Evolutionary Design – Intuitive, Featureless Modelling in 3D

Since the company was founded in 1994, the name Canto stood for quality and innovation in development, design, prototype and tool engineering. As a service provider, the company’s development is characterized by steady growth, constant adaption to the needs of its customers and a fast-changing market, including the addition of its own model construction and tool engineering.

Due to this expansion Canto is able to consolidate all the steps of design and production – starting with prototype engineering to series production – under one roof, making a tool like the SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer critical.

Perfect in form: Canto’s mascot represents all their expertise in prototyping. This object demonstrates vividly the advantages of injection molding, 3D printing and chipping manufacturing.

A “BUTT” as a Company’s Figurehead – A Conventional CAD Story

For the 20th anniversary, Canto was scouting for a mascot, an icon, and symbol for all their expertise in prototyping, mold making, design and several 3D printing technologies. The idea “butt with ears” was born. It is now an example for mold making versus 3D printing, as well as chipping production.

Today, the mascot — machined from a 550 pounds solid block of aluminum, a print model in shouting red, and several examples for molding technologies — can now be found in Canto´s offices and as part of “giveaways” at fairs and expositions. The project also was a huge chance for young designers and students to gain some experience out of the classroom. They took surveys to find the most charming and perfect shape for their “object.”

As in a real design finding process, there were dozens of designs revised, corrected and discarded – using conventional CAD modelling software. Every contour, every finest geometry feature was created using splines, lofts and several other heavy surfacing features. Some surfaces were created in different software and reassembled in a final CAD software to finalize the butt. A simple looking design line change to help make the design perfect took – as imagined – hours and days: Contour splines losing tangency definitions, curves and surfaces losing their references. A “red tree” is the result of this design changing impact. This is how a funny idea changes very quickly into a high cost project.

When Your Mouse Turns into a Real Tool

Today, after all design iterations were done to create the mascot’s final design, a second version of Canto´s symbol was launched – and it was created using SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer. A radical change of the “design finding” workflow was the result. As a virtual clay model, a primitive solid ball was pushed and pulled into the right shape.

No Curves. No Features. No tiring parametric model you need to teach how to build a shape out of curves and lofts. Suddenly it is possible to easily create what has already materialized in the designer’s mind – “subdivision modeling” makes it real. Design revisions can now be done in seconds by pushing and pulling surfaces into new shapes (see comparing picture below). No more painful feature and sketch remodeling. Easily to design – even more simple than directing a pen on paper – easily focusing all your mind on finding the one design and creating aesthetic products will set free a huge amount resources to be used in the design finding process.

Additionally, an unconventional tool is provided to ease up customer´s internal and external communication with decision makers and stakeholders: 3DSwym – the company´s own social network. It is created to invite all required persons to present a design revision and get it commented, voted and even manipulated. The decision process, which votes for a design, takes a more active role in the overall workflow. Now it´s possible to have a tool to share and gain feedback on your design in a dynamic way with everybody involved in the project – “cross team” collaboration is now possible.

Figure 2: Round glasses for nerd-version of the mascot

Figure 3: Modification of glasses: Just a little pulling and plugging on the surfaces and the form of the glasses turns oval. This process would have taken in SOLIDWORKS almost half an hour.

Figure 4: Object rendered with SOLIDWORKS Visualize

The Day After – Design Meets Engineering

The creative hours are gone – the final design is completed. The result is a perfect design done in the SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer,but now the design needs to find its way into the mold. Ribs and mechanical features need to be added; wall thickness are waiting to be applied. Functional and manufacturing-relevant features will be created. First renderings were done to communicate the design on a higher level. Everything done in SOLIDWORKS. Everything done without a way back to the design? No!

Not a long time after the design entered the engineering department, the first problems focusing on feasibility came along: Wall thicknesses needs to be changed, radii are too small and some curvatures and contours will not support the mold´s flow in the manufacturing process. The paralyzing process of changing features in depth is no longer required: The model will be corrected inside SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer and reloaded into SOLIDWORKS. All engineering features were still referenced: The mold´s cavities were changing by design, Ribs and slot connections found their design dependent new positions as well as referenced sketches and surfaces found their references after the updating process. Everything looked like the model never left SOLIDWORKS. A seamless collaboration of both contrary facing disciplines – design and engineering – is now possible. Furthermore SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer makes it possible to really have an evolutionary, dynamic design process.

Learn more about SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer by watching this recorded webinar, “What’s New in SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer.”