DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

New year, new opportunities. or so they say. But while we’re talking about change, myself and the rest of the DEVELOP3D team would like to know what you, the reader, the browser of the blog, wants to know. Our company’s tag line is Community Through Content and we mean it. Is there a burning issue that’s aching to be resolved? Is there a technology you’d like investigated, explained and expanded upon? Is there a product, class of product or field of technology that you’d like to see more of both online and in print? What do you think we’re not doing enough of, or equally, something that we’re doing too much?

We’d really really really like to know. Please? you can get in touch with me via .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), via twitter or mostly handily, using the comments below. Go at it. Let us have it. All of it. We’re all ears.

Here’s an intriguing situation developing in the rendering and visualisation world. Bunkspeed broke into the rendering world in a storm, providing an easy to use tool that provided instant feedback on your work and enabled the create of stunning imagery in seconds. I’m a fan and you’re probably a fan too.
What most people probably don’t realise, unless you notice the little tag on the splash screen as it starts, is that HyperShot and the underlying technology is licensed from an organisation called Luxion. This is the tech that makes all that real-time ray tracing possible. The technology is the brain child of one Dr. Henrik Wann Jensen - rendering genius and Academy Award winner. Henrik was also the Chief Scientist at Bunkspeed. The key this to reread is one word: was.

I got wind of a change at the tail end of last year as there were rumblings from all manner of places about all not being well at Bunkspeed and the reasons have now become clear. Essentially, Bunkspeed don’t have the license for the ray tracing components that HyperShot is based on. Meaning they can’t sell it anymore. Effective as of the end of December 2009. What’s more, the HyperShot product is now in the hands of Luxion who will continue to develop and sell it. Who is a cofounder of Luxion? Of course, Henrick Wann Jensen. All very confusing indeed, so i contacted both parties to get official statements on the matter. First up, Bunkspeed:

A key piece of licensed technology is no longer available to us as of January 1st.  This means we are unable to offer HyperShot for sale any more.
We are working on some very cool new product that we will have a major announcement about soon that will put further speculation to rest.  You will be the first to hear!

Philip Lunn, CEO, Bunkspeed

Lunn also cleared up two of the most immediate questions. For those on maintenance and support, they “will be provided with our new generation product that is expected in a few months.” Also, if you’re working on current, long term projects, that data within the existing products will be fully transportable to the next generation products.

Now. What about Luxion. I got a rapid response from Dr. Henrik on the subject, which intrigued me greatly. he has this to say:

Here is the summary. HyperShot will remain available. The situation is as follows. Luxion ApS is a separate company. We are the exclusive developer of HyperShot. It is based on our comprehensive set of rendering libraries that we have developed over a period of more than 10 years. HyperShot was sold by Bunkspeed under a license agreement until last year. We ended the license agreement, since Bunkspeed did not pay us the license fees, that we had agreed to, for more than a year. Instead, Luxion will market and sell the HyperShot software.  We expect to make a release shortly.
Cheers,

Henrik Wann Jensen
Chief Scientist and Cofounder
Luxion ApS

There you go. An interesting thing. Luxion has the product and seemingly, the name. Bunkspeed has the customers. Let’s see who wins. I do wonder what HyperShot users make of this. It has something rather special about it, but that specialness is something quite intangible. There are similar technologies (from Luxology and ART-VPS) and it wouldn’t take a great deal to replicate it. Interesting times indeed. And this is the first week of 2010.

Well, we’ve patiently been waiting for the App Store fairies to come back from their christmas break and its finally live. We’re proud to announce that the DEVELOP3D iPhone app is now live and ready to go. So, what does it do?

Head over to the App Store and get yourself the app. It comes free with your first issue at a very reasonable 99 cents or 59 pence (not too sure on other currency costs) or you can take out a year’s subscription for just under a fiver. You’ll get each issue, as they appear in print, with live contents, fully searchable on each issue and all manner of other goodness. Each page is rendered on screen, zoom and pan-able and ready for your mobile enjoyment, whether that’s on the train, on the tube, up in the air (assuming you’re allowed to even move in your seat, never mind operate electronic devices these days) or just when you’ve got five minutes to relax.

We’ve got plans for this including greater interactive content, video and all manner of goodies, so if you’re a rectangle stroker, then dive in and have a play. And let us know what you think.

