In recent years, design technology has advanced way beyond one’s imagination. With demand for greater 3D realistic images, powerful animations and more designer products increasing, a good knowledge in design programs is needed to survive in the design industry today. To date, there has not been any design program that monopolizes the design industry. Therefore, designers have to be versatile in learning different design applications.

So Studio469 will look into what computer design programs today’s range of designers use to survive in the design scene. It is time for yet another Design Discovery!

Many industrial design companies rely heavily on 3D surfacing and engineering programs to bring a design from conceptualization to production.

First, surfacing programs like Rhino and Alias are used to conceptualize a design in 3D modelling. Surface-modeling allows more freedom in designing – the ability to create complex shapes with simple clicking and tweaking. Such surfacing programs allow easy and fast modelling of geometric models for product design. But the drawback is that many 3D surfacing applications don’t record the history of how one achieved the design. Therefore, simple changes such as increasing the radius of a fillet can be arduous and time-consuming, and designers therefore have to re-create everything from the point of change and beyond.

3D engineering programs like Solidworks or Pro Engineer are other solid-modelling software that designers use to design products based on measurements. Solid modeling provides great repeatability. Shapes aren’t described as shapes but rather, by semantics such as the diameter and depth of a hole. A solid modeling application records every action so one can make updates, such as changing the fillet radius or diameter. The computer is able to re-modify the design based upon the updates of the new design. The only problem about such programs is the shapes are solely determined by measurements, so designs may be compromised at the expense of accurate measurements.

In recent years, hybrid programs that combine the ease of complex shape creation with the semantics and repeatability of solid modeling, have been introduced to enable designers and engineers to design and define measurements with greater flexibility. Think3’s ThinkiD, is a popular program that both designers and engineers use to define the shapes with surface and solids design tools. Any shape changes and subsequent features in the part history can even be further re-defined using GSM (Global Shape Modeling) for shape modification.

So far, programs like 3D Studio Max with plug-ins like Vray and Brazil, Maxwell Render and Lightwave have been very good for rendering photo-realistic models. The above applications are very popular among designers in the industry who wish to create realistic rendering images.

I have also heard of cases where industrial design companies do their designs in 2D design programs like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop first. Only upon confirmation are these 2D designs modelled in 3D engineering programs by the design engineers.

Because of the need to use a wide variety of programs, industrial designers are therefore pretty trained in exporting design models from one program to another to achieve the best design, engineering and rendering effects.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 20:58 and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.