The areas that 3D rendering can really help is, first of all, improving the product's marketability. Secondly, it allows engineers and
product owners to get a proper understanding of the product's form
throughout the design process. You’ll actually understand
what the thing looks like without having to make
a physical prototype. And third, because you get these
tools as part of the process, you can create marketing
content along the way. You can be selling that product
even before you've made it. A new process these days really
should be industrial design first. In our experience. Trying to satisfy the function
that's required from a product. And then creating form. So create some Blender models,
which are just solid models that we push and pull around
and we mould them like clay. Make them look organic,
make them look really nice and saleable. And then from there, take those
products and put them into CAD, where the engineers can do the
engineering to make it manufacturable. The way we used to do things previously was we would basically
just jump straight into CAD. From there you kind of end up
wrestling with a CAD machine that kind of allows you to do all sorts
of crazy things that may not be required just to create something that's,
you know, shaped in a certain way. So Blender gives more freedom to people
who know how to use it, like Nicole. Nicole is an amazing artist, especially
with vector art, things like that. But where she's really shone now
is this 3D modeling using Blender. This system here that Nicole’s showing
now was for a client of ours, HydraTune. We had been given a brief on
what the product needed to be. The device could have literally
been a box with a removable battery. We knew we wanted it to be
anodised CNCed aluminium. One of the major requirements that
we wanted for this particular product was to protect the antennas. So the antennas are quite large
because the device needs to work in quite a rugged environment. It's going to be working in steel
machines, which impedes the RF. And the larger antenna helps
us basically get the best Bluetooth connection
back to the tablet as possible. We came up with an idea
to have these ribs. Nicole went through process
where we started off with basically the simplest design which would
provide the function that we needed. But the form was probably less
organic or less marketable, per se. And then we incrementally iterated
it across different designs, And we made those changes in Blender
without doing any CAD, figure out what the customer wanted. The customer wanted the most
extreme looking one, which is awesome. And then we took that Blender model
and put it into SolidWorks. This was a hand-held emergency stop device
using long range RF for autonomous trucks. Katherine, Nicole and myself
came up with hand sketches of roughly the size and shape we would like
to functionally have something work. We wanted a hole for a belt loop. It had to be big enough to basically have a battery that
would last a certain amount of time. So we did some engineering to be able to
figure out how big that battery might be. We then knew that we wanted a button
that was going to be the emergency stop that had to be covered. So that's kind of that
lid on that side there. And then we wanted
some other inputs as well. So we wanted to be able
to turn the thing on and off. We had our liquid silicone rubber flaps
that we use on the Cranio, so we wanted to be able to recharge it
by having a USB plug. And then we set Nicole to work. What do you usually do here, Nicole? You basically copy and paste
and change as you go? Just duplicate and iterate and
try different sizes and spacing. And for this one, since we had like a good idea of like
what kind of shape we wanted. And then it was just a case of,
do we want this to be smaller or larger? Where do you want the buttons to be? Do you want a singular button
or a round button or a square button? Or where do we want
little LED lights to be? Which areas can we actually fit stuff in? Yeah, yeah. So this was a combination of myself
going really hard on in CAD and then getting feedback to Nicole. Okay, what about if we change this? What about we change that shape? We were doing sort of a hybrid approach
where we would be in CAD and in Blender at the same time,
but Blender was primarily used to kind of figure out
what would look nice to the end user. What was functional for the end user. This is a good way of doing things
to explore things quickly and a really good interface between engineers and designers is probably key to getting good use out of the tools
and getting quick wins, I guess. If you’ve got a preexisting CAD model, we can basically bring it directly
from CAD format directly into Blender. And then we would basically texture it. Normally I'd get the CAD model in. And it would be no textures at all. And then I just make sure each of the individual bits are separate
from each other. Yep. Yep. Or go into them individually and highlight
different parts to do specific textures. And then making sure that all the bits
don't have any holes in them or missing any pieces. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have a specific CAD format
that is easiest to use, or?.. Usually we convert them to OBJ files. Ah, okay. So we can open them in Blender easily. So we've created a library of textures that
we basically then can apply to any product. You’re also using a renderer, or a shader,
that gives us photorealism as well. Yeah. Using Cycles, a render engine. These are some textures that we've created
for the Cranio product suite, is that right? Cranio is anodized aluminium. It's got a plastic, I think it's
an acetal CNC machined machined plastic top, which one
day we’ll plastic injection mould. This here is emulating an
anodized aluminium look. We've got some for rubbers,
for silicones, for plastics. This is a sand texture. Wow, look at the tiny little grains. Yeah. So what do you do? You actually throw the sand on there,
let it drop or something? It's actually a displaced texture
that comes out from the plane. And on top of it, I've used
geometry nodes to disperse a whole lot of grains on top of it
to give it a more realistic texture. Yeah, nice. Without having to go overboard with physics. So you've actually emulated a backdrop. Is that right? Yeah. So you emulated a backdrop,
and then you've positioned a camera, you’ve given the camera specific
focal point and features. And then you're placing in lights. Is that right? Yeah. That’s a pretty cool environment. Did you make that? I got assets and place them into the scene. So you’re physically putting in, like, sticks and twigs and dirt and
grass and stuff, which is awesome. The more simplistic way you can do it is
basically bring in what's called back plate. You bring an environment in
and it's like a big spherical picture. You place your cameras
towards your 3D model. You drop that 3D model in space,
say onto a floor or whatever. You can have different lights. So like the sun or other bits and pieces
that come as part of the environment as well. So this is one of the reasons
why we would want to use something like Blender over SolidWorks
Visualize and things like that. SolidWorks Visualize may not be able
to handle the level of complexity that's involved in these things. Because, you know, some of
those leaves and things like that, they're actually little modelled up little pieces that in a CAD program could be very heavy. So this sort of program handles it much better. You can create blockbuster
movies in this in this software. So there's no reason why you can't use it
for your product development as well. Special effects is the cool stuff,
the new stuff we're getting into. What is this one doing? It's melting. Animated texture and melting metal. So it's actually creating a model, heating that model, and almost emulating the realistic elements. So in Finite Element Analysis, we bring in a mesh
of 3D elements, and then we put stress on it. This here is kind of doing that. It's creating a mesh and then
applying some physics to it. And then all the elements
sort of move on each other. So this is the stuff that I tried to play around with years and years ago,
but I never really got my teeth stuck into. When you're doing sort of things like this,
which is obviously for marketing material for some of our customers
and their industrial products, we want to be able to show people
what a product may go through or what it's capable of. So we can do things like dust,
we can create smoke, we can create fire. You can do water simulation. It's not fluid dynamics. It’s not 100% accurate to what the
fluid might do in real life, but it's close. It's got a lot of mathematics in there that
have been derived from real world properties. But just with rendering and camera dynamics
overlaid on it to make beautiful visuals. Like dust in the air. Nice. Dust particles, yeah. Imperfections on the surface of things
really make a difference to photorealism. Because, you know, when you see a render
without any of those things in it, it looks fake. So you can apply those
as part of the texture. There you go. So we can see there's some scratches
and things like that. We expect these Cranio devices to be used and abused out in the mine sites and oil and gas. Put up on poles or run around in trucks
or, you know, in the production plant. So when we're creating marketing content,
we really want to be able to emulate what this thing
looks like in the real world, what it might look like in the real world. The major advantage of that is we're getting marketing content out before we've even made one. So we've got, obviously we’ve got a few golden devices here. We literally have one device
with all the seals in it. The seals aren't tinted yet,
it doesn't look like a real one. We don't have the fascias on there. We're not ready to take that to market. So these visuals that we can create
from 3D rendering technology can allow us to get marketing content out way, way earlier than actually having a physical product. It also allows us to refine the the design, refine the the form, fit, and function, before we have even made one. So virtual prototyping is absolutely
number one, of course. What’s this here, some foam or something? Snow. Snow, cool! That was an add on, Real Snow. And that also comes
with the snow texture as well. And when it renders, it's extra detailed
than it is currently in the viewport. So Blender again being open source,
there’s people that create add ins. And you can basically just download them
from a massive library, snap them in, and use the GUI to configure,
configure what you need. Yeah, amazingly powerful.
It's the way of the future. I tried to do this back in the day with Blender. And I got like really bad water droplets
that sat on a Cranio top hat. The original design that I had was
untextured, or partially textured. And I managed to get water that would flow and
then go down to all the little holes and stuff. But now you've actually taken it
and gone to the next level. Are they like little water droplets
you've put on there? Physical water droplets,
I mean, you've textured them? Yeah. With a water texture. How did you put them on there? There was a geometry node that I used to
scatter them on top of the actual object. So with this, I could change how
much it actually shows up on it. You know you're doing, like, maths and
coding and stuff just with the visual GUI. That's pretty cool. The other content we can create
from this would be animations. Marketing content on the way something works. So if you're trying, especially
with a lot of the complex products that we work on, a lot of the time it’s
very hard to get across how the thing works
or why it does that thing. It's not a hard thing to do. It just takes a lot of effort to
set it up, to be, to look nice. Effort and time. Yeah, time and love, I would say,
is the inputs for an animation. But the output can be a really good
understanding of what the product's going to do for the customer. This is the BusMin logo. It's a graphic for the BusMin website. Yeah, yeah. Because BusMin means Busyness Minimised. So we're trying to get rid of the busy
work inside a business. And my version being busy less
was having a martini on a beach. So this became sort of like the
ad hoc logo for BusMin for a while. So how have you created this? I've never seen this style before. It's a 3D model with a texture
that allows it to look like a 2D image. A toon shader, I believe. Toon, as in cartoon. Yeah, toon shader. Blender just gives you
so many possibilities to make interesting marketing material. This is the stuff that I only dreamed of. So my background is in tyre design. That's what I did my thesis on. Magna Tyres was one of the two first companies
that employed us, Element Engineering, as a service provider. Yeah, we basically created 3D models used for marketing content only for Magna back in 2010. And we were using SolidWorks Photoview. And then we knew that we wanted to use Blender,
we knew the capabilities of Blender. And Nicole's really taking them
to the next level now where we're basically bringing those 3D models in. We're texturing them with all these
textures that we keep improving. Are you applying, like, dust
and things like that, or is it just one texture that is algorithmically driven? One texture. And then I adjust it
for each of the tyres. Bar any special requests
that we get from them. Tyre rubber, especially some of these larger tyres, it’s quite hard to emulate the texture itself. Sometimes it can be really shiny,
sometimes it can be texture-y. If you zoom in on one of those lugs. You see the texture that pops out there? That's the texture that looks very similar to real life. But sometimes from certain flat sections,
you get this really real sheen come off it. Which you can obviously see there,
which Nicole's really done well with. And these striped sections. Is that a texture as well
or are they physical? Those are physical ones. Yeah. So that’s a pretty detailed texture. Each one of those nodes is
basically trying to do a different thing. And it's using algorithm or using
mathematics, basically, to pick out. So that part is trying
to pick out the outside, I guess. That part’s
trying to pick out the whole surface. That's picking up just the outside
curvature of the extremes. So do you tweak the numbers? Yeah. Yeah, cool. Whether or not it's flat on the edge or round. We've created something like over
a hundred different CAD models now. But the marketing material is
the main one we do for them. The best case scenario
is that the engineers and the industrial designers
are all working as one. And so that's what we're really trying to achieve here. So using these rendering
technologies through the process is, I think, key to differentiating
a good product from a really good product. And it can really help. I think probably the biggest thing
is boosting sales, number one. The product looks as good as it performs. Secondly, it draws the eye in. It may actually attract users that
may not have been attracted before from if it was, you know,
more boxy or more simplistic. And it may allow you to explore and allow the design team
to explore options that would take time and effort,
more time and effort to do in CAD. So Nicole is much better at being able
to create different shapes and things. We might hand sketch something out. The design thinking is a lot different
to the engineering thinking as well. Engineering thinking
you might be distracted by, well that's got to be this thickness because of this. We can allow a bit more freedom
in these surfacing tools to be able to create different forms that then would have a better impact
on the product at the end of the day. That is awesome. Show this one for fun. That is so awesome. A neon sign version of our logo. And the texture on the wall
and everything. Who wouldn't want this on their website?