I’ve been meaning to have a play around with this since AU late last year and finally got the chance today. At the Vegas event, Autodesk launched the latest addition to the Labs website (labs.autodesk.com) in the form of Inventor Publisher and its first Tech Preview. Like many things, this was first shown in the previous year’s event (2009) but this is the first time it’s been seen generally and made available.

What is it?

According to the web-site (labs.autodesk.com/utilities/inventor_publisher/) it is : “easy-to-use software for creating interactive 3D product documentation - from assembly instructions to operating procedures, repair instructions, and more. Inventor Publisher allows you to deliver clearer and more comprehensive technical instructions to your customers. Inventor Publisher allows technical publication and illustration teams to leverage the same digital prototype created in Inventor that is used in the design to manufacturing process. You can work directly with 3D design models to clearly communicate technical information without the need to learn CAD software.”

What is it really? That’s a pretty accurate statement, the system provides you with an environment in which you can load both Inventor and DWG data, create keyframe-based animations that show the various steps in how you can assembly, disassembly or service a product. It gives you tools for either automatically creating exploded views or diving in and knife and forking them yourself to create each step. The system has a wide range of presentation styles, from shaded views, through to more tech. illustration style display methods, colour control, perspective and orthogonal options and such as well as a number of annotation tools. The whole process is drive by snapshots within a storyboard.

Each Snapshot gives you each stage and at first it seems a little counter intuitive, but once you get a handle on the workflow, it’s easy to move components, create each explode sequence, then move onto the next. The system automatically adds in the animation sequences (tweened across a user controllable time span) to move both components and camera views.

The system has an interesting array of output options. As you might expect, there’s video output, which is handy (to both flash movies and AVIs - there’s an example of the latter below), but alongside that, there’s output to PowerPoint (shown, imported into Keynote as I avoid powerpoint like black death), Word as well as standard graphics file outputs, with full control over resolution, format, transparency and size.

The odd thing is that while the animation sequences are interesting, I would imagine that the last category of output might be the most used, particularly for those publishing technical documentation. That said, the video output is particularly compelling and when used in combination with animation and colour/transparency controls, pretty effective at communicating intent and instructions.

Coming next?

This is Tech Preview territory as with many things on Autodesk’s labs resource, so what you see here isn’t what’s going to ship. My guess would be integration of these tools into Inventor and it being bundled in with one of the Suite offerings. Other things that are to come are an iPhone publishing option. It’s unclear whether it’ll be cloud or download/sync based, but Josh at SolidSmack has a nice video from AU that I’m going to steal to show you how it works:

Had this sat in my inbox for too long, so here it is: When the alternative fashion company Comvert looked into a new space for its Milan headquarters, it came upon a vacant cinema from the 1940s.  The movie theatre had enough square footage for design offices, warehousing, and its flagship retail store.  The building also had volume—6600 cubic meters of vaulted space above the old audience seating.  This gave room for a more unusual office amenity.

View
 from
 the
 COMVERT 
design 
department 
offices (Photo:
Giuliano
 Berarducci
)

“The idea of building a indoor skate bowl has been around ever since we started Bastard 15 years ago,” says Claudio Bernardini, founder and CEO of the company.  Bastard is Comvert’s internationally recognized brand of clothing and accessories for skaters and snowboarders. “The cinema site gave us a real chance to make it happen.”

Milan architects Studiometrico executed a massive, multi-level renovation to the cinema, but Comvert kept the Bastard Bowl as an internal project. “The moment we found the space, we began planning our own design. We wanted the whole project to follow a DIY ethic,” says Bernardini, who was surprised at the extent of the community effort; armies of skaters from around the region showed up to volunteer at every phase of construction. Perhaps most unique about Comvert’s attic-level skate park was the advanced 3D modeling techniques and digital manufacturing methods – the same ones Comvert used to make snowboard gear. “We wanted cutting-edge structure in terms of the technologies used to design and build it.” 

Bastards doing architecture

Comvert designers had advised several local municipalities on what goes into a rad skate park, so the Comvert team knew exactly they wanted for the shape and features of the course.  They conceived of a double-kidney shaped bowl 1.85 m deep with two top hips and a lower love seat. Skate bowls originated as empty swimming pools made of concrete, but since the Bastard Bowl would occupy the upper vault of the theatre, Comvert had to take a lighter-weight approach with wood frame construction.

