To achieve b l e u concept, it took six full months to the team.
But in fact iit took previously another half-year to bring the team together, a group made of a creative designer, two concept modelers, two vizualization experts, two class A surfaces modelers, one mechanical modeler...and one Objet Connex 260 printer.
As part of the core-team, I was supervizing Class A surfaces, mechanical modeling and 3D printing operations, and I was really pleased to access this Connex great technology to iterate on our own designs. Briefly, the printer is able to mix 2 resins of a kind and get a pallet of various materials available during printing. What is amazing is not only the mix of colours, but also the mix of material properties. See how blacker is the material you pick, softer it is:
b l e u - Early concepts and shape research
"b l e u" design brief was : Gran Turismo Coupé (2 doors) | 4 Seats | Dassault Group heritage (Aerospace) | French GT cars heritageThat was the starting point for our creative, Arthur Coudert. Very early in the project, Arthur was able to sketch his ideas in 3D and iterate with concept modelers for the digital sculpting.At this stage, shape research is everything especially concerning volumes and proportions. So let the next picture speak for itself:
This 10cm very first print of the car can make you smile, but actually you just cannot imagine how useful it has been to understand where we stood and how far we were from the sketched ideas
In fact we found out that low scale 3D printing was so complementary to any scale 1 reviews to validate design or reveal mistakes that we actually followed this process all along the ideation phase:
Pierre in front of the proposed variants in the DS cave
The corresponding set of 3D printed models
In addition to these low scale printed models (10cm), as the Connex printer resolution has a very welcome accuracy (slice resolution is down to 16µm, 33µm if multi-material mode is used) we also started to validate at a larger scale some very first details that could be covered in some parallel pro-active tasks like this side mirror
or tyre sculpture variants (where soft black material was very appreciated to feel like getting the real tyre rubber).
b l e u - Shape convergence & design freeze
We finally could elect our preferred 3D silhouette for the car (also called speedform), on which we did some last global deformation studies as we found out that the 1st chassis was too long and needed to be shorten
When decision was finally made, we could print our first larger model, fitting in the printer tray's diagonal, which corresponds in our case to a 1:18 scale model:
Although transparency can twist the perceptions of styling character lines, usage of VeroClear material was quite interesting to get some reflection 1st ideas and detect some unrevealed shape defects
.
See consistency between final render for marketing purpose vs. with transparent printed model (~14cm):
b l e u - final detailed design
Again, the very small printer resolution (33µm using 2 materials at the same time) allowed us to push the validation on 3D printed model along with high realistic render we could achieve in CATIA Live Rendering solution.
Final STL data
To get a better idea of this model, pls check this little movie in addition of previous pictures:
and the 3D :-)
And again, as a parallel task we could focus on an alternative rim model once tyre concept was validated:
b l e u - assembly design
Last but not least, the fun part of the project was to push some work to CATIA Mechanical Core Modeling team, using the power of the very intuitive CATIA Natural Shape application to design a chassis. The objective here was to produce through 3D printing a chassis prototype as an unremovable assembly, that could just be clipped on the car body, making b l e u look like a real usable toy. The result is just amazing, knowing it only required 1 day of 3D modeling. CATIA V6 Natural Shape application (formerly known as CATIA Live Shape) brings a lot of value there because it stands as an easy to learn solution to work on exact data and just manage through push & pull operations the creation of gaps between parts, holes to ease the cleaning operation after printing, and also iterate in case of any data preparation mistake. The design can easily be splitted into parts after geometry tuning and finally get converted to .stl files that Objet Studio (3D printer software) will immediately proceed as an assembly.
Again let the motion speak for itself :
Wanna print at your own end?
If you can access to a 3D printer facility, well just ask the data for detailled design, or download them for speedform
- speeform 3dxml 4 review: https://swym.3ds.com/#media:78769
- detailled design 3dxml 4 review: https://swym.3ds.com/#media:78772
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