DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

We’ve been known to like a tipple here at D3D, so we weren’t going to turn our noses up at the chance to look at the design of a new luxury vodka bottle.

Unfortunately the bottles were empty.

Industrial Design Consultancy (IDC) has just completed the project to develop the luxury vodka bottle with unique design appeal for upmarket brand Nordic Spirit.

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The Cryo Octane EDP-WS X5680 is a brand new water-cooled workstation. It features two overclocked six core Xeon X5680 processors running at 4.50GHz+ (35% faster than the stock Intel CPU) up to 96GB RAM, a choice of Nvidia Quadro (Fermi) graphics, and a number of mechanical and SSD drive options.

While a high-end machine with two Xeon X5680 processors, Quadro 5000 graphics and 12GB RAM will set you back over £6,000, Cryo PC also offers a number of more cost effective options featuring Quad Core (Westmere) Xeon processors. Machines can be configured online here.

CAD Manager - Sunseeker Ltd

Job Type: Permanent
Industry Sector: Product development and manufacturing - marine/shipbuilding
Software Packages: AutoCAD, NX
Location: Poole, Dorset

Luxury motor yacht company Sunseeker International Ltd are currently looking to recruit immediately for a position based between the design and IT departments to provide CAD/CAM (5 Axis) technical support, training, and implement best practice for its in-house CAD users.

Responsibilities will include:
- Technical support of CAD/CAM (5 Axis) Systems (NX, Teamcenter, & AutoCAD) to include patch management of applications, server releases and supplier liaison.
- Provide support for Plotting / Printing and Electronic File Submissions
- Implement user training and best practices
- Development and implementation of CAD Standards throughout the company
- Coordinating with Vendors and Suppliers: Uploading supplier parts and information into Teamcenter
- Harnessing Teamcenters reporting and Visualisation tools
- Provide documentation for all CAD systems
- Involvement in ongoing integration of Design data into ERP system.

To apply click here

If you have a vacancy that you are wanting to fill, get in touch here

Forget chocolate - real eggs decorated by robot is where it’s at this Easter

When I worked as a CAD operator back in the early nineties, we had a pen plotter. I remember being fascinated as it picked up different colour pens and went about its job of draughting complex engineering drawings at speed, line by line.

Well, that’s how I remember it from behind my rose tinted glasses. The reality was crying into the keyboard of my 486 as one of the pens ran out of ink right near the end of an hour-long plot.

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Autodesk’s new 2012 Product Design Suites come in three flavours: Standard, Premium and Ultimate

March has become the traditional time for the yearly release of Autodesk’s product updates. This year, however, the usual list of features and functions has taken the backseat to packaging and ‘bang for the buck’.

Previously Autodesk dabbled in creating Microsoft Office / Adobe Creative Suite-like bundles with products such as the Inventor Suite, but with the 2012 products this strategy has now been greatly expanded, offering discounts of between 18% and 68% on pricing.

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Motion capture goes a bit ‘Tony Stark’ with the new Motive Pro suit

Cambridge Industrial Design recently completed work on Motive Pro – a Motion capture suit for a small start-up company.

The brief was to design a body movement sensor system for sound generation comprising a control hub along with 16 sensor nodes attached to the body using neoprene/nylon straps.

The design involves a set of ‘nodes’ attached to the body via neoprene straps and a control ‘hub’ mounted on the chest (think IronMan!). The ‘hub’ feeds the positional data wirelessly back to a computer. The exciting thing is that this product is intended for a whole host of uses from music production to dance and maybe even computer games.

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Brad Peebler, CEO of Luxology. He’s a big fella and he likes his lukewarm beverages the same way.

Luxology is a company that’s risen in profile in the design and engineering world very quickly over the last few years. Perhaps the genesis of that is the rapidly growing adoption of its rendering engine, Nexus, by the likes of SolidWorks and Bentley Systems. Both of these systems (SolidWorks and MicroStation) have discarded older generation technology and implemented the Nexus renderer. This has enabled much more accurate previews (thanks to progressive rendering), quicker set-up times (thanks to HDRI -based lighting use) and much quicker calculation speeds.

Alongside the CAD integration of its technology, Luxology’s Modo modelling, animation and rendering system has been popping up on our radar more and more. While its background is solidly in the digital entertainment and animation world, the last few years have seen the organic modelling tools combined with stunning rendering capabilities to become a part of the designers and engineer’s toolkit (A perfect example is the work phil & teds are doing with it).

Look at the grain on that bad boy.

The last month saw the release of new resources for the Modo user interested in industrial design work. There’s the sunglasses tutorial set that shows how you can use Modo’s sub-divisional modelling tools to generate a design concept pretty damn quickly. Then there’s the Packaging Design and Construction Kit that’s quite breathtaking in its comprehensiveness. It takes the core base of Modo and adds in not only standard parts and libraries for caps, packaging examples, but delivers a workflow that’s ideal for anyone working in structrual packaging that wants to avoid the ball-ache of trying to do these things in a traditional CAD modelling tool.

So, with all that in mind, now seemed like as good a time as any to catch up with Brad Peebler, co-founder and CEO of Luxology.

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