Bernardini had prior experience building a wood track, building parts by hand or with a jigsaw.  This time, however, the team wanted to sidestep traditional building process all together. “As forward-thinking digital designers, we chose to use Rhinoceros instead,” he says. The team had designed the majority of their snowboard and related hardware in the 3D NURBS modeler, so they were familiar with the capabilities of the software to model parts with complex surfaces that they could easily export to high-precision digital manufacturing.

CNC
 metal
 bending
 of supports (
Photo: 
Marco 
Clozza)


“We can break the Rhino model down into individual components and send the geometric data for each unique part to CNC cutting machines,” says Bernardini.  By the end, CNC workstations had sawed every member and panel of the design, with every piece precisely matching the curves in the 3D model.

Vertical Challenges

Once the Rhino model of the Bastard Bowl was completed, Bernardini showed it to Marco Clozza of the local engineering firm Atelier LC.  He asked Clozza to calculate the structural requirements, devise a railing system and support from the floor, and then manage the assembly on site. “Claudio gave me a surface that was ideal for skaters but for builders, not so much,” jokes Clozza. 

At first, the site itself presented Clozza with a number of challenges. The wooden bowl would rise 25 feet above the lower level, where Comvert had now placed aisles of warehouse shelving.  The auditorium-style seating of the old theatre meant a ground floor was not level, but inclined, terraced at points into multiple levels after renovation.

“The design became more complex since we lacked a continuous plane to support the wood frames.  Initially, I had no idea how to attach the structure to the warehouse level,” explains Clozza. “But after taking a look at the latest in wooden bowls, we came up with the idea to introduce steel elements, which would not only enhance the look, but it would make it easier to connect to the shelving level.  And it solved the issue of protective parapets along the edge.”

Because scaffolding would block employees’ access to active shipping and receiving, he borrowed a solution from another Milanese pastime, rock climbing. Clozza would swing from a harness across cinema space during assembly.  Marco used similar contraption of carabineers and climbing rope, nicknamed the Bastard Crane, to lift the CNCed parts to their proper place. 

Phat Flattening

After a skeletal frame took shape above the warehouse, attention turned to the skating surface. Using an early release of a new Rhinoceros plug-in called Advanced Flattening, Bernardini and Clozza could translate surfaces curved in two directions into flat cookie-cutter patterns for an automatic router. “The biggest problem was the double radius of curvature of the panels,” says Clozza.  “According to the material and thickness, there was a maximum degree of bending we could do to fit it securely to the base structure without breaking.”

At first, Clozza used the Rhino plug-in to panelize the surface as interlocking polygons, like a soccer ball.  After Clozza’s trial installation on to the frame, they found a three–to-four-millimeter gap between the bent plywood– too big of a crack for smooth skating.  The team then went back to the drawing board and chose a simpler geometry for the panels.  “We found that panels with straighter lines gave the maximum dimension to curve the plywood in two directions,” says Clozza.

“After several tests, we came up with the final solution that made the spaces less than one millimeter between the panels,” adds Bernardini. “This was the key feature for obtaining a perfect flowing effect.”

Curves for the Community

After unveiling a few months ago, the Bastard Bowl has attracted legions of skate fanatics around the region to Bastard’s flagship store.  The track now regularly hosts demonstrations from visiting professional skaters, as well as after-hours skate parties for Comvert staff and customers.

For Clozza, the project was his first experience with digital manufacturing. “Absolutely it’s the future of construction,” he says.  Work on the Bastard Bowl has inspired him to put digital curves in other wood projects, which can be seen on his blog (www.atelier-lc.com), along with the full photographic story of building the ultimate Italian skate track.

The Comvert team discovered that digital manufacturing of product design can easily be applied to large-scale architectural structures. “Modifications and adjustments during the work were very few, so assembly went quickly,” says Bernardini.  “This project proved to be an experimenting ground for materials and assembly techniques, even for the most experienced on our team.  Individual experiences and contributions gave birth to a collective work that belongs to all of us.” For more information on the Bastard Bowl and everything related, visit: http://blog.bastard.it/tag/bowl

And here’s some video, courtesy of the team at Antiz.