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Automotive styling Print E-mail

P&D Studio excels at automotive styling projects with T-Splines

The customer

The design firm PD-studio, a division of AJ Technology, s.r.o. , provides product design, industrial design and 3D modeling services.


www.pd-studio.cz

“For organic shapes, such as this car bumper design, the ability to work with a single surface in T-Splines is essential. I can explore different shapes and move creases and edges on the surface with ease while maintaining a single continuous surface the entire time.”
- Pavel Zákravský, Industrial Designer, PD Studio

Case Study

The challenge

PD Studion Car Bumper Design David Jurda and Pavel Zakravsky are the design team behind PD-studio. They both studied industrial design and started working together on projects after finishing school. Initially, they worked on product designs and visualizations for a diverse group of clients, but these days they mainly work for car tuning companies.

Automotive styling is one of the most demanding 3D surface modeling tasks in product design. The surfaces have to be seamless and meet stringent demands for smoothness and continuity. At the same time, the design has to meet specific aesthetic and manufacturability requirements for the client.

Complex shapes, such as the front bumper design for a Porsche Panamera pictured at left, are the most challenging. The surfaces of the bumper are difficult to model in traditional NURBS techniques and any changes to the design can be very time consuming. David and Pavel work under tight schedules for their car tuning clients, so they need the best tools to allow for faster design and more concept iterations.

The solution

T-Splines provides the capabilities they need. For organic and complex shapes, such as the Porsche Panamera bumper, Pavel prefers using T-Splines. The ability of T-Splines to work with the entire model as a single surface during the shape refinement process speeds up the process.

The design started from a perspective sketch, and some input scans of the original bumper were used to model the assembly points of the part. Pavel used a control polygon to create the T-Splines surface. He then manipulated the surface, constantly working toward the final design by changing the shape and position of the intakes, moving and adjusting creases and tweaking the sharpness of selected edges. Pavel also leveraged the symmetry feature of T-Splines to focus on only one half of the front bumper. Even when making some radical shape changes during the design, T-Splines maintained a single gap-free surface, allowing for faster and easier design iterations.

Once the final shape was determined, he used the push-button conversion to NURBS and added some final details in Rhino. The finished part was then used as input for milling the mold.

The car tuning client was very satisfied with the result and the car with the new bumper design was presented at the recent 2010 Geneva Motor Show.

Future Direction

David and Pavel are using T-Splines version 2 as a standard part of their design tool set for new projects. With the help of T-Splines they are looking forward to gaining more clients from the automobile and car tuning industries.

Learn more

To learn more about how P&D Studio completed their project with the help of T-Splines, you can download the full case study here or on our case studies home page.

To learn more about Rhino, please visit www.rhino3d.com

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