed from here. XR Center enables organisations with more complex needs to conduct their VR sessions, not only handling data access (it manages user access), but also distribution of data and collation and reporting of design review sessions.

IN CONCLUSION What SkyReal has built is impressive, considering that the team has only been going at it for a few years now. It’s likely to resonate with companies in the design, engineering and manufacturing industries,

where interest in taking advantage of the benefits of VR adoption is on the rise.

After all, HMDs are more powerful than ever and costs have never been lower. And they’re backed up by a set of baseline VR engines, such as Unreal and Unity, which gives developers access to well-funded and quickly advancing platform options.

It will be interesting to see which vendors take advantage of this set of technologies and provide the real-world functionality that design and engineering teams need. Will it be the older guard of VR developers, accustomed to handling huge implementation projects on a consultancy basis – or will it be newer, more nimble start-ups, which outmanoeuvre the dinosaurs by providing freshly thought-out and cleanly delivered tools?

SkyReal falls 100% into the latter camp.

It has taken underlying technologies and, in collaboration with customers in some pretty demanding industries, is building out a set of tools that not only provide review and collaboration, but also extend into other areas such as factory and production planning, as well as training and simulation, all with a clean, modern approach.

The team’s roadmap is also looking interesting, with highlights including the ability to import simulation results and CAD geometry together into your VR session, to overlay animated simulation data on the CAD geometry, as well as first explorations into mixed reality device support. In short, SkyReal’s work is first class and the company is definitely one to keep an eye on.

3 Manikin capabilities ●

bring new life to collaboration, as well as production planning, training and more. These can be directly linked to VR trackers on real people

sky-real.com

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THE LAST WORD

When design and engineering tools are made available for free, the deal usually comes with some serious caveats.

Al Dean takes a look at why we’re seeing a lot of ‘freemium’ offerings retracted or reconfigured

T

he Japanese have a saying: “Tada yori takai mono wa nai.” This translates roughly as, “There’s nothing more expensive than something free.” In the world of software, this has never been more true.

Over the years, I’ve seen many vendors offer up their products at the steepest of discounts. I’m thinking of the Solid Edge Origin offering of the mid-1990s; of both Alibre and IronCAD trying our ‘freemium’ options; and of more recent offerings from Autodesk Fusion 360 and Onshape.

For the most part, this has always been a poorly concealed way to attract customers who are likely to pay up in future.

Some vendors don’t even both hiding the fact. Siemens, for example, has you pump your personal data directly into its Salesforce CRM system when you sign up for the Solid Edge Portal. Others are a little cannier about it.

What’s typically happening behind the scenes is this: someone in marketing digs out a textbook on ‘how to pull the punters in’ and soon stumbles across the ‘give stuff away for free’ chapter. Six months later, they’ve got a decent chunk of marketing cash available for pushing this new free offering to all and sundry.

What happens then is that anyone with even a cursory interest in the problems a tool is designed to solve signs up and downloads their copy. But some never even install it.

Others use it only when absolutely necessary. Others embrace it enthusiastically – but only for hobbyist use in their spare time.

The vendor’s hope, of course, is that one day, these free users might decide to use the tool professionally and cough up a fee

for the pleasure. Or, they might take a job where they can bring their influence to bear on an enterprise-level purchase of that tool.

The maker movement was supposed to change this. The idea that there was now a wealth of tech-savvy makers out there, wanting professional-level tools for the princely sum of sweet FA attracted many of the CAD vendors.

Autodesk went nuts for makers and offered up its Fusion 360 toolset to anyone who wanted to use it for personal projects; Onshape launched with a pretty compelling free offering.

As of this month, neither of those offerings look quite the same as they did. Onshape restricted its free plan to purely public projects a good year or so back; and Fusion 360’s free offering has been gutted, so no more file export and only 10 personal “active” documents for free.



It seems that there really isn’t anything more expensive as free, but this time it’s the vendors that are having to stump up.

And they do not like it



So what happened? The answer is that previously, ‘free’ meant the cost of a vendor providing a download or shipping a CD. But in today’s brave new cloud-enabled world, the nature of these tools means that the provision of software is just the start.

In other words, once you’re using this software as a cloud-based service, there’s a cost attached, which either you or the vendor has to bear.

Even if you’re using Onshape for free, PTC has to provision data storage and bandwidth. And it’s no surprise that Autodesk has killed off free access to any cloud-enabled parts of Fusion – so no generative design or simulation and no cloud renders. As soon as you hit the render button, that’s costing Autodesk money.

It seems that there really isn’t anything more expensive as free, but this time it’s the vendors that are having to stump up.

And they do not like it.

Generative design in Fusion 360. Any solve that’s performed on a free plan is simply costing Autodesk money

GET IN TOUCH: Email on al@x3dmedia.com or on Twitter @ alistardean — He’ll be glad to get back to talking about 3D printing next month. Winter is coming and he needs the machines to warm up the workshop.

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