NAIC at Night

To say that 2020 has been a bad year would be an understatement of epic proportions.  But hang in there everyone, we are more than two thirds of the way through this year and there are promising utterances of a vaccine on the way.  Still, this year will arguably go down as the single most memorable year in human history.  A world war was certainly terrible but thankfully it really was only fought in a few countries.  Covid-19 affected every single sector of human activity in every country, and that also includes cars.  It will shape the car industry for years to come.  It affected the product line, the design of cars, shared mobility and society overall.

The Product Line 

As human activity started to shut down in March, everyone felt the cash crunch.  Car sales around the world grinded to a halt.  Want an eye-popping statistic?  The 1.4 billion people in India bought a staggering zero vehicles in April 2020.  If your business case for a vehicle line was not strong before, COVID19 was probably the final blow.  Nobody is immune to this new reality.  Volkswagen has been on a tear to turn around its green credentials.  Prepare yourself for an onslaught of green ID vehicles of all sizes.  With Dieselgate and the COVID related cash crunch, VW is taking a long look at its luxurious (and polluting) portfolio.  The wildest rumour is that Rimac will take over its crown jewel Bugatti.  And nobody else in the VW empire is safe. 

Design Goes On 

Just recently General Motors issued an official statement: its staff will stay home until June 2021.  That certainly does not mean that design work stops.  And that has been true for all of the design studios around the world.  Sure, there has been contraction and furloughs worldwide, but the work has continued.  Automotive design has always been at the cutting edge of technology.  Why?  It costs billions to put a car on the road.  By investing heavily in technology, you maximize the chances of getting your product right.  Those technological investments certainly paid off.  With design studios all around the world, OEMs have long mastered conference calls, secure review rooms for 3D CAD reviews and virtual reality tools.  

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The clock said 23h00 but at least I finished my bike. I got the materials, the lighting and the set ready. I clicked “render” and went home. I suspected it would take Alias a few hours to calculate the 1280 x 1024 image I asked for. I came back to the Tinkertoy building the next morning. In the computer lab I was greeted with evil stares and for good reason. When I turned on the monitor the computer was still rendering 12 hours later, completely hogging the machine.

A generation later, the same image is rendered in seconds. Welcome to the crux of the battle. Along with Hollywood and gaming, the automotive industry is one of the biggest spenders in computer graphics, a never-ending arms race in hardware and software. It costs billions to put a car on the road. Modelling a vehicle is only a small part of the battle. It is essential to visualise the design as fast and as accurately as possible, all along the design process. This process can be divided in three categories: real time, calculated images and animation.

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Corvette in Blender

If you have some time to kill on Google Street View, check out the original campus of the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.  If you go to this location, you’ll find the nicknamed Tinkertoy building.  The computer lab was on the third floor.  It was a mysterious room, hot, dark and full of very colourful computers.  I had never seen such computers before and for good reason.  Those were Indigo boxes made by Silicon Graphics.  They could cost you more than $50,000 apiece.  Only big companies and schools were able to afford them.  I attended my first 3D class with Alias more than 20 years ago at that location.  I logged in and for all intents and purposes I never logged out.  From my first class I was completely hooked on digital modelling.  I stumbled into a world that literally had no limits.  More than 20 years later, let’s have a look at the state of digital modelling.

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