Rhino 3D Modeling Process

Rhino 3D is different from parametric 3D CAD programs in the respect that there is no design feature tree. Since Rhino 3D is not feature-based, the line(s) or curve(s) for a surface are independent from the surface by default.

With that being said, however, there are different methods to preserve the building history of a 3D model. And certain parent/child relationships can be established and maintained when the design is updated. I can either 1) turn on Record History or  2) manage to separate curves/lines and the surfaces created from them into different layers.

 For method 1) turn on Record History:
Based on Rhino's help menu: the History command "Stores the connection between a command's input geometry and the result so that when the input geometry changes, the result updates accordingly. For example, with History recording and Update turned on, a lofted surface can be changed by editing the input curves."

When using method 2) with layers to manage the parent/child relationships, I will assign lines/curves to one layer and create a new layer. Then the new layer will be set as the current layer from which the new surfaces will be created. Next time when I need to update the sketch profiles in lines/curves, new surfaces will be generated from the updated lines/curves without interfering with existing surfaces.

As direct editing function is a natural way to create, edit and generate 3D models in Rhino 3D, it will require more efforts from me to get familiar with the 2 above-mentioned methods in maintaining parent/child relationship.

Process Lab in Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Anyone who is interested in product design should pay a visit to Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum if he or she happens to be in New York City. The visit will be a one-of-the-kind experience for a design aficionado. The museum just reopened its door this year after renovation. Even though the museum is still located in the existing historic Carnegie Mansion by Central Park, it is aimed at providing immersive experience for its visitors through the physical exhibition display and interactive media. It offers each visitor who pays admission at the counter a high-tech wand so-called “the Pen” by the museum to collect his/her images from the exhibitions, interactive tables or his/her own creation on the tables. The Pen helps storing up the visitor’s collection onto Cooper Hewitt’s website from which the visitor can retrieve the collection on his/her own devices after the visit. Designers at Cooper Hewitt in charge of this unique user experience design shared an very interesting coverage on how they develop and design the user experience.

However, for designers, the most impressive part of the new museum is the process lab. In this newly created Process Lab, Cooper Hewitt has drawn on its extensive experience through the years in planning and providing education programs on design for people of all ages to create an immersive learning space that brings the design process to life. The museum asks a visitor to “play designers” in this lab to gain the first hand experience on how things are created and made through the design process. Isn't it that we used to do role playing in our childhood play time? So play designers will enable the visitors to immerse in the design experience. Guided by the display panels in the lab showing assorted design processes, methods, and approaches, visitors can try their hands on designing objects. These guiding principles on the panels to me are reminiscences of methods and skills I have acquired in the design school, such as:

·       Brainstorming
·       Think of the human scale when designing: as on one corner of the wall showing Henry Dreyfuss Associates’ male and female figures from its groundbreaking book, the Measure of Man and Woman
·       Mix and match to improvise an interesting combination (or an impromptu0
·       To draw and to make prototype

In problem solving section of the lab, IDEO showcases its renown design process and its real-world case study. And once again IDEO proves itself to be the world class innovation consultant firm.

The lab even shows a latest 3D printer at work and its output samples. The 3D printers combining with Computer-Aided-Design programs are creating new realm of design that has never been envisioned before. As it is evident in the generative design  samples in this lab that are part of bio-mimicry and part of pattern morphology.

The lab very much leans toward introducing visitors to design process used by industrial designers, mechanical engineers, and human factor specialists with very light coverage on the graphic, interior or architectural design. But for novices to design process, going through the tasks offered in this lab definitely will make their experience with design very engaging and immersive. And for designers, this is the place to rekindle with skills and knowledge we should implement daily in our projects.

Relevant details for consumer electronic product design

One day in June when my wife and I strolled down the street in Quebec City during our vacation, a company’s sign caught her attention. It says Advanta Design Industriel. She guessed it must be an industrial design firm. We peeped through the window and, yes, it is a design studio with people working in there. She wanted me to take a picture of the sign for our vacation memory, but I thought why bother, I have seen so many design firms in the U.S.

After the trip, I decided to google the company and found its website. Wow, Bang! This company does put out some good stuff on its site that is worth noting. Mainly you will find it make itself very resourceful regarding the mechatronic design if you go to its expertise page. Right there you will get a glimpse of what an industrial designer needs to know about the details as well as inner working for the electronic products they may design. For example, a designer can learn:

1)      How the clear or translucent lightpipe can work as a conduit for transmitting LED light from PCB board to exterior control/display panel. I consider lightpipe design is crucial to dictate the locations of LED lights on control/display panel as in many projects I have to deal with this issue. It is related to PCB layout and physical sizes and locations of LEDs.

2)      How thin walls can be designed and molded. Thin wall plastic enclosure sometimes are created inevitably even engineers will suggest a designer not to. Here Advanta gives you the idea on how to make the thin wall design works – by using high pressure injection molding to increase the mold flow speed or by choosing the right resin to facilitate the mold flow.

3)      Soft touch overmolding – as the demand for good gripping on the handheld products escalates, the textured and soft touch are becoming the de facto finishing of product exterior surfaces. You will see TPE (thermoplastic elastomer) type of materials like Kraton or Santoprene are widely used in creating these soft touch gripping surfaces.

4)      Overmolding that in some cases combines soft and hard materials into one single part. Overmolding is prevalent in many product details where reducing the abrasion between components in an assembly or creating inmold decoration is required.

These design details featured in Advanta’s expertise page will be relevant to many industrial designers and will certainly help inspire them to unleash their creativities for more design options that take roots in gracious details. 

Quest for the strength of Rhino 3D

I have  came to know of Rhino 3D for more than 10 years. In the beginning, when it was still in its infancy, I downloaded the free trial version to play for a while. At the first sight of Rhino 3D, I was quite amazed because I thought how a NURBS modeling program can be so affordable. Back then I used Alias Studio at work to create some complex curvilinear shapes that were then hard to be modelled by Solidworks I used every day. Honestly I was a bit distasteful of Alias Studio. It was a program built on Silicon Graphics workstation and was very hard to use because it was so powerful and has so many variables that need my attention and tweaking. I was lost often in using Alias and thus quipped that learning to use Alias is like studying rocket science.

Then Rhino 3D came. It was offered as a low-cost but powerful enough NURBS modeling program under a unique business model of Robert McNeel & Associates. Though I downloaded the program to try but never paid a full attention to learn it. My company even sent me to learn it at Magnetic Visions in Brooklyn, NY in 2011. Through the training I learned the basic modeling skills in Rhino 3D, but thought that why bothering with Rhino while in Solidworks I can use hybrid of solid/surface modeling techniques to take care of most 3D modeling task.

I decided lately to dig deeper into learning Rhino and encountered several issues, which I have to get used to. The issues I have with Rhino 3D are: first of all, it is a program born out of AutoCAD era, meaning its interface bears the resemblance of CAD programs in that era. It has a command prompt window. Even though there is an alternative icon in pulldown menu to get to each command, a user still has to use command lines to get to the options under a command most of the time. Some commands are followed by the dialogue windows once selected, but only a few. Secondly, to make a sketch for modeling, the sketch normally falls on front, side, top or construction plane. This is something I have been struggling with because I am so used to parametric modeling in Solidworks where I can simply click on a plane surface to start a sketch. So far as I know, in Rhino to start a sketch it is easier to adhere the sketch to front, side, top or construction plane. Elevator Mode may be the only antidote I have found so far to break a 2D sketch away from the construction plane to which it adhere. Thirdly, Solidworks has simplified the steps of many model features that employ Boolean algorithm, for example, shelling a solid block. Shell command only becomes available since Rhino 5. Fourthly and the least is that Rhino is not a CAD program for engineers, it lacks the parametric modeling features and does not have a design feature tree that can be rolled back and forth as in Solidworks.

So that I have to bear in mind that certain modeling tasks can be done better elsewhere than in Rhino. I just have to find the strength of Rhino where other CAD programs fall short or cannot do better. Keep reading ....

T-Splines in Rhino: preparing NURBS surfaces in Rhino for T-Splines

When preparing T-Splines optimal surfaces in Rhino, I use Rebuild command to have enough control points on the surfaces. In this tutorial (https://youtu.be/JZ_bA_4XTpg), it teaches me how to prepare Rhino's NURBS surfaces to be used in T-Splines.

Plan surfaces in Rhino are all degree 3. It means the minimum point count in the U or V direction is 4. When the surface with 4 points in U or V direction is converted in T-Splines, I will get one single face. But if I increase the point count to 5 in U or V direction, I will get 2 in both directions or 4 faces total.

So it is easier for me to think in terms of how many faces are in my model when I convert them into T-Splines. If I want X faces in U or V direction in my T-Splines model, then I rebuild my NURBS surface to X plus 3 control points in that direction.

OnShape - the promise of CAD in the future is here now

I signed up a free account at OnShape and tried it today. I would say it is a promising CAD solution that could shape the future of CAD. By using OnShape, a user can experience what the things will come in CAD industry.

OnShape is a CAD system built on the cloud. Your internet browser is turned into a platform on which the CAD programs like OnShape can run. Whereas OnShape is more than a CAD program and that is why I call it a system. It comprises not just the CAD program, but the online collaboration tool, online data storage, and mobile app. Literally it is a Software as a Service system.

For starters: If you are not familiar with SaaS concept, you can look at the example of  salesforce.com as the harbinger of SaaS, or later Adobe’s Creative Cloud. The software is built on an online platform and is subscription-based without upfront purchase of the entire software. So a user of the software does not own a copy of the software and only pay the subscription.

As in the case of OnShape and other SaaS programs, the programs are constantly updated without version installation and/or upgrades. That is why OnShape is what the CAD programs look like in the future.

The 2 most distinctive features to me in OnShape are the direct editing function and online realtime collaboration. Given OnShape is a feature-based parametric modeling program, it allows a user to break the ranks of feature tree to directly alter the parameters on a feature and to determine the scope of propagating changes after the alteration. As far as online collaboration, OnShape’s development team claims that multiple users can work on different portions of the same part or assembly simultaneously.

The modeling tool in OnShape at this moment is heavily depending on 2D sketches and solid modeling. As an industrial designer, I would expect that more Spline curve and NURBS surfacