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ABOUT
These are exciting times for electric vehicles, and you could argue that this is particularly true for EVs of the two-wheeled variety. With low-cost electric motorcycles taking off across China and India, it was with great interest that I got to speak with a British challenger, Maeving.
Adding high quality and stunning looks to the proven benefits of urban EV travel, the team is building a product that looks firmly to the future while also reinventing some wonderful design elements from the past.
Talking of reinvention, in this issue, we learn more about the OpenUSD format for visualisation. Experts from studios Zerolight and Collective explain how having a means of creating platform-agnostic digital assets has transformed how they work, and how the industry should quickly adapt to make the most of it.
We also get hands-on with a couple of excellent products. One of these, from 3Dconnexion, demonstrates that its SpaceMouse design remains a 3D CAD designer’s best friend. The other is a new Pen Display product from Xencelabs, which offers a wonderful level of versatility, both as an input device or simply as an extra screen. Both products are designed for users on the move, highlighting an industry shift away from designers and engineers being chained to a workstation, a topic I touch on in my Last Word column on page 50. With the unstoppable rise of cloud-enabled everything, will our industry’s employers loosen up on what they consider a suitable space for working, just as we’ve seen in other industries?
Finally, I must mention the rescheduling of DEVELOP3D LIVE, which has been postponed until 29 March 2025. The location remains the same – the excellent Warwick Arts Centre – but due to a medical issue within our team, which is likely to impact our event planning for the rest of the year, we decided that organising the best possible day for everyone necessitated a few months’ delay.
Of course, you and your team are still all invited! Hopefully, you’re scribbling the new data in your calendar and I’ll look forward to seeing you there.
DEVELOP3D is published by X3DMedia 19 Leyden Street London E1 7LE, UK
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Stephen Holmes Editor, DEVELOP3D Magazine, @swearstoomuch
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NEWS
Siemens makes NX 2024 announcements, nTop expands its partner ecosytem, Nano Dimension acquires Desktop Metal, and more
FEATURES
Comment: ZeroLight’s Jason Collins on OpenUSD
Comment: Chris Whyte of Kodu on smart hiring tactics
Visual Design Guide: Radia Windrunner aircraft
COVER STORY Maeving’s mix of smarts and style
D3D 30: the hottest new tech for product development
Fight to repair: Jude Pullen investigates fixability issues
Q&A on Autodesk Manufacturing Sustainability Insights
Quick fix: Audi Sports on 3D printing jigs and fixtures
Creative vision: OpenUSD-enabled campaigns at Collective
REVIEWS
Xencelabs Pen Display 16
3Dconnexion SpaceMouse Wireless Bluetooth Edition
THE LAST WORD
If we’re serious about increasing diversity in product design and engineering, writes Stephen Homes, then we need to get serious about adopting the technologies that enable employees to choose how and where they work
SIEMENS NX 2024 UPDATED AND AI, NX X AND XR LAUNCH DATES ANNOUNCED
» Company executives provide further details of products to be made available through NX X, its new cloud-based service on the Xcelerator platform
Siemens Digital Industries Software has made a string of announcements regarding the 2024 updates it will make to its NX software, including NX X on the Xcelerator cloud platform, a drop date for its immersive collaboration software, and news of new electro-mechanical workflows and AI-enabled design capabilities.
Previously announced at Siemens’ Realize Live Americas event in May, NX X is a cloud-based service that can be accessed via desktop installation or browser streaming from Amazon Web Services (AWS), and which offers PLM capabilities from Teamcenter X software. With over 110 products and capability extensions available, users can explore the add-ons that will best fit their own workflows.
Among the products on offer is Siemens’ newly announced Zel X software, a production flow management app that integrates with other Xcelerator solutions to streamline factory floor operations.
NX Immersive Explorer, set to launch in December 2024, supports all major HMD options and aims to cut physical prototyping costs with its immersive and interactive photorealism. Users can focus on specific parts in an assembly, examine omponents and add mark-up notes to document design review outcomes.
Elsewhere, there are new AI-enabled capabilities, including tools for topology optimisation, Performance Predictor and gyroid modelling. These join existing AI-based tools that deliver command prediction and selection prediction to boost users’ efficiency.
In particular, Performance Predictor is an AI-enabled design simulation tool that focuses on validating material choices and mechanical performance of individual parts, with the aim of enabling designers to validate, test and rework design iterations in real time.
When combined with the AI-enabled topology optimisation and new gyroid lattice and infill design capabilities, as well as the Design Space Explorer capability introduced in 2023, designers can create optimal parts that not only perform as needed, but also can be studied for lightweighting opportunities and benefit from additive manufacturing methods.
This latest update also brings greater levels of user control and workflow productivity to NX CAM and NX Additive Manufacturing (AM). Enhanced 3D Adaptive Roughing for high-speed machining helps programmers to automatically specify start locations. Similarly, the hole-making operation has been improved to provide finer control over tool moves.
Cloud Connect Tool Manager has been upgraded to streamline CNC programming. This feature for tool data management, which comes with direct access to tool vendor catalogues, now enables association of machining settings with cutting tools for faster programming.
Workflows for preparing AM build jobs for metal and polymer parts have also been streamlined and enhanced. New facet selection methods simplify the creation of support structures for parts modelled with facet geometry.
Additionally, new capabilities for subnesting, sinterbox creation, slice area distribution calculation and 3D packing optimisation greatly simplify and accelerate the workflow for preparing of polymer builds jobs. Furthermore, new Siemens build processors simplify the generation and output of print job files from NX to SLM Solutions and Trumpf metal 3D printers.
New multi-axis additive build rules enable creation and reuse of custom process parameters.
Managed Environment for Electronics Design is new for this release, bringing together NX, Capital, Xpedition and Teamcenter for PLM enabling data flow and collaboration between electronic and mechanical design teams. www.sw.siemens.com
Siemens NX X enables users to access via the cloud the product engineering capabilities of its NX software
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NTOP EXPANDS ITS SOFTWARE PARTNER ECOSYSTEM
With the launch of nTop 5, the software's developer can now boast a string of interoperability partners for its implicit modelling technology, including Autodesk, Hexagon, Materialise, Intact Solutions and Cloudfluid.
These software partners have all built nTop interoperability into their software packages, to provide better end-to-end processes for designers and engineers who wish to use third-party simulation and manufacturing capabilities on their nTop designs. The partner products are: Materialise Magics, for preparing models for 3D printing;
Autodesk Fusion, for interrogateing models, integrating them in larger assembles and preparing them for production;
Hexagon scSTREAM, for performing rapid CFD analysis on heat sinks, chill plates, manifolds and filters;
Intact.Simulation, for mechanical simulation of designs containing lattices and other highly complex geometries; Cloudfluid, for improving the performance of heat exchangers and manifolds through CFD analysis.
“For over 10 years, our mission at nTop has been to help high-performance engineering teams design beyond the limits of traditional software,” said nTop CEO Bradley Rothenberg.
“NTop 5 is a leap forward in implicit modelling technology and the integration of our new ecosystem partners will expand what our customers will be able to create while streamlining workflows using the tools they know and rely on. www.ntop.com
DEVELOP3D LIVE rescheduled for March 2025
DEVELOP3D LIVE, the inperson event for designers and engineers from DEVELOP3D, has been rescheduled for 26 March 2025 at Warwick Arts Centre.
DEVELOP3D LIVE is the UK’s leading single-day conference and exhibition celebrating design, engineering and manufacturing technology and how it can help product designers bring worldleading products to market faster.
With medical reasons affecting key members of our small events organisation team, we have had no choice but to reschedule the event.
“While we are disappointed, the good news is that DEVELOP3D LIVE has only been postponed, not cancelled – so please add the new date to your diaries,” said conference director Martyn Day.
“Working closely with a university-owned venue means that the event is only able to take place outside of term time and the shift to an event held in Spring returns the show back to how it was when our events team initially conceived it over 12 years ago.” www.develop3dlive.com
Accessible lattices from Hyperganic H
yperganic has unveiled HyDesign, its cloud-native design application for creating 3D-printed lattice structures and simplifying the options for designers.
The product aims to intelligently reduce the complexity of lattice design options, to eliminate the need for expert designers and for high-performance computing hardware.
With validated materials and meshless simulation (currently a beta feature), it should also minimise expensive and time-consuming trial prints, making it less taxing to explore cutting-edge uses of 3D printing for real-world products. www.hyperganic.com
HTC VIVE unveils streaming
service
HTC VIVE is launching a new streaming service for its Polygon Streaming technology, intended to bring interactive 3D models into workflows across various devices. The service will make Polygon Streaming technology available outside of Viverse for the first time. It will combine server-side processing with client-side rendering, reducing bandwidth and power requirements. Polygon data from a 3D model is streamed at the level of detail appropriate to the user’s distance from that model.
www.vive.com
Ansys 2024 gets R2 update
TThe UK's leading event for product design technology will now take place in March 2025
he Ansys 2024 R2 release aims to fuel collaboration and digital transformation with the introduction of two new products: Ansys TwinAI software for enhancing simulation with artificial intelligence; and Ansys HFSSIC solver for deep electromagnetic analysis of integrated circuits (IC). Many of the other enhancements in R2 are focused on accelerating run times, scaling capacity and providing users with the hardware flexibility needed to help optimise complex design tasks.
Others aim to make it easier for users to evaluate the likely cost and performance of a product over the course of its entire lifecycle. www.ansys.com
A new partner ecosystem for nTop gives customers more simulation and manufacturing options
NANO DIMENSION TO ACQUIRE DESKTOP METAL
Nano Dimension is to acquire Desktop Metal, creating a broad portfolio of 3D printing technologies and software that it hopes will rival those offered by industry heavyweights Stratasys and 3D Systems.
Having signed a definitive agreement, Nano Dimension will acquire all outstanding shares of Desktop Metal in an all-cash transaction for $5.50 per share, subject to possible downward adjustments to $4.07 per share. This puts the final value of the deal at between $135 million and $183 million in total.
“Our combination with Desktop Metal is another step in Nano Dimension’s evolution to become the leader in digital manufacturing, with capabilities in mass manufacturing for critical industrial applications, said Nano Dimension CEO Yoav Stern.”
“We’re excited to join forces with an excellent group of technology leaders, all of whom share our vision for transforming manufacturing to Digital Industry 4.0.”
Nano Dimension has its roots in micro 3D printing, but under Stern’s stewardship, it has been keen to expand, largely through acquisition.
In 2022, it acquired Admatec/Formatec, a developer of 3D printing systems for ceramic and metal end-user parts. In 2023, it added multi-material AM optimisation software Additive Flow to its stable.
Also in 2023, it made a bold move to acquire Stratasys for a reported $1.8 billion, temporarily scuppering its move to acquire Desktop Metal and prompting a bidding war that 3D Systems also entered.
Desktop Metal offers a much broader stretch of technologies. Its metals additive manufacturing footprint is key, but it also offers 3D-printed sand casting, ceramics, its intriguing Free Foam product and its wood 3D printer Forust. Additionally, the company also offers sheet metal forming technology Figur G15, and has built up its own list of acquisitions over time, namely of EnvisionTec and ExOne.
“We’re excited to bring together our pioneering, complementary product portfolios that will further enhance our ability to serve our customers in high-growth industries with a more complete offering of digital manufacturing technologies for metal, electronics, casting, polymer, micro-polymer and ceramics applications,” said Ric Fulop, Desktop Metal’s co-founder and CEO. www.nano-di.com
Nano Dimension's deal to acquire Desktop Metal brings it a broader range of technologies
ROUND UP
Esteco has acquired Turin-based Optimad Engineering. Optimad’s products are designed to make AI more understandable and interpretable; for example, they help engineers to analyse the predictions made by machine learning models www.esteco.com
Lumafield’s Neptune CT scanner, built for uncovering the intricacies of inside parts and mechanisms, can now be equipped with a Surface Capture Module to render complex geometries and reflective surface textures that other scanners may struggle to capture www.lumafield.com
Autodesk has teamed up with Haas to address the manufacturing sector's need for more trained workers by creating a four-part curriculum that is designed to teach a range of CAD, CAM and CNC machining skills to students participating in high school, vocational and university courses www.autodesk.com
Intel announces Sapphire Rapids CPU refresh
Intel has ‘refreshed’ its Sapphire Rapids workstation processors with the launch of the Intel Xeon W-2500 and Intel Xeon W-3500 Series.
Architecturally, the new chips are almost identical to the original Sapphire Rapids family from 2023 – the Intel Xeon W-2400 and Intel Xeon W-3400 – but offer more cores at each price point and a small boost in base frequency. Turbo frequencies remain the same.
At the top end, the new Intel Xeon w72595X has 26 cores, two more than 2023’s Intel Xeon w7-2495X, while the new Intel Xeon w9-3595X has 60 cores, four more than 2023’s Intel Xeon w9-3495X. More cores means more base power, and the new chips are rated between 20W-35W higher than their predecessors, with the Intel Xeon w9-3595X peaking at 385W.
However, according to Intel, despite this
its OEM partners – Dell, HP, Lenovo and others – have not needed to make any changes to the thermal management of their workstations and that the new chips will be ‘drop in compatible’ with existing Sapphire Rapids workstations. www.intel.com
Tech Soft 3D, maker of engineering software development toolkits, has announced the acquisition of Theorem Solutions, developer of CADTranslate and CADPublish, to create a broader ecosystem of data translation, publishing and 3D PDF solutions for end users and developers www.techsoft3d.com
CloudNC’s CAM Assist solution is now available for Mastercam users, both as an AI add-on for the Mastercam platform and through software resellers, for generating intuitive machining strategies for 3 and 3+2 axis CNC machines in second or minutes, depending on complexity www.cloudnc.com
New Sapphire Rapids chips from Intel deliver more cores at each price point
As more car sales are conducted online and auto brands scramble to up their digital marketing game, demand for 3D models is outstripping supply. OpenUSD could help tackle the challenge, writes Jason Collins of ZeroLight
The 3D vehicle model pipelines that exist within automotive OEMs are in urgent need of some digital plumbing.
The reality is, they aren’t able to keep up with the sheer amount of different content, in different formats, that modern car-buying journeys require. It’s been clear for some time that demand downstream for 3D models has been outpacing the average pipeline’s set-up and capabilities.
So, what’s behind this growth in demand for visual automotive marketing content?
One big shift is that 92% of car buyers are now likely to conduct some element or the entirety of their purchase journey online, which means that there’s more pressure than ever for auto brands to maximise their digital discoverability with engaging content.
The challenge for automotive brands is not only producing enough of this visual content, but also managing the 3D models that are needed to create it.
To generate this content, brands need to supply source 3D models in lots of different formats for different agencies, teams, software and processes that exist in their content generation ecosystem – not just once, but multiple times, in order to encompass model year updates, fixes and enhancements.
However, at up to three months of manual work per conversion, per vehicle, you end up with a pretty scary picture of the scale and duplication of effort that’s required.
It’s the reason why many OEMs limit themselves to a select number of graphics engines or formats, opt for a wider selection at considerable cost, or agree to compromise on the scope of their campaigns.
In a webinar that ZeroLight recently hosted with Volkswagen’s Head of Digital Car Visualisation, he revealed that 70% of their team’s budget is dedicated to converting master vehicle models into
multiple formats and engines.
In an ideal world, we would flip this ratio, with 70% of a team’s budget dedicated to creating innovative customer touchpoints that can generate a return, with the remaining 30% spent upstream on the preparation of 3D assets.
INNOVATION WITH OPENUSD
Thanks to innovations with OpenUSD, this ‘ideal world’ is almost within reach. Auto visualisation specialists now have a gamechanging solution that can upgrade and future-proof their pipelines, and it’s backed by big hitters including Pixar, NVIDIA, Apple and Adobe.
OpenUSD is a universal data framework that has enormous potential for the industry. It means that brands essentially only need to convert their original CAD data once, as that one file is then interoperable across all engines and 3D software. It’s also non-destructive, so it can be transported in and out of different applications without losing any data.
This might sound too good to be true, but the promise of a format-agnostic digital pipeline for automotive is here and it’s already been proven in other industries.
Visualisation teams no longer need to work in siloed teams or tie themselves into a single engine, making them vulnerable to price hikes or inadequate technical roadmaps.
Instead, they can be more agile and build amazing experiences and content across lots of platforms, without being restricted by model conversion costs.
The challenge for car makers now is how they make the most of this opportunity. Building a single model in OpenUSD is achievable, but converting and maintaining an entire catalogue of models is another matter.
And the challenge is not purely an operational one; there are cultural and mindset changes needed for the adoption
Visualisation teams can now be more agile and build amazing experiences and content across lots of platforms, without being restricted by model conversion costs
of a universal model pipeline that need to be nurtured.
What would help already stretched teams speed up the transition to a universal model pipeline is removing the manual effort required.
This could be done with a smart model converter, which takes the geometry, materials, and animation data from the master digital twin and automatically transforms it into OpenUSD.
TIME TO ACCELERATE
This approach would accelerate the process from months to hours for each model, while simultaneously optimising elements such as texture data, objects and hierarchies.
Brands would quickly be able to experience the advantages of moving digital twins seamlessly between applications and teams, without the obstacle of setting up specific materials and configurations for each one.
At ZeroLight, we’ve already started to roll out our very own smart model converter for an exclusive group of global OEMs. The results are exciting for an industry intent on updating its pipeline for the digital age.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jason Collins is Chief Product Officer at ZeroLight. He has over a decade of experience in automotive visualisation, working with the world’s largest OEMs on scaled solutions from model pipelines to consumer experiences. www.zerolight.com
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Recruitment could be your company’s biggest source of competitive advantage,
headache.
For many founders and design leaders that I speak to, recruitment of great design and engineering talent is important, but the process of recruiting itself can be hugely timeconsuming and frustrating.
Typically, they cite one or more of the following reasons. First, the skills they require are in short supply but high demand, meaning they end up losing candidates to competitors or counter-offers.
Second, application rates are high, but it takes so long to screen out irrelevant profiles that the best talent is off the market by the time they get to speak to them.
Third, they struggle to find candidates of the right calibre, often because the recruiters they work with (either internally or from an agency) don’t understand what ‘good’ looks like, or have other priorities.
No doubt you’ve experienced some of the above and have probably had a few moments, over the years, where you’ve thought, “I’m better off doing this myself.”
THE RECRUITMENT LOOP
I’ve seen this so many times throughout my career. Hours and hours are sunk into inefficient recruitment and sourcing practices, screening CVs, conducting screening calls, and interviewing candidates. All that time gets invested, and you still lose great candidates along the way.
When do you finally make an offer, the candidate ghosts you for a week, before joining a competitor, or accept a counteroffer to stay with their current employer.
How many times have you had this happen and had to start all over again? I recently surveyed my network of design and engineering talent, asking how many vacancies they typically applied for when looking for work. Almost half said that they applied for between three and ten jobs. While that’s not too surprising, almost one quarter of them said they applied for over 25 vacancies.
It’s no surprise, then, that many design
leaders find themselves caught up in a frustrating recruitment loop.
GETTING ENGAGED
Next time you’re hiring, consider this: most applicants consider multiple roles. So not only do you need to at least keep pace with your competition, but also and more importantly, you need to be better at engaging your candidates. But how?
Often, the best way is to engage with a professional recruitment consultant. And by that, I mean a recruiter who is embedded in your industry, understands it, and has long since notched up the 10,000 hours that it’s said are needed to master a skill.
A professional recruitment consultant will have a huge network in your niche. They’ll give you access to a much wider pool of relevant talent than advertising or sending out LinkedIn messages will achieve. They can introduce you to people who are not actively applying, but might consider a move if the right opportunity came along.
Your recruiter should work with you to design an efficient recruitment process, defining desired outcomes, building a candidate engagement strategy and project-managing the whole thing, so that you only need to interview three or four highly vetted, super-relevant and highly engaged candidates per role.
DIY RECRUITMENT
Still determined to handle recruitment yourself? Here are some pointers:
1. Create a compelling LinkedIn post to tell your network about the opportunity. You should write it as if you’re telling a friend about the role. In other words, make it sound natural. Post it on your personal page and ask your network to share it. (Personal posts typically attract ten times the engagement as compared to business pages.)
2. Block out time at least once a week to meet with the hiring team and review their progress. An agenda should be set
Not only do you need to at least keep pace with your competition, but also and more importantly, you need to be better at engaging candidates
for the meeting and next steps agreed. Candidates should never be kept waiting more than a week for feedback.
3. Aim to see all candidates for a role in the same week and block out, for example, six two-hour slots in advance. If you let your candidates know about the interview slots at the pre-screening stage, you’ll avoid unnecessary back and forth.
4. Share as much information as you can. If you don’t have a ‘Work For Us’ page on your website, create one and share it! Have you or your company appeared on a podcast or been featured in the press? Share it with your candidates! Do not assume that they are interested in or knowledgeable about your firm, just because they applied.
5. Keep candidates informed if you need more time to decide. Don’t expect them to still be available if you leave it two weeks to follow up.
Recruitment doesn’t need to be overly complicated or difficult. It just needs time dedicating to it. Take the short-term hit on the project now and you’ll reap the rewards later. Get it right and you’ll turn a recruiting headache into a competitive advantage!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Chris Whyte is the founder of Kodu, a specialist recruitment consultancy for physical product development roles. He has over a decade’s worth of experience in connecting design and engineering talent with user-focused technology brands and consultancies. www.teamkodu.com
VISUAL DESIGN GUIDE RADIA WINDRUNNER
WindRunner is set to be the world’s largest aircraft, designed specifically to deliver huge wind turbines across America, in a bid to help in the decarbonisation of the grid
REDUCED RISK
LOADING UP
The nose cargo door opens using a patented system to load blades into WindRunner quickly and easily, and to unload them directly onto transport after landing
Despite its unique design, including placing the pilots above the cargo bay, Radia plans to use existing qualified materials and components to lower risk and expedite its move into production
HIGH IN THE SKY
The
AVAILABILITY
Reports suggest WindRunner will take off in 2027, but Radia is yet to confirm www.radia.com/windrunner
PLANE SIGHT
URBAN ADVENTURER
» Sometimes, tried-and-tested approaches are what it takes to get a start-up moving at speed. Stephen Holmes visits electric motorcycle company Maeving to see how a potent mixture of experienced hires and vintage looks are shaping the future of two-wheeled travel
Parked up on the street in a cool London neighbourhood, a chic motorcycle with a British racing green tank and all the angles of a 1960s cafe racer is drawing a crowd. This bike has all the star quality of those ridden by James Dean or Steve McQueen, with one important exception. It has no exhaust.
Running purely on electricity, Maeving’s RM1 is a bike that manages to scream ‘vintage cool’ while also providing a slick and sustainable way to get around town.
Hailing from Coventry, a UK hub for automotive engineering expertise, Maeving is a little over six years into its journey. The company’s cofounders Seb InglisJones and Will Stirrup are on a mission to continue to build on the global reputation that the UK already enjoys for producing legendary motorcycles.
Yet the concept behind Maeving is not a purist’s love of motorcycling. The founders are strongly committed to making a positive environmental impact. On graduation from Durham University, Inglis-Jones and Stirrup had already laid a plan to regroup five years later and start a business that could deliver real change in terms of sustainability.
“Naturally, we turned to the electrification of transport as an area of interest,” Inglis-Jones explains. “And, in the process, we discovered that the highest rates of electric adoption were in China. We were just fascinated by this. Why? What’s this revolution, this paradigm shift that the West is unaware of? Through our research, we discovered that the answer in some ways was quite simple: It’s removable batteries in two-wheeled vehicles.”
The seed of an idea was planted: to develop a lightweight, two-wheel vehicle with a range of 40 to 50 miles and a removable battery that could be recharged at work or in a cafe, much like a smartphone. “That is such a simple idea. But it is genius, in some ways,” laughs Inglis-Jones, “because the number one barrier to electric
adoption is charging infrastructure.”
‘Range anxiety’, he explains, is not actually about the full range that a vehicle can cover on a single charge, but more about where you’re able to charge the battery.
Recent changes in mobile phone charging habits could be of real benefit to Maeving, he believes. As he points out, when the Nokia 3210 was released in 1999, it typically needed charging every seven days. “My iPhone gets through two-thirds of one day now, and the reason that I’m not shitting myself is that I have a charger at home and a charger at work.”
In other words, he continues, charging habits have changed, but “not the capacity of the device, which has decreased.”
Armed with its killer idea, Maeving still faced a considerable challenge in its early days. In 2017, the year it was founded, only around 300 electric vehicle (EV) bikes were sold in the UK. By contrast, 22 million were sold in China.
Today, China remains the sector powerhouse. However, a low price-ceiling in the Chinese market means that the quality of many electric bikes manufactured there is equally low.
By contrast, Maeving has positioned itself as an automotive brand that can offer all the benefits of removable batteries, along with design standards and engineering quality associated with British motorcycles and loved by global audiences.
FAITH IN FOUNDATIONS
Initially, Inglis-Jones and Stirrup worked with product design agency Bang Creations to develop initial sketches and quickly move into building a frame. This then became a moving, looks-like prototype built from 3D-printed and CNC-machined parts. This early MVP (minimum viable product) helped not only to impress potential investors, but also attract the engineering talent that Inglis-Jones and Stirrup knew they’d need to make the business a success.
● 1 The Maeving concept is simple: a stylish, lightweight design capable of handling daily commute, with a removable battery as easy to recharge as a smartphone
‘‘ ‘You’ve got something that wants to look good. There are so many components to a motorcycle and everything is on show, so it has to be aesthetically pleasing
Peter Taylor, lead project engineer ’’
“I think where a lot of start-ups fall foul is that they don’t understand or respect the engineering process,” says Inglis-Jones. “Our first hire was Triumph’s former head of product Graham Gilbert, one of the most experienced [motorcycle] product leads in the world.”
In fact, until very recently, the least experienced person on the Maeving team could still boast a 17-year track record in engineering and the most experienced engineer had been designing motorbikes for 47 years. “So straight away, our policy was to find the best talent and hire experienced engineers.”
Following the recruitment of Graham Gilbert, the Maeving team began visiting motorcycle dealers, to look in detail at what differentiates bikes and brands. Gilbert scrutinised 10 different models, recalls Inglis-Jones, analysing “every single component, how it was made, the manufacturing process, the materials – all sorts of things to get us thinking about how things would feel, how they would look, how the light would catch on them. I just can’t imagine working with a team that didn’t have that level of experience, because it’s been invaluable.”
In the design of its RM1 motorcycle, Maeving has stayed true to the design language of its concept bike, but the company’s thinking has moved on at speed. Much deliberation, for example, has been focused on tackling the battery⁄power⁄weight equation that has stumped other electric motorcycle makers.
With an electric car, the extra weight of batteries is compensated for through weight distribution and the increased torque of the electric motor, which provides grin-inducing rates of acceleration.
This can’t be replicated on the more limited platform of a motorbike, given the natural space constraints imposed by the bike and its rider, along with that rider’s strength and skill. “At the moment, if you wanted to make a bike that could go as far and as fast as a petrol bike, you would need to put 300kg to 400kg of batteries on it. It just wouldn’t work!” says Inglis-Jones.
Instead, he says, Maeving’s bikes are not designed to replace a car or a big motorbike, but instead to be ridden every day to work in urban and suburban areas. And this makes them applicable and accessible to a far wider customer base.
By limiting the power bracket to an 80-mile range, the design of the RM1 isn’t hampered by trying to be something that battery technology cannot yet support.
“At the same time, we have been trying to optimise for weight,” explains Inglis-Jones. “So, part of the reason for focusing on the 1930s, 1940s and 1960s in terms of inspiration is that these are super minimalist bikes. Specifically, they don’t have any extraneous plastic fairings on them. They’re stripped-down bikes.”
In this vein, the RM1 has a single-column frame, runs economical 19-inch wheels on super skinny tyres, and weighs in at a lithe 98kg without its two batteries.
PROPRIETARY PACKAGE
To achieve its optimised design, Maeving’s engineering team found that off-the-shelf parts wouldn’t cut it. “We wanted to make sure to have the perfect part to fit the package in the best possible way,” states Inglis-Jones, describing how 90% of the RM1’s components are proprietary and designed by Maeving engineers working with colleagues from its supplier base.
PTC Creo has played a substantial role in the development of the RM1, allowing the team to build parts in 3D CAD and for them to be quickly simulated with Creo’s built-in finite element analysis (FEA) tools.
“I’ve been using PTC products for nearly 24 years,” says Peter Taylor, lead project engineer at Maeving, who joined as employee number two and followed Graham Gilbert over from Triumph. “With Maeving being a start-up, and there being a need to get up and running and get things done as quickly as possible, there was an expediency to being able to use software solutions that the users were experienced with.”
Every single item on the bike needed to be modelled in Creo. Initially, the team built a skeleton model to mark all the hard points and fix them in place, gradually building up the RM1 from there, assigning space packages and placing the various components.
element
the bike on show, the Maeving team used Creo’s surfacing tool extensions to make even the most functional parts
‘‘
Our policy was to find the best talent and hire very experienced engineers. It wasn’t to do that startup thing of hiring enthusiastic 22-year-olds! Graham Gilbert, product lead ’’
The design then moved into more detail, allowing the team to use various tools within Creo, such as Mechanisms, to ensure that housing openings had the requisite clearance envelopes to avoid clashes.
Using Creo Simulation, meanwhile, helped simplify the process, by keeping design and simulation in the same software package, says Taylor.
“The main thing is being able to put in accurate details from the materials, to be able to get a good estimate of weight distribution,” he explains. “When it comes to looking at materials and what loads parts have to withstand, we use Simulation to guide us on where to improve the spec of material or see if areas using a certain steel grade could maybe use aluminium.”
When dialling into critical structures, Maeving employs an external client to provide extra input, but it also makes use of Creo, enabling Taylor and team to export data as native files to that client.
As the key CAD software, Creo acts as a hub around which the RM1 is built. PLM data flows into PTC Windchill, with Maeving’s PTC reseller Concurrent Engineering offering support with the back-end data set up and being on hand to solve any issues across its PTC toolset.
QUALITY FIRST
The RM1’s drop-in battery proved to be a key design challenge. This, after all, is key to the experience of fastswapping the bike’s power source and allowing owners to remove and recharge one or both batteries quickly and cleanly,
Using the ergonomic, in-built handle, the battery slots into a compartment located where the engine would sit on a traditional bike, putting it at the heart of the RM1. When removed, it can be charged at any 13-amp wall plug via a charging dock.
The search to perfect the design led Maeving to Greenway, the world’s leading supplier of power packs to two-wheelers, which was persuaded to develop a completely custom battery and connector designed by the Maeving team.
“We’ve had a lot of pushbacks with them to get [the battery] denser and denser in order to play around with the packaging,” says Inglis-Jones. “So, we now have this
bizarre situation where we have a supplier that would usually be doing deals to supply hundreds of thousands of units to the world’s biggest companies making small batches of very, very high-quality batteries for us.”
It was a similar story with the motor, continues InglisJones. The reason that Maeving has been lucky enough to work with Bosch on a new generation of motor is because the technology giant was captivated by the design of Maeving’s bike and the company’s clear mission.
The brilliance of the design, combined with the recruitment of experienced figures with years of know-how and the right connections has helped work this magic. That experience isn’t confined to engineering, either. Maeving’s procurement team has worked at a long list of UK motorcycle and automotive firms and its members have established in-roads with top-tier suppliers.
A willingness to fully test the bike and undertake a full homologation process for the final RM1 has also been a key factor in its success. “If you’re going to do that, you need to make sure that your supplier base is immaculate,” advises Inglis-Jones. “And Bosch – I mean, Bosch! – did a huge amount of due diligence on us before it was happy to work with us!”
VISUAL PURPOSE
With its stripped-back aesthetic, cosmetic considerations as well as functional ones were vital when it came to parts, as most of these are on show on the RM1.
Most of the surface modelling has been done in the Interactive Surface Design Extension in Creo, enabling the team to achieve its desired shapes and contours.
“I think that’s certainly one of the things that got me into motorcycles and engineering design 20-odd years ago,” says Taylor. “It’s the fact that you’ve got something that wants to look good. There are so many components to a motorcycle, and everything is on show, but it must be aesthetically pleasing. Having Surface Design makes it so much easier. It’s a much more flexible and powerful tool to be able to use.”
For some of the styling work around key visual elements like the tank and seat, clay modelling is still used. A modeller will sculpt the clay surface physically on top of a
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nylon SLS 3D-printed space envelope, before the design is 3D scanned and data taken back into Creo.
The sculpted ‘bobber’ seat of the RM1 has garnered a lot of love from bike critics, riders and from Inglis-Jones himself. “It’s easily my favourite part of the bike, bizarrely,” he says. Partly, he adds, this is down to the romance of the clay modelling process. “Sitting with an artist clay modeller and talking through it, saying ‘I actually want a little bit more angle on the back.’ I think we’ve created the best-looking single bobber seat in the world, humbly!”
In his opinion, there’s no substitute for physical form and for making assessments based on a changing physical form. “You can look at a million 2D and 3D CAD images, but you just don’t get a sense for the presence of a component as it sits in 3D. Whether it’s foam or clay, we certainly wouldn’t click the green button on anything until we’ve seen it in 3D, physical form.”
The team uses 3D-printed prototypes to ensure fit, using SLS and HP MJF nylon parts for various mouldings. To get accurate prototypes that help reflect the appearance and purpose of the components, DLP 3D printing was used to replicate rubber parts.
Working with Paragon Rapid Technologies, the Maeving team was able to replicate durable ASA parts quickly using Carbon’s RPU 130, a tough, heat-resistant material.
BUILDING OUT
With a continued focus on creating the ideal vehicles for urban transport, the Maeving design team is already working on exciting new models and innovations. Having already launched a 65mph version, the RM1S, the longterm goal is to drive home the notion that the future of sustainable transport is two wheels, not four.
Having moved from an 11,000 square foot factory to a unit boasting 50,000 square feet at the end of 2023, Maeving now has capacity to produce 7,500 units per year, and expansion into markets like North America and Southern Europe is well underway.
If its plans succeed, city streets around the world could be navigated by lightweight bikes bearing the Maeving badge, adding cool sustainability to the everyday commute. www.maeving.com
Photocentric Brings
3D Printing to Mass Manufacturing With Autodesk Fusion
For Photocentric, 3D printing isn’t just for prototyping or niche applications. In line with Industry 4.0, the Peterboroughbased company’s goal is to bring it to mass manufacturing. To achieve this, they develop their own resin materials and design and manufacture a line of 3D printers that can deliver a vast array of parts and products for industrial applications.
Photocentric’s flagship products include the LC Titan, LC Nano, and JENI. LC Titan is the
largest LCD 3D printer in the world. It has a 32-inch, 8K screen inside and a 1.2-metre print height. With LC Titan, customers from a variety of industries—from automotive to aerospace and even entertainment—can print large and accurate products with high definition. JENI is the company’s vision for the future of 3D printing. It’s an automated system that combines multiple Nano machines into one unit capable of automating between printers, washing units, and curing units.
With Autodesk Fusion, Photocentric can
collaborate easily and quickly to speed up their workflow. Generative design is used to evaluate potential design options, and automated drawing helps them generate many complex drawings that are often needed in a very short space of time.
“We develop all of our products in Fusion,” says Ed Barlow, Head of Engineering, Photocentric. “It’s an incredibly powerful tool that allows us to do all aspects of the design all in one package. Fusion is the backbone of our design process.”
Designing the revolutionary LC Nano 3D printer LC Nano is the fastest LCD 3D printer in the world with Photocentric’s patented Blow-Peel technology that enables very fast layers. One
of the unique design features of LC Nano is a 3D-printed housing. “The 3D-printed housing is only possible because we used Fusion’s Product Design Extension to build in lattices into it, which help it print really, really straight and rigid,” says Josh Moody, Senior R&D Design Engineer, Photocentric.
For LC Nano, the Photocentric team also faced complex design challenges with the electronics, optics, and hardware all in one design. The LED array is at a 90-degree angle to the screen and a mirror is used to reflect the light up. It was important to determine the correct placement of the LED and ensure the light hit the screen in the right spot. In the mechanical workspace in
Fusion, they created sketches and translated it into the electrical workspace so LEDs could be positioned accurately on the PCB.
“Advanced tools like the Signal Integrity Extension give us the ability to design right the first time rather than iterating over and over again with the mistakes that we make,” Barlow says. “In a machine like this where the LEDs are crucial to the machine’s operation, keeping everything in the same design tool has saved us hundreds of hours of design work. It gives us a huge boost to productivity.”
“Digital manufacturing is an industry that is moving so fast, and we can move so fast with Fusion as well,” Zarezadeh adds.
» Welcome to The D3D 30, our round-up of 30 new technologies from around the world that we firmly believe could deliver a major boost to your product development work
With the post-pandemic lull now over, and a whirlwind of M&A drama out of the way, the technology industry has designers and engineers firmly in its sights and a stack of new products to offer them.
At DEVELOP3D, we’ve been keeping an eye across the software and hardware sectors for the best tools to boost your projects and workflows. From AI assistants to jigs & fixtures-focused CAD, we hope you’ll find something here to add to your own personal toolbox and make you both more innovative and more productive. As always, the D3D 30 includes some brand-new
technologies and newly hatched start-ups, as well as established names and proven tools, albeit with new capabilities added to keep them fresh and appealing. Unlike other rankings, companies have been included in the D3D 30 entirely on the basis of merit. There’s no entry fee, no flashy black-tie awards ceremony, no sponsorship deals. Our only aim is to help readers identify the tools that will help them design and build the products of the future. Speaking with readers, we know that many of you have adopted the products previously featured in the D3D 30 and now can’t imagine working life without them.
We are confident that our Class of 2024 will bring to your attention many more worthy candidates.
AMT
POSTPRO SFX
Clean-up crew
It’s one thing to add modern SLS or PBF 3D printing systems to your workshop line-up, but quite another to settle on the right approach to post-processing. For PA12 builds, vapour smoothing is your best bet, and AMT’s desktop PostPro SFX is an excellent choice for small spaces.
The 11.5-litre chamber is surprisingly deep at 190 x 320 x 190mm, with space for three processing racks. Operation is simple enough, with just a single consumables cartridge to add in. All it takes is for you to type in the part thickness, the fill level of the processing chamber and some part characteristics, and then hit go. The process smooths surface roughness as well as sealing the part, adding strength and visual appeal – and all from a tiny footprint. www.amtechnologies.com
ANNEAL ENGINEERING OS
Making tracks
An engineering collaboration system designed for fast-moving hardware teams, Anneal aims to help engineers to discuss, manage and share their work.
Much of this product’s brilliance lies in its ability to make information easy to find, along with a notifications system that keeps projects on track while minimising rework risks. Designed to complement existing PLM solutions, integration via Anneal’s open API keeps sensitive data under tight control.
But what really sets Anneal’s Engineering OS apart is the ability for engineering teams to keep a full audit trail of all decision-making, calculations and test results from concept to delivery, which then becomes a valuable learning resource for future projects. www.getanneal.com
ANSYS DISCOVERY BURST
Fast physics
Ansys Discovery’s new burst-to-cloud service leverages the power of the Ansys Cloud’s Nvidia A10G GPUs with 24 GB GPU memory, leading to eyeopening acceleration of parametric studies conducted in Discovery.
To use this service, users with a parametric study in Discovery simply select ‘solve on cloud’. It supports all Discovery Explore physics, including thermal, structural and fluids. Users pay with Ansys Credits and are charged on the basis of computation time. Simulation set-ups run in parallel on the service, without the need to deploy or select virtual machines or job managers. As design variations are simulated, results are streamed back to the Discovery interface, populating charts and tables for further evaluation and comparison. www.ansys.com
ARMARI MAGNETAR M64T7
Desktop beast
You simply can’t miss this beast of a desktop workstation. UK firm Armari has managed to squeeze even more performance out of the already insanely powerful AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series processor.
In fact, equipped with the 64-core Threadripper 7980X, this machine can outpace Dell, HP, or Lenovo offerings armed with the pricier 96-core Threadripper Pro7995WX, especially when it comes to demanding tasks like ray tracing or computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations.
Of course, there’s a catch here: more power consumption and more heat. But the good news is that the user can easily tweak the settings in order to find the right balance – or confine themselves to going full throttle only when deadlines loom. www.armari.com
AUTODESK
ALIAS - CONTROL PUCK
Speedy selection
With Alias 2025 more capable than any previous release, Autodesk has introduced the Custom Puck as a new way for users to access their most frequently used tools, editors, menu items and navigation controls.
The puck is fully customisable, so new users can add and organise tools as they learn. For casual users, work becomes more intuitive. Expert users, meanwhile, can add high use or special settings at a click.
Whatever your level, a key function reduces the amount of mouse travel, speeding up workflows – especially for viz teams that love large monitors.
The Custom Puck is made up of a centre, an inner ring, and one or more outer rings, so the number of tools made available is entirely at the user’s discretion. www.autodesk.com
BOSCH ADVANCED CERAMICS
AM CERAMICS SERVICE
Tough love
3D printing makes creating ceramic parts easier and more versatile than ever before. Bosch takes this trend a step further with a new on-demand service that combines years of know-how and high-level delivery. For maximum density, 3D-printed parts – mostly built with Lithoz’s ceramic additive manufacturing technology – undergo several thermal steps to remove binder content and for sintering. From there, Bosch offers further processing using methods that include hard machining, laser processing and functional coating.
Whether you have ideas for a new ceramic component, or want to fill a gap in manufacturing, having Bosch on call is an expert choice. www.bosch-advanced-ceramics.com
CADCHAT CADCHAT
All together now
CADchat is a digital workspace that combines video meetings, design reviews and centralised communication for teams and external stakeholders. Its charm is its simplicity, with a user interface that’s easy to navigate Instant messaging and face-to-face calls enable users to share native CAD models with colleagues, with everyone able to work on a model, mark it up and see exactly what their fellow team members are seeing. Clever hosting technology means no time lags and using native CAD data means no messing around with PDFs, even for 2D DXF markups.
CADchat is SOC 2 compliant, with all customer data including CAD files encrypted with AES-256 when at rest and with TLS when in transit. www.cadchat.com
CADIFY AI CAD COPILOT
A better suggestion
Cadify is one of a number of start-ups tackling generative AI for solid modelling. The approach it has chosen is an AI assistant that intelligently guides next steps, reduces time spent on repetitive tasks and streamlines design iterations. Rather than taking humans out of the design process, Cadify monitors all design stages and makes useful suggestions. You increase a part length; the assistant suggests that you might want to increase the diameter by a percentage. If you choose that option, the system makes the changes.
Cadify has been built to be intuitive rather than intrusive. A beta plug-in for Autodesk Fusion was launched earlier this year, with more in the pipeline for later in 2024. www.cadify.com
COMINO GRANDO WORKSTATION
Silent assassin
If you’re in need of some serious power for rendering, simulation or AI, the Comino Grando is in a league of its own.
This machine is whisper-quiet, thanks to Comino’s custom liquid cooling technology, which goes beyond just the CPU to also cool GPUs and VRMs.
But the Grando isn’t just quiet. It’s blazing fast, too. Comino claims it can push the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7985WX (64 cores) to a whopping 5.0 GHz on all cores, easily outpacing air-cooled systems. Need more GPU muscle? You can load it with up to four top-tier GPUs such as the Nvidia RTX 6000 or HPC/ AI-focused Nvidia A100 and H100, all thanks to a sleek copper water block that frees up PCIe slots. www.grando.ai
DASSAULT SYSTEMES SOLIDWORKS AI AIDS
Helping hand
Currently available for Solidworks xDesign, but making its way soon into desktop Solidworks, Design Assistant uses AI to learn how individual users work and suggest improvements.
Mate Helper recognises components in an assembly and suggests locations where they might be added to the product. Smart Mate creates fully constrained mates, by dragging and holding components in the position where you want them to mate with surrounding components. Selection Helper aims to be one step ahead of the user, predicting and suggesting which element of the model they’ll select next.
Solidworks is clearly working hard to balance a smooth design experience with control for the user, and so far it looks promising. www.solidworks.com
FORMLABS FORM 4
Fastest yet
Formlabs’ Form 4 is all about speed, promising builds two to five times faster than the Form 3+. This new, resin-based 3D printer features the Low Force Display Print Engine, capable of maximum vertical print speeds of 100mm per hour across a full-size (200 × 125 × 210mm) build, completing it in two hours.
But print speed is only part of the story, because everything is faster, including part washing and cure times. And there’s no compromise on print quality, with 50-micron pixels achievable, thanks to advanced pixel smoothing and highly collimated light technology.
When you factor in automation features, then this is the 3D printer setting the pace for design studios and workshop machines. www.formlabs.com
GENERATIVEENGINEERING GENERATIVEENGINEERING Parallel power
Generative design isn’t just for parts. It’s equally applicable to full, complex systems and in situations where thousands of designs need to be generated and tested in parallel.
That’s the view of the founding team at Generative Engineering, whose background experiences include a doctorate in computational engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and product management roles at Google. What they have in common is first-hand experience of the complexities of general engineering gained at British electric vehicle company Arrival.
Generative Engineering’s codefirst integration framework allows engineers to plug in existing software products and use them alongside outof-the-box integrations.
www.generative.vision
CHROMATIC RX FLOW
Brilliant bouncebackability
3D printing elastomers is nothing new, but Chromatic 3D is offering a range of polyurethanes for builds that are as close to injection moulded parts as we’ve ever seen.
The shore hardness ratings of these polyurethanes ranges from 50 to 90, for tough parts that can be flexed, stretched, twisted and repeatedly squeezed.
Custom seals, grommets and bladders can be quickly built on demand, but Chromatic is taking its 3D printing abilities to another level by printing directly onto other materials – including metal, glass, ceramic and even garment fabrics – without need for adhesives or fasteners.
Chromatic knows its market well. Manufacturers of products such as O-rings might normally bypass slow 3D printing, but with the RX-Flow’s ability to custom 3D-print billets to size, they have a real opportunity here to work faster and with less waste. www.c3dmaterials.com
HEXAGON
SMARTSCAN VR800
Zooming in
A completely new platform from Hexagon, the SmartScan VR800 is the first white light 3D scanner with a motorised zoom lens, enabling users to adjust data resolution and measurement volume entirely through software settings. With coverage of up to 800mm, four cameras provide a total of 80 megapixels for extreme precision and allow for six different volumes. Resolution can be adjusted on demand in less than three seconds without additional tools or recalibration. That means quicker set-up times and more efficient post-scanning alignment processes, including the ability to combine scans of different resolutions within a single project – letting users define for themselves how they collect their data.
www.hexagon.com
HP
ZBOOK FIREFLY G11 A
Solid performer
HP is certainly shaking things up with its CAD-focused ZBook Firefly G11 A.
This sleek, lightweight 14-inch mobile workstation packs the energy-efficient AMD Ryzen Pro 7000 Series processor with built-in Radeon graphics, so you don’t need to shell out for a separate GPU. It comes with advanced Radeon Pro drivers, optimised for Solidworks and for other professional CAD software. While it may not be the fastest for rendering, we tested it with Solidworks Visualize and found it can handle huge, high-res scenes, as long as you’ve got enough RAM (up to 64 GB). That simply isn’t possible with entry-level GPUs that rely on dedicated GPU memory. www.hp.com/zbookfirefly
INSPEKTO S70
Inspect gadgets
The S70’s tagline – ‘Learns like a human, inspects like a machine’ – is accurate for a system that is this sharp at spotting faults.
Working through the set-up is painless. The user just needs to run a handful of ‘good’ examples of a part under its gaze. The S70 then autonomously begins a visual quality inspection of parts, spotting faults and highlighting errors as they pass below.
An out-of-the-box solution, the S70 can be operated manually or fixed above a production line, where its three AI engines capture the image, identify the part and inspect it for defects.
Users can train the S70 further by including defected parts but that’s not a prerequisite. www.inspekto.com
LENOVO THINKSTATION P3
ULTRA SFF
Flexible friend
This ultra-compact workstation may not be the smallest out there, but when it comes to performance, expandability and remote management, it shines.
It supports a range of 14th-Gen Intel Core CPUs, including the powerful 125W i9-14900K, and can handle up to 128 GB of RAM. That’s double what the Dell Precision 3280 CFF and HP Z2 Mini G9 offer, and they’re stuck with 65W CPUs.
This extra power makes the P3 Ultra perfect not just for CAD, but also simulation, reverse engineering and visualisation. Plus, it’s a good fit for remote workstation deployment. You can fit seven units in a 5U rack space, with room for a BMC add-in card for remote management. www.lenovo.com
PTC
CREO 11 COMPOSITES DESIGN
Lightening Lay-ups
Aerospace might be king when it comes to composites design, but that hasn’t stopped PTC from looking to other key industry sectors to contribute their knowledge, experiences and workfl ows to its Creo 11 toolset.
From boats to bicycles, race cars to wind turbines, PTC’s R&D team delved deeply into what new features it might add to its composites design capabilities, which only took shape just over a year ago in Creo 10. Zone tools allow for large models made up of hundreds or thousands of composite plys to be broken down into sections, allowing users to assign ply stacks to individual zones and speeding up the process.
For the manufacturer, there’s improved draping, extension of boundaries and creation of laser projection files. This is impressive stuff for a first full update. www.ptc.com
LUMINARY CLOUD LUMINARY
Speedy simulation
Promising high-fidelity simulations at a rate 100 times faster than legacy vendors by leveraging the speed of GPU- and cloud-based processing, Luminary Cloud’s proprietary simulation platform is powered by parallel Nvidia GPU clusters in the cloud, enabling engineers to iterate and test a variety of scenarios and optimise product designs.
According to the company, time wasted faffing about with mesh generation is clawed back by Luminary “intelligently adapting” computational meshes for higher accuracy and efficiency.
Enabled by the Siemens Parasolid kernel, native CAD models can be manipulated within, giving a reliable path to optimising a design. Pricing allows for an unlimited number of users.
www.luminarycloud.com
MELTIO M600
Dinky DED
Designed specifically for machine shops and production environments, the Meltio M600 is a versatile machine. Capable of 3D printing entire metal parts, it can also add new features to existing components, as well as repair damaged surfaces.
A 300 x 400 x 600mm fully inert workspace equipped with smart sensors means large parts can be built using demanding materials including titanium, copper and aluminium alloys, as well as stainless steels, tool steels, nickel, invar and Inconel. Many of the M600’s abilities are down to its Blue Laser deposition head. This increases printing speed while reducing energy consumption, by using a short wavelength light instead of the near-infrared light emitted by most industrial lasers. www.meltio3d.com
RYSE 3D LANDR 500
Taking off
What happens when people experienced in 3D printing critical parts for some of the biggest automotive brands out there decide to build their own 3D printer? The answer is the Landr 500.
Landr 3d is a spin-out from additive manufacturing production house Ryse 3D, which has been building and hot-rodding its own FDM machines for years. Now, its collective know-how is available to other companies as the business launches its first production model, the Landr 500.
Aside from offering a 500 x 500 x 500mm 100C heated build chamber and Revo 500C hot end, the 140C heated bed on the Landr 500 will make most engineering-grade thermoplastics a doddle to print. This machine has been built for production-level efficiency, repeatability, manageability and automation, with plenty of features that look set to win it a lot of attention. www.landr3d.com
MSI CREATORPRO X18 HX - A14V
Mobile powerhouse
This is no ordinary laptop. With a powerful Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada GPU and a top-tier Intel Core i9 HX (14th Gen) processor, it tackles the toughest tasks in product development.
While other workstations have similar specs, the MSI stands out by delivering 270W of power to the CPU and GPU, thanks to its 400W power adapter. In comparison, adapters in similar HP, Dell and Lenovo laptops max out at 230W to 240W, leaving lots of performance on the table. Just a heads-up: the serious cooling system sticks out from the back, and under heavy loads, you can expect significant fan noise and heat. But if you require top-notch mobile performance, this 18-inch powerhouse deserves your attention. www.msi.com
PNY
NVIDIA RTX 2000 ADA GENERATION GPU
Mini marvel
The Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada Generation is a solid pro GPU option for product designers and engineers who want to boost their visualisation capability without breaking the bank.
It’s ideal for CAD-focused viz tools such as KeyShot and Solidworks Visualise, with 20 GB of memory for handling hefty datasets. Plus, with dedicated Tensor cores, it’s ready to support emerging AI workflows, such as using Stable Diffusion for ideation in concept design. Designed for compact workstations, but versatile enough for standard towers, the RTX 2000 Ada is showing up in systems like the HP Z2 Mini G9 and Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra SFF. You can also grab it through PNY now. www.pny.com / www.nvidia.com
PRODUCTIVE MACHINES SENSE NC
Less chatter
Productive Machines has been busy launching the first elements of its SenseNC autonomous machine tool optimisation technology.
Its Feed Rate Calculator app emerged late in 2023 and can enhance machining strategies with cutting-force predictions and feedrate optimisation for CNC machining.
SenseNC Finesse, a product that hit the market this year as a plug-in for Siemens NX CAM, goes further still. With automated optimisation of milling operations, it helps prevent chatter vibrations from every running cutter across a production line.
It’s still early days, but this startup, a spin-out from the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and a participant in Boeing’s tech accelerator, has big plans for the future. www.productivemachines.co.uk
SIEMENS NX IMMERSIVE DESIGNER x SONY
SRH-S1
Engineering XR
Determined not to miss out on the hype around extended reality (XR), Sony has partnered with Siemens Digital Industries to build an exciting new XR system for enterprise use.
The Sony SRH-S1 headset features crystal-clear 4K OLED microdisplays and works with a traditional mouse and keyboard, or with new handheld controllers specifically for designers. However, it’s in the software that this Sony/Siemens collaboration really shines. Built around existing NX capabilities, Siemens’ software for the headset is targeted at meaningful engineering work, taking a virtual environment beyond simple design reviews and initial concept sketching, and enabling users to interact directly with the live NX session that they’re viewing. plm.sw.siemens.com
SHAPR3D AVP XR
Express XR
The launch of Apple’s Vision Pro spatial computing headset earlier this year got the world talking, but for specialists in product design and review, it was Shapr3D’s XR tools that really grabbed their attention. Many of the benefits of AVP XR over traditional 3D CAD VR/XR comes down to the seamless pathway it offers. Running your Shapr3D visualisations on the Vision Pro needs no tweaking, optimising or rebuilding. That immediately reduces workloads, by using native CAD and rendering and results in fully editable models that can be updated instantly. A meeting host has control over editing the model and applying materials, while other team members can join in and see updates in real time, making it perfect for dispersed teams looking to explore designs quickly. www.shapr3d.com
TRINKLE FIXTUREMATE
Clamp down
A huge opportunity for desktop 3D printers on factory floors lies in the production of cheap, fast and accurate polymer-based jigs and fixtures to replace machined aluminium equivalents.
Now, Trinkle is honing this workflow by speeding up the design process and making it accessible to anyone. Capable of designing custom fixtures in under 20 minutes with a few clicks, Fixturemate lets the user subtract complex CAD geometries, avoid undercuts and finetune offsets for a secure fitting fixture. A range of standard clamps and base plates are available directly in the software.
Fixturemate is not trying to be a sexy, do-it-all CAD package. Instead, it performs a simple task extremely well, to keep manufacturing production moving along.
www.trinckle.com
ULTIMAKER FACTOR 4
Industrial revolution
Shaking-off its desktop roots, UltiMaker has moved into the world of factory-grade performance with the new Factor 4 3D printer. Accuracy, repeatability and reliability are at its core, with a triple-insulated build chamber and active temperature control managing print conditions perfectly for its direct dual extrusion heads.
Combined with the new UltiMaker PPS CF materials, resulting composite parts can replace steel parts and manufacturing aids. Setup is managed using the familiar Cura software.
At more than double the price of other UltiMaker models, it’s not the next step up from an S7, but a bold step forwards in delivering the performance needed to run multiple FDM machines around the clock. www.ultimaker.com
XENCELABS PEN DISPLAY 16
Smarter sketching
Xencelabs’ beautiful, fanless displays with edge-to-edge, super-AG etched glass have now gone portable.
The Pen Display 16 exhibits all the user-focused benefits of its larger 24-inch sibling, but with added flexibility that means you can pick it up and work however you find most comfortable.
The slinky display is less than 12mm thick and weighs just 1.22Kg, making it easy to transport, while a single cable to link it up to a laptop makes getting up and running simple and fast.
Conveniently, the product comes bundled with absolutely every accessory needed to get to work quickly. This includes two pen options, along with Xencelabs’ programmable QuickKeys controller. It’s everything you need to take your sketching to new levels. www.xencelabs.com
ZOO TEXT-TO-CAD
Generate next
Zoo is looking to transform solid modelling with next-generation CAD tools running on remote GPUs.
Starting with its Text-to-CAD open-source prompt interface for generating 3D CAD files, users can enter prompts of a surprising level of complexity. What results is a workflow that lets you set system tasks to produce simple designs in seconds, freeing you up for more complex work. Resulting models are exportable as STEP, STL or OBJ files.
Zoo has also launched its Modeling App, which enables users to generate 3D CAD through traditional point-and-click actions or by editing code, blending hardware design with software smarts. With a fresh approach to new tools for designers, it’s an exciting time to try these early offerings out.
www.zoo.dev
Pro
Pro
HT
FIGHT TO REPAIR
Creative technologist Jude Pullen has turned his hand to ‘applied journalism’, spending the last six months taking apart everyday products to assess their repairability and discover what designers could do to build more fixable products
When the battery failed on his noise-cancelling headphones, Jude Pullen quickly stumbled down a repairability rabbit hole. It was an eye-opening experience, he says. “I was left thinking that this should be so much easier. I’d expected to go inside, see a couple of pull-out leads and get on with it, but there was a rat’s nest of cables in there that I was quite shocked by.”
The takeaway for Pullen was that these headphones had been designed with manufacturing assembly in mind, but not repairability. “I don’t think that’s me trolling Sennheiser or being unfair,” he adds.
In fact, it’s a pretty common scenario, as Pullen was soon to discover. Drawing on his years of expertise and experience as a designer at the likes of Dyson and LEGO, he embarked on a mission to tear down other consumer electronics and uncover their own repairability failings.
REPAIRABLE FOR WHO?
Since the early days of mass production, products have been designed for quick, easy and cost-effective assembly. Repairability is seldom considered – unless it’s lucrative to do so. In other words, Pullen’s headphones are the tip of a very large and awkward iceberg.
But with ‘Right to Repair’ legislation starting to develop teeth in many jurisdictions, Pullen’s focus on the fixability of products could not be more timely.
“I thought, if this is hard for an engineer like me, with almost two decades of experience, then this isn’t easy for Joe Public,” he explains. “I wanted to reconnect with that point – to understand the economics, the rationale, the safety, the litigation, the legislation behind why a product is like it is.”
In fact, he adds, it’s sometimes an intelligent move to err on the conservative side of things, particularly when it comes to designing something like a battery-powered device.
“When you look at the lithium polymer chemistry, the fact that a device can basically catch fire does not mean at any point it is going to be an easy thing to get through compliance, or your legal team, or indeed your PR team.”
Pullen’s view is that designers need to find a sensible middle ground. But are companies willing and able to make something inherently more repairable, even if they can’t advertise it as such?
As an example, he highlights an IKEA air quality monitor. To unfasten the case, you need a Torx screwdriver. You are then presented with a PCB that, as Pullen puts it, has been labelled in a way that only a developer would recognise as an invitation to tinkering. It labels voltages. It labels GPIO pins. It labels additional pads for soldering purposes.
“At no point on the packaging does it say, ‘Hack me’. Does it say repair me? It doesn’t, but it is so obviously designed to encourage that behaviour,” he says. “But the subtlety is not its difficulty. The subtlety is it’s a signal to only those who are in the know.”
A more approachable example is found when changing the battery in a Bosch electric screwdriver. This features a hybrid Torx/flathead option for its four screws. Inside is a lithium battery with the serial number very clearly printed on it. If you type that into the Internet, you can buy a new one and clip it to the two spade terminals.
“This might prove intimidating for people like my parents, but it’s not intimidating for a person who’s worked at Dyson or indeed at a repair shop. In principle, a qualified or experienced person could definitely repair it.”
Pullen explains that Right To Repair legislation typically dictates that a product needs to be repairable, but then makes a distinction between repairability for a member of the general public and for a qualified repair person. It’s perhaps not surprising that most big companies don’t want to deal with the many issues associated with letting unqualified customers tinker with their products.
“The caveat – and this is the tricky, contentious bit of the legislation – is that at no point does it say that repair has to be easy. At no point does it say it has to be attainable at a fair price,” says Pullen.
It might be, for example, that the repair process required to replace a cracked screen on a product is so inordinately complex and expensive that no sane person would ever set up a repair shop providing that service. So
● 1 Jade Pullen is on a mission to understand what really makes a product ‘repairable’
● 2 Pullen’s quest began when his own noisecancelling headphones malfunctioned
● 3 A Bosch electric screwdriver provides a good example of repairability
a manufacturer could deliberately make products that are extremely difficult or cost-prohibitive to repair, but would still be able to say that all of its products are repairable –and importantly, still be in compliance.
“That’s why I think the first wave of change makers are going to be smaller companies that ‘do the Bosch thing’. And that’s not to say that I know for a fact that Bosch has deliberately done it this way, but whether deliberately or accidentally, it’s made a product that, to my eyes, is easy to repair.”
FRESH THINKING
So how is the future of repairability likely to look? Will we see repairability clearly marked on product packaging, alongside energy efficiency?
In fact, a ratings system for repairability would be a starting point. If a Nokia G-Series smartphone or a Fairphone – two products that are actively marketed as repairable – were awarded A ratings, that would immediately impact other phone companies with models ranked C, D or lower.
It’s clear that something more sophisticated than a traffic light system is needed, says Pullen, adding that the sheer range of metrics involved doesn’t lend itself to a quick and easy sticker to apply to a fridge, for instance. However, even a basic ratings system would slowly start to weigh on big brands, making their products start to look old-fashioned and slow to adapt to more progressive times when competitors achieved higher rankings.
And this, he says, is where his ‘applied journalism’ work comes in. A troll might attack a brand online for offering no replaceable battery. Pullen’s mindset as a designer is to instead try to show what could be achieved.
“This is my attempt, and manufacturers are welcome to say, ‘What you forgot is this, this and this – but thank you. At least, we can see that you’re trying to be part of the discussion.’”
It’s this type of conversation between designers, he says, around topics like his headphone battery, which will be needed to help the noise around repairability gain more volume and more compelling examples. www.judepullen.com
MAXIMISING SUSTAINABILITY
» Manufacturing Sustainability Insights (MSI), a new add-on from Autodesk, is designed to calculate a product’s carbon footprint long before it is manufactured. DEVELOP3D spoke to Autodesk senior sustainability manager Zoe Bezpalko and sustainable manufacturing specialist Matt Oosthuizen about the new software and how it can deliver more environmentally-friendly products
DEVELOP3D (D3D): When Autodesk started to discuss Manufacturing Sustainability Insights, or MSI, internally as a new product for designers, how did that conversation evolve? What can you tell us about the thinking behind it?
Zoe Bezpalko (ZB): Autodesk has been working on sustainability for over 10 years and this is a core component of our impact strategy. How do we lead by example, by showing that a company can focus on sustainability within all of its operations, have a net zero commitment and follow through with it?
Often, there is a disconnect between saying that your company is going to be net zero and will report its emissions at a company level, and then how you actually do that. How do you calculate the carbon footprint of a product, maybe one of the thousands of products that is put on the market every year?
Today, this is really disconnected in terms of workflow. There are very few tools that enable users to calculate carbon footprint early on enough to have an impact on the design process.
There is also a disconnect because even the companies that are pretty good at reporting on sustainability are completely disconnected from the products that they put on the market, meaning that they typically are going to calculate how much carbon they emit based on maybe their electricity and water bills, but not in terms of the design and manufacture of each product.
Matt Oosthuizen (MO): It’s a mixture of internal and external research. Research from McKinsey shows that in 80% of products, the main carbon emissions are linked to the design and manufacturing phase, so that really highlights the need to have a solution within those phases, so that a designer can understand the impact they’re having and make informed design decisions.
We also did internal research in our technology centres in Birmingham, UK, and in Boston and San Francisco, with a six- to eight-week project where we took the same product and designed it slightly differently with generative AI. And then we measured the energy consumption of the machines and material waste and created a bespoke lifecycle assessment for those components to compare them directly.
We thought that we needed to create a solution that can do this at a quick rate and give a pretty accurate read – not 100% accurate, but a ballpark figure of 70% to 80% accuracy.
D3D: Of course, MSI is still in its early stages as a commercially available product. How do you hope that it will evolve?
ZB: We saw the opportunity to start leading this type of research and putting the results into the hands of our customers. And we’re constantly talking to our customers about how we can do better.
There’s a lot that we can do better in terms of including transportation, which is already included in MSI but not in a very flexible way yet, so that’s something that we’re starting to think about, as well as including the product end-of-life.
Also how do we start connecting this data throughout the product lifecycle, but also throughout the reporting regulation and framework of a company itself? That’s really the opportunity we have with our platform. We’re starting to think about what type of platform services can exchange sustainability data from a lifecycle assessment to a reporting tool, so we can catalogue these needs and start working with our technology and product teams to understand the demand from our customers.
D3D: And what has so far gone into the plans for improving the software? How have you been researching,
say, product lifecycle management technology to make the software more accurate, for example?
ZB: Right now, just a narrow list of materials and manufacturing processes are available through MSI. We also work with partners that are lifecycle assessment companies. MSI exists within the context of a partnership with Gravity Climate and we also have a partnership with SimaPro on a tool that will come out soon. And SimaPro is the leading lifecycle assessment software. So, we wanted to partner with them to help us to have the same accuracy of a real lifecycle assessment.
D3D: Why did Autodesk choose to make this software an add-on rather than an entirely separate program or an integrated update?
‘‘
There is a disconnect between saying that your company is going to be net zero and will report its emissions at a company level, and then how you actually do that Zoe Bezpalko, senior sustainability manager, Autodesk
MO:The whole idea with Fusion is being able to have an end-to-end workflow all in one solution. You can brainstorm your design, manufacture it, simulate it and render it, all in one place. It would go against that vision if we were to make a separate solution that you then have to drag and drop something into later on. We want to focus on having users stay in Fusion.
D3D: Finally, how do you anticipate your users’ carbon emissions will change as they design products using MSI?
Previously, they wouldn’t have known what impact
MO: Previously, they wouldn’t have known what impact the decisions they were making would have on their carbon emissions. So, this is a foundational solution that can give initial feedback to them. Hopefully it gets them on that trajectory. Now you can use sustainability as a metric to optimise your designs, and engineers do like to spend a lot of time optimising something! So we’re interested to see how this plays out.
EASY FIX
» A new model on the production line drives a need for new tools, jigs and fixtures. At Audi Sport, design automation and 3D printing technologies gave the E-Tron GT a smooth factory roll-out
German automaker Audi reserves its Audi Sport Bôllinger Höfe facility for the manufacturing of prestige models, including the highperformance Audi R8 and the fully electric Audi E-Tron GT.
Located in Heilbronn, Germany, the factory’s assembly line transports cars from station to station, where order-specific parts are installed. Every station has a limited time to complete tasks and much of the assembly work is carried out by hand. Audi Sport offers equipment lists exclusive to Audi RS models, while also fulfilling bespoke requests for individual customers.
The mechanics’ workflow is optimised to maintain quality and speed along the line, with custom tools, jigs and fixtures playing a huge role in this process, making tasks easier and more ergonomic.
Some tools help align parts during installation – easing a roof panel into place, for example, or fixing badges in the correct spot on a car’s exterior. This increases the consistency and quality of the final products, while saving minutes per unit.
Quality control tools make sure all cars from Audi meet the highest standards. Custom jigs are mounted to parts of the car to measure alignment and tolerances. Audi Sport created a custom jig to focus the head-up display (HUD) on the dashboard of the car. The jig uses two lasers projected on the installed HUD. When the lasers align, it means the reflective glass is installed properly.
Many parts need to be assembled before they are installed. Tubes need to be attached to a central fluid plate, cables and heatsinks must be added to a central control unit, and so on.
Audi Sport uses hundreds of fixtures to hold parts in place for easy assembly. Not only do these fixtures save hours, but they have a big impact on the consistency of production. Many of these fixtures are also designed to have a positive impact on ergonomics for the worker.
“We produce nearly 800 tools and jigs and fixtures for our factory here,” says Cem Guelaylar, Audi Sport’s 3D printing expert. To outsource a part takes several weeks or even months, he says, depending on the supplier and the process.
By 3D printing parts in its own factory, Audi has slashed that timeframe dramatically. “It has helped us to get these tools in a very short time,” says Guelaylar. “The workers come to us and say, ‘I need a fixture to assemble the cars.’ It takes one day to get this tool in their hands.”
When the new Audi E-Tron GT was introduced, the Bôllinger Höfe factory needed almost 200 new tools, jigs and fixtures to get production underway.
To develop the parts as quickly as possible, Audi Sport’s engineers turned to Trinckle Fixturemate to create the fixtures for assembly. A CAD model of the part is imported and positioned in the Fixturemate software, which creates an accurate holding fixture around. The user then adds supports and holes where needed so it can be mounted to a desk or bracket.
A library of off-the-shelf tools such as clamps helps the engineer quickly build the necessary fixture set-up digitally, with Audi’s team able to quickly design tools in 10 to 20 minutes on average using Fixturemate.
“Fixturemate helped us in a short time to bring a lot of fixtures,” Guelaylar notes. “Normally, in classic construction, we need two hours, three hours, four hours, depending on the size of the part.”
Fixturemate is very easy to use, he adds, and by using it instead of traditional CAD, the engineering team can free up members with specialist CAD knowledge to tackle more productive tasks.
“We can bring trainees and show them how to use the Fixturemate software, and they can directly work with this software and bring the fixtures in a short time.”
Once a part is designed, it is sent to the facility’s 3D printing room. Using several FDM 3D printers, including UltiMaker S5, Audi Sport produces the parts using Tough PLA. This material has flex and strength properties similar to traditional ABS, but prints more easily.
Tools are also printed for the protection of car parts, using TPU 95A, a soft material designed to stop parts from being damaged or scratched, and ESD-safe PLA is used for some more specific applications, including fixtures that handle electronic components.
Using this straightforward in-house process means that Audi Sport can produce tools within the same day and at a fraction of the cost as compared to outsourcing their production. When a part doesn’t meet requirements, it can quickly be improved and reprinted.
By relentlessly seeking more efficiency through adding automation to its in-house 3D printing capabilities, Audi Sport has reduced its tool production costs by over 80%.
By keeping production in the same carbon-neutral 40,000 square metre facility, the company can better manage its sustainability footprint, making its electric E-Tron GT’s production even better for the environment.
And by delivering parts in hours, rather than days, and putting production of prestige models into gear faster, Audi has found a quick fix for its fixtures. www.audi.com
● 5 The Audi Sport Bôllinger Höfe facility manufactures prestige models including the R8 and fully electric E-Tron GT 5
CREATIVE VISION
» Using real-time visualisation technology to build digital twins has changed the way that digital agency Collective works to build eye-popping content for its clients, as Stephen Holmes discovers
Product visualisation has never been more powerful. In a world populated by screens, rendered images play a vital role in enabling designers and manufacturers to communicate about the products they create.
Building realism into those renders, meanwhile, remains a critical task. Getting the smallest details right in the face of tight deadlines and mounting hardware requirements can be a tricky balancing act.
None of this is new to the team at London-based multidisciplinary creative agency, Collective. The company works with brands that include Mercedes-F1, the NHS, Avis Budget Group and Unilever, among many others, to create eye-popping visuals, marketing and storytelling.
But when DEVELOP3D sits down with Collective director Stephen Barnes and his colleague Stephane Bourez, a motion graphic designer and creative technologist at the company, it isn’t their award-winning campaigns or rendering credentials that the pair are most keen to discuss, but their work on digital twins.
Through the combined use of Unreal Engine, Nvidia’s GPU power and the USD file format, the team at Collective is building these digital twins in the form of visual
assets that transform not only where the digital renders of products can be used, but also the process by which creative campaigns are devised.
GETTING CREATIVE
The story goes back some four years, to when Collective pitched car rental giant Avis with its idea for a project. The client, which was looking to boost its European presence, loved the idea, but also wanted the project delivered within a six week timescale.
That caught the attention of Bourez and Collective’s R&D division, which had been experimenting with using Unreal Engine since as far back as 2014 to build render assets and scenes. Taking a leap of faith, Collective put the technology to work on this real-life project – and the results were a revelation.
“That, for us, was the lightbulb moment,” says Barnes, of the realisation that these tools could deliver photo-real content in an incredibly expedient way. “Once we were in Unreal, it was like we had complete control. We built this universe, if you like, and everything else.”
As well as enabling the team at Collective to work in real time with scenes and assets, they could repurpose these deliverables later on, with all the data packaged within the USD file. “That was the moment when we realised, ‘This is really powerful.’”
UNDERSTANDING USD
While utilising real-time 3D technology such as Unreal Engine and Nvidia Omniverse to create and manage 3D assets was a revelation for Collective, the company found it much harder to explain to its clients.
“You’d start talking about it and you’d see their faces just melting,” Barnes laughs. “It’s a really broad church and you can do a lot with it.”
Adds Bourez: “Our first reflex was, ‘Wow, we can do this, we can do that!’ We were so excited that we were sharing all of it to the clients, and this is why we were losing them.”
The pair explain that the process is quicker, but not massively quicker, than creating assets in 3D using
Autodesk Maya or SideFX Houdini, and the cost is no lower. But as the client begins to build up a library of assets to be deployed across screen, print and more through the USD format, the approach quickly gains momentum.
In other words, says Barnes, you don’t necessarily see all the benefits of this approach on the first go. It took over a year for Collective to really drill down and identify how to explain these benefits to clients.
Part of this process involved inviting clients to sit alongside Collective’s designers and getting their opinions in real time. By exploring their tastes and preferences in this way, and making tweaks and changes in front of them, says Bourez, the clients would be amazed at the results.
Collective now actively invites clients into these collaboration sessions, says Bourez, “because we know they’re going to have a great time!”
Letting them see the power of the technology and feel engaged with the project, he adds, is a huge bonus. It creates buy-in on concepts early on, because the client can directly change lights, camera angles, move assets and more.
“It becomes theirs!” says Bourez. “In a shop, if you have the product in your hands, you’re more than half-way towards buying it. This is the same thing, but with an abstract world.”
A NEW STRATEGY
Creating a library of digital twins is extremely powerful, allowing the same universal asset to be platform-agnostic and therefore used in print, or at super high-resolution for billboards, or for interactive experiences, or even inserted into a movie.
The second benefit of these assets is that the creatives using them don’t have to start from scratch anymore. For example, working with client Victorinox, it might have taken multiple passes in the past to achieve the correct tint of red and level of glossiness associated with the handles of its iconic red pen knives.
Today, with a universal asset in the USD format, a digital twin can retain all this data, along with a history of all the
versions approved by the client.
What Collective is creating is not simply a hero product render, but new staging environments and product variants, allowing for seasonal variations or adjustments for different regions, all packaged into a single digital file.
This brings sustainability and savings as part of the longterm benefits, saving on multiple real-world photoshoots and recordings for each different medium.
The team at Collective explains these benefits now whenever they go into client meetings. Instead of thinking about new product launches, clients are encouraged to consider the rest of the year and how they’re going to be able to reuse every digital asset again and again.
“There is a bit of drawback to overcome, as there will be upfront costs to consider, because you’re building things you don’t already have,” says Bourez. “But once you have this powerful library, you never have to start from scratch.”
The process has meant a different strategy for Collective in terms of creating content. The procedural methods and tools available in Unreal mean the agency can build a batch render pipeline that takes all the cameras and renders them automatically, a process it used for Victorinox.
“If you have two different pen knives, and for each you want a front view,a top view, a side view, a three-quarter view and a 360-degree view, then yes, you can hire junior people and make them grind like slaves – that’s one way,” explains Bourez. “Or, you can just create a smart tool that’s going to do it for you. You press one button and go grab a slice of pizza or something!”
Anytime you find friction or a bottleneck in your pipeline, he adds, “there’s probably a good chance that you can solve it and make it even more powerful by coding the routine and by being smart about it instead of brutal.”
With a team mantra of ‘Build once, use many’, the move has made Collective’s visualisation work even more powerful. Designers get to be more creative with ideas, now that they no longer have to waste time building assets. And the end results speak for themselves, across pages and screens of all sizes.
www.collectiveworld.com
Building Information Modelling (BIM) for Architecture, Engineering and Construction
Building Information Modelling technology for Architecture, Engineering & Construction
Xencelabs Pen Display 16
» The Xencelabs Pen Display family continues to grow. With its detailed display and desktop practicality, the svelte and portable Pen Display 16 is a welcome new addition to the line-up, as Stephen Holmes reports
‘‘
Product
» Xencelabs Pen
Display 16 Bundle
Power adaptor hub, travel easel, Quick Keys £999 (Ex VAT)
» USB-C port with DisplayPort Alternate Mode (UHD), or DisplayPort (UHD) and USB-C/USB-A, or HDMI 2.1 (UHD) and USB-C/USB-A
» Windows 7 or later, Mac OS X 10.12 or later, Linux www.xencelabs.com
Handling hardware has become a more prevalent part of the designer’s daily workflow since the rise of the tablet. A high-end digital device like a notepad is one way of achieving more natural lines or including better detail in your sketches.
While many of you will by now be adept at sketching on an iPad, the maximum 13-inch screen size can be restrictive. As a result, the 16-inch screen offered by the Xencelabs Pen Display 16 (rising to 19 inches if you include the bezel) is getting a lot of attention.
The PD16 is designed for creative professionals on the go. Few may be doing detailed CAD work in the back of a cab, but the ability to pack up and take your familiar desktop with you is a marvellous benefit of the modern age.
Xencelabs’ case is barely 11mm thick and weighs just 1.2kg, putting it in the territory of a modern laptop rather than a barely-there iPad. But given that you’ll need to hook it up to a workstation, you’ll likely be popping it into a backpack or the included carry case rather than carrying it, folio-like.
Any initial reticence around carrying another device in addition to a laptop quickly disappears when considered in context: hot-desking and remote working
IPAD PRO
Price: from £999
The 11-inch and 13-inch models of the latest version of Apple’s tablet are the thinnest yet (5.1mm), while still packing in enterprise-class hardware led by the new M4 chip behind a beautiful Ultra Retina XDR OLED display. www.apple.com
are commonplace now, so having a device like the PD16 with you is a definite productivity win.
At DEVELOP3D, we’ve written before about designers being lovers of multiscreen set-ups, and the PD16 is a beauty that can be picked up at any time for detailed sketching and marking-up.
Flicking windows and apps between screens is easy to do with Xencelabs’ Virtual Tablet Mode, which lets the pen control other attached displays, passing a window onto another monitor with a short swipe.
One of the big wins for this tablet is its ability to run from a single USB-C cable that sends the signal and powers the device. With a super-fast uptime, you can be working in seconds.
Everything you might need for this product is included and has been
configured
The single cable means that the PD16 can be used when the user is on the move, with a laptop running in clamshell mode in a bag down by their feet.
WACOM MOVINK
Price: from £730
A 13.3-inch full HD OLED Samsung Display is one of Wacom’s best yet, with added multi-touch and pen control. With over 1.07 billion colours, the factory-calibrated and Pantone Validated device is targeted at designers on the move. www.wacom.com
However, in more practical terms, the set-up with a sole wire certainly makes for simplicity on the desktop.
REMARKABLE 2
Price: from £389
A wonder for note scribblers (including directly on PDFs), handwriting is converted easily. The 10.3-inch e-ink screen is for text more than sketching, yet the paper-like surface is still good for line strokes and battery life can top two weeks. www.remarkable.com
RATTA SUPERNOTE NOMAD
Price: from €300
A travel-size, 8-inch e-notebook with modular design for repair and upgrade, plus micro SD card storage. The paperesque Wacom Feelwrite screen offers 16-level grayscale, and export to PSD is in the works. www.supernote.com
This mode has a trade-off. Without hooking up the included mains-connected power pack, single cable use reduces screen brightness to 120 nits, compared with 300 nits at full power. Yet I found the OLED 4k display pops with enough brightness at 120 nits and my eyes preferred this setting over long periods.
The display feels supercharged at 300 nits, making it perfect for working with super high-fidelity imagery. With some 1.07 billion colours on show, a choice of five factory-calibrated colour spaces should fill your immediate requirements, including Adobe RGB: 98%, P3-D65: 98%, and sRGB: 99%.
The pen pressure curve is responsive and adjustable to match your drawing style, and as with most modern tablets, no perceivable lag is noticeable.
Xencelabs’ trademarked Super-AG etched glass is a beautiful texture on which to sketch, while still providing some of the best anti glare capabilities I’ve seen yet.
It’s the same tech as is used in the Xencelabs Pen Display 24 (PD24), but in this portable format, it becomes so much more important, as you are likely to be using it in multiple different lighting conditions, including outside.
Changing the firmer pen nib for the felt-tip option was preferable and resulted in a sweet stroke for concept sketching.
FAMILY VALUES
In fact, the PD16 is very much a slimmeddown version of the PD24, its bigger deskbound sibling. One of the few trade-offs is the loss of three physical buttons at the top of the display.
In the PD24, one of these is a quick key for Virtual Display Mode. For the PD16, this has been switched to the ‘eraser’ on the end of the two pen options.
To explain this, Xencelabs says that it finds that few people use the eraser for erasing – but it can still be allocated as such using the Xencelabs driver app if you’re one of the few. As ever, the Xencelabs software makes it easy to customise both pens and the Quick Keys controller.
Like the pen options – a slim twobutton pen and a chunkier three-button option – the Quick Keys controller remains the same as that offered with the PD24. With a small display, physical dial and up to 40 customisable shortcut keys per application, this makes easy work of tool selections and regular functions, from sketching in Illustrator to crunching numbers in Excel, once it’s been set up to reflect your personal preferences. (And these were handily remembered by my Xencelabs app.)
Unlike the PD24, there’s no screen-side dock for the Quick Keys included with the PD16, but given the propensity of
online STL files, you could quickly 3D print yourself one, or deploy any of the growing number of user-generated peripherals for Xencelabs’ click-fit docks.
Everything else you might need for this product is included and has been configured to be ready to work wherever you’re travelling. This includes the power hub, a pen case with both pens, replacement nibs, dongles, cables and plug adaptors, pen clips, a carry bag that will fit the device and your laptop and even a travel easel.
Designed to be lightweight for packing into a bag, the easel offers two height settings and has rubber grippers that keep the device in place. Yet I found the easel a bit too light for continuous desktop use, and without any rubber feet, it tended to skitter around on hard surfaces. Xencelabs has let us know that it has a desktop-specific easel for the PD16 launching soon, promising VESA mounts and more.
But the real charm of the PD16 lies in the opportunity just to pick it up and sit with it however you like, balancing it on a chair arm or rotating it into portrait mode on your lap. When not being used for sketching, it becomes a richly coloured OLED second screen perched on your desk, waiting for you to pick up the pen – and, given its superb ease of use, it usually won’t have to wait for long.
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3Dconnexion SpaceMouse Wireless Bluetooth Edition
» The most advanced portable peripheral for controlling your 3D CAD software has been updated with expanded connectivity – but is the SpaceMouse still the go-to option for reliability and ease of use? Lawrence Marks gets his hands on the new Bluetooth-enabled version to find out
I’ve used a 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse at my desk and on the move since 2018. Like most designers, taking it away from me would be like cutting off my left hand –or at least a couple of fingers.
For anyone unacquainted with what 3Dconnexion has achieved, the SpaceMouse is used in your non-dominant hand to navigate 3D space, leaving your usual mouse-wielding hand to do all the selecting and clicking.
Since I was introduced to the smaller, hockey puck-like version of 3Dconnexion’s range, built of black plastic and brushedsteel and with an unmistakable heft to its weighted base, I’ve never looked back and it has never gone wrong.
Despite going wireless over ten years ago, 3Dconnexion has until now stayed true to its Universal Receiver technology. Since almost everything else on my desk has a Bluetooth connection, it’s fair to say that 3Dconnexion has left it late to make the shift.
But with changing times come changing demands. Many designers are on the move once more – whether that involves international trips to meet clients, hotdesking in offices, or taking a laptop home for the weekend. With USB ports on laptops now a luxury, a simple Bluetooth connection can be a game changer.
» 3Dconnexion
£144 (Ex VAT)
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SpaceMouse still has enough weight to keep it steady on the desk during use.
The familiar CMF of black, silver and blue is not a million miles from my older desktop model, but it remains modern in its angles and understated when part of the usual desktop furniture.
LINK UP
In all these applications, it just worked – with the MacBook Air, Shapr3D and SpaceMouse combo proving particularly effective given how un-CAD-optimised the MacBook is.
To test the set-up process, I plugged the SpaceMouse into my HP workstation, a laptop and an Apple MacBook Air for good measure. Having downloaded 3Dconnexion
Home from the website, I was off. Simple. No fuss. Effective.
Individual drivers can be downloaded from 3DConnexion’s website, and the company’s ‘all-in-one’ driver 3DxWare 10 speeds up the process if you’ve a lot of applications to work across.
With 221 applications ready to roll, and the ability to customise shortcuts, it’s as efficient to get started as it is when using your CAD package of choice.
Switching between devices – from desktop to laptop, or even to a colleague’s machine – is as seamless as connecting to any other Bluetooth device in the modern world. Simply select the mouse from your Bluetooth options and, driver install permitting, you are straight into your work. You can place the mouse wherever you like on your desk or rest it on your knee while trying to work in a cramped train seat. Living without wires – as seen with headphones and all manner of electronics – offers great freedom, and with around one month of battery life, recharging is not a matter of anxiety.
To meet these needs, 3Dconnexion’s team of engineers have given us the SpaceMouse Wireless Bluetooth Edition. Arriving packaged in a neat, clinical manner, it comes complete with a zipped soft shell travel case, along with a USB-C charging lead and the classic 3Dconnexion Universal Receiver dongle – both of which you can use to connect the SpaceMouse to a workstation should Bluetooth be unavailable.
As soon as the device is out of the packaging, you can see that this thing has the build, component quality, material selection and feel of a decent piece of industrial design. Despite its portability, the
There seem to be endless customisation options for each of your software applications, via the two programmable side buttons on the SpaceMouse Wireless. You can assign your favourite commands, create radial menus and map custom macros to these buttons simply, using the single 3DxWare driver.
It’s on the software side that a lot of 3Dconnexion’s development hours have been focused in order to make its devices easy to use, with a steady stream of updates keeping hardware primed for the latest CAD releases. I tested this device with an ancient version of Siemens Solid Edge on some design and simulation model prep work, along with current versions of Dassault Systèmes Abaqus/CAE and Siemens Simcenter STAR-CCM+ CFD software. To mix things up, I also used the SpaceMouse with Shapr3D on the Macbook Air.
COMFORT
As a tool to be used for long periods, the SpaceMouse works very well indeed – a reflection of the experience and dedication that 3Dconnexion puts into its ergonomics engineering. It’s light to manoeuvre and raised fins every 90 degrees give the user enough purchase to push, pull, twist or turn. Resistance is sufficiently light that working with the SpaceMouse never becomes taxing.
These smooth and simple movements transform the way in which you interact with 3D models. Once you have your shortcuts selected, using apps becomes far more intuitive than before. The best way to measure this is by attempting to go back to working without a SpaceMouse. Instantly, you are in a mess of mouse buttons and movements, trying to get the feel for the part or the results set that you are visualising.
The big worry, in fact, is that a wireless SpaceMouse might be easier to misplace or leave behind somewhere – and where would you be without it?
As new technology options continue to transform ways of working,
it’s time for the product design and engineering sector to think how these tools might also boost
workforce diversity, writes Stephen Holmes
As I write this column, I’m seated comfortably on my own sofa, bathed in natural light, the tapping of my keystrokes accompanied by the sound of a small dog snoring loudly down by my feet.
While most working conventions have loosened up a little since the pandemic years, I still realise that I’m lucky to get to work like this most days.
That doesn’t stop me, however, from taking an interest in how and where others spend their working hours. Visiting other people in their workplaces is one of the privileges of my job.
I spend hours each year on factory tours, sitting down in design offices, peering over the shoulders of engineers, or being briskly whisked through secretive facilities. As a result, I perhaps have a broader perspective on the wide range of working habits and environments out there than others.
I’ve seen the modern playgrounds of software developers, equipped with pick ’n’ mix stations and slides; the pristine operating theatres of the F1 world with their gloss white floors and walls; the charred-black surfaces and intense heat of foundries; and the cookie-cutter office pods of giant corporations, where desks and cubicles repeat over spaces the size of football pitches.
A WORKPLACE MISHMASH
While other industries seem have come to some sort of unofficial, loose agreement on what workplaces should look and feel like, it seems that our own industry’s mishmash of characters, creatives, scales and sizes means no two studios, workshops or facilities are alike.
I’ve seen lightweight, hyperfunctional design studios that are little more than two desks and a couple of workstations packed into a garden shed. Then there are others that resemble the expansive lairs of movie villains, built of expensive marble, chrome and no doubt the sweat of many interns.
Even on all the identikit industrial estates I’ve wandered through, lost and typically requiring directions from the inevitable burger van selling dubious meat-in-bread concoctions, every company has a different image or personality. Either way, workplace satisfaction marries up with high employee engagement. Making our workspaces productive, comfortable, inclusive (do female employees have a three-mile hike to their toilet?) and, dare I say, more fun is often at the bottom of many companies’ priority lists, but I strongly believe it’s worth considering.
If we’re serious about adding diversity to the profession, then adding more flexibility to how we work might give it more appeal
Every visit I make is enlightening, opening a doorway to another world. No two are the same. Like a local’s bar in some shadier part of town, the interiors of most workplaces are typically seen only by ‘regulars’, who tend to forget what their surroundings must look like to an outsider who strays in off the street.
TECHNOLOGY ENABLEMENT
Much of it comes down to technology. I’m free to swan about and work wherever I please thanks to the portability of my laptop. However, someone spending hours immersed in a CAD model, simulation analysis or visualisation is typically chained to their workstation.
Will this change as we creep towards a more cloud-enabled world, freed from the power of the black boxes under our desks?
Cloud-based tools are marketed to us as being able to harness more compute power, transforming the speed with which we can develop new products, but they will likely impact the work patterns and environments of those involved.
Software developers also see a coming change. This year’s D3D 30 [on p28] features several excellent communication and collaboration platforms purpose-built for designers and engineers, which are now available to keep teams connected, wherever they are based.
If we’re at all serious about adding more diversity to the profession – more women, more people with disabilities, those who don’t want to live in a satellite town near the M25 or Cambridge – then adding more flexibility to how we work might give it more appeal.
I think that in-person working, ideation and workshops will all remain key elements of our industry – but may I also suggest a bit more time away from cubicles, soulless office complexes, and grinding commutes?
I think most of your staff would welcome that. Sofas and snoring dogs optional.
GET IN TOUCH: A cooler summer has meant Stephen hasn’t needed to launch his annual search for aircon-enabled workplaces this year, delivering the double benefit of saving his waistline and a few polar bears, too. On Twitter, he’s @swearstoomuch
The sofa might not be everyone’s choice of office – but for others, it just works
