DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

Step up and show your talents people, Cut&Paste, the digital design tournament is on the hunt for entrants to this year’s competition.

Rolling into London town on 11 November, this is your chance to get up on stage and compete with the best of British designers.

To enter yourself into the rock and roll lineup (and we think you should!) check out the sign-up page here.

DEVELOP3D are getting involved this year: not only are we sponsors for the shindig, but we’ll be helping judge on the night, and providing a super special guest to take to the stage in Show&Tell - an insightful how-to with some of the brightest minds in the design community.

We’ll be providing full coverage of the event on the night, but until then we want you to get involved in some of this.

Take a look at CutandPaste.com

I ventured into London yesterday to see what the London Design Festival, which is being staged from 18 to 26 September at over 200 venues across the capital, had to offer. Despite the typical soggy British weather, I managed to stay mostly dry and see a number of rather interesting events and exhibits.

The Victoria and Albert Museum was my first stop as it’s the hub of the Festival. As well as hosting an extensive programme of seminars and special events, there are also a number of specially commissioned installations specifically for the Festival including Stuart Haygarth’s design which was made using discarded pieces of frame and installed on the grand marble staircase leading up to the architecture galleries.

I then headed over to Brick Lane in East London to have a nose around TENT London, which is in its fourth edition this year and houses over 200 designers in its exhibition space in the Old Truman Brewery. I made a beeline for the micro-show called Lab Craft: Digital Adventures in Contemporary Craft as I had previously interviewed one of the exhibitors - Daniel O’Riordan of Orchard Studio, creator of the Ripple Table - for a recent blog post. The show features 26 projects by designer makers who are all specialising in cutting-edge digital technologies such as rapid prototyping, laser cutting, laser scanning and digital printing.

Then, venturing into the main exhibition area, a stand that immediately caught my attention was Flux with its foldable plastic chairs. On closer inspection and after a chat to the company’s founder, Douwe Jacobs, I discovered that this Swedish company is aiming to bring well-designed foldable furniture to the market. The interesting thing is that each one is made from a single piece of injection-moulded polypropylene that can easily be folded into a strong chair. As Jacobs told me, they developed their idea in paper first and made over 80 prototypes until they found a design they were happy with. “The fault lines are so important to the shape so there was lots of trial and error,” he explains. They start production of their chairs in October and over 15 countries have already been lined up for distribution. The estimated retail cost per chair is £108.00 and, by the number of visitors milling around their stand, I am sure a number of pre-orders have been taken already.

Read more…

The LG SV770 Waffle. Not to be confused with real waffles. Or indeed, strawberries. Word to the wise. Don’t leave your phone in your dinner.

Korean manufacturing giant LG Electronics has recently introduced its first mobile phone designed with Delcam’s Tribrid Modelling technology which is built into many of its products, including PowerShape, ArtCAM and CopyCAD to name but a few.

LG’s new Waffle phone (which engadget seem less than enamoured with because it’s just a phone) features a surface texture created in the ArtCAM, wrapped around the body of a phone design produced with PowerShape. It is expected to be the first of a number of new models that will use the Delcam software to create the distinctive designs needed to build market share in the highly competitive and fashion-conscious mobile phone market.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, Tribrid Modelling is Delcam’s patented approach to design that adds triangle modelling to the solid and surface modelling options available in hybrid modelling systems. and it gives the ability to add triangle files of logos, branding, textures or other 3D decorations onto the surfaces of CAD models.

Staff from Delcam’s Korean joint venture, Hankook Delcam, had their first contact with LG in August of last year.  An initial presentation on the potential for Tribrid Modelling was followed by a longer meeting with a large group of designers from the company. Subsequently, Hankook Delcam produced a series of rapid prototype models to further demonstrate how the unique Delcam technology could produce sophisticated designs quickly and easily. The presentations were so impressive that LG decided to purchase the Delcam software in the following month.

According to the release, “This was both pleasing and surprising for Hankook Delcam as most potential customers in Korea insist on a comprehensive evaluation period before making any purchasing decisions.  Apart from the design capabilities of the Delcam software, the staff at LG were impressed with the full range of Delcam programs that could cover the whole design and manufacturing process for the phone cases.  In particular, they were pleased to see how quickly the software could generate machining data for tooling once the product designs were completed.”

We recently took a look at Delcam’s CopyCAD Pro which is in the latest issue of DEVELOP3D and a couple of months ago, a look at PowerShape 2010.

Back in May Nvidia told DEVELOP3D that there was going to be some big news later this year regarding some of the major CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) software developers taking advantage of GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) to accelerate solve times. Well, as far as CAE software developers go, they don’t come much bigger than Ansys, and the company has just announced details of a GPGPU (general-purpose GPU) accelerator capability inside a preview version of Ansys 13.0.

According to Ansys, by using GPGPUs, or more specifically Nvidia Tesla GPUs, it has been able to ‘dramatically reduce overall engineering simulation processing time by as much as half’ - an amount of time not to be sniffed at. Of course, all performance claims need closer inspection and it is important to note a couple of things, which are explained in more depth in this informative Ansys report.
1) This initial development only works with shared-memory equation solvers – i.e. those that take place within a single workstation – and 2) the reduction in processing time is compared to a single quad core Xeon chip.

Read more…

We’ve been talking Inventor Publisher for sometime, since getting a quick look at it at Autodesk University last year. Providing a system for taking 3D data and creating work instructions, graphical service instructions and the like, it shipped with Inventor 2011. At the time of the launch, the team also showed how the instructions could be delivered via Apple’s iPhone. The new is that the team is going to shipping these tools later in the year in the form of the Inventor Publisher Mobile Viewer app. Along with this, the main application is going to be enhanced with tools to add detail views, section planes, bill of materials (BOMs), and parts lists. It’ll be available the end of September (varying globally) - and we don’t know how much it’ll be because Autodesk has stopped publishing and giving price details of late.

Final note: Rob Cohee has a nifty little video that looks at the system and what it’ll be able to do.

This week’s question is all about what you look for in a job

Following the success of last week’s poll, we took a little time to analyse the results, locking away D3D’s editor in chief with the stats - here’s what he had to say:

“The results are in from our first weekly poll and we got a good response, enough to show that there’s some interesting results and conclusions to be drawn.

So, further questions I wonder about are these, particularly relating to the third party add-on world. Are those mission critical applications that you’re waiting on, are they CAM solutions, data management solutions or more specialised tools? Also, how do you know when your clients have upgraded? Is a diktat sent out or is it more informal?”

Feel free to leave your comments below.

But now for some more Monday morning clickable democracy with our question for this week:

Last week AMD launched the ATI FirePro V9800, which it hopes will help bring down the cost of large scale visualisation on powerwalls by driving up to six HD displays from a single graphics card.

The theme continued this week with the news that Mersive Technologies, a specialist in so-called ‘beyond HD display solutions’, has launched a new display system called the M-Series. It uses six HD projectors, which sit at the rear of the system, to produce one seamless image that is stitched together.

The 11-megapixel display delivers a whopping 157-inch diagonal image, almost six times the resolution of HD, while using a footprint that is only 24 inches deep. According to Mersive, the big selling point of the M-Series is that it “eliminates the need for room reconfiguration and specialist HVAC and building infrastructure.” The company also reckons that the system costs 70 percent less than a typical 11-megapixel display. It uses Mersive’s SOL Harmony display management software engine that automatically aligns, color balances, and maintains image quality across multiple projectors.

Imagine having one of those in your living room to hook up to your PC gaming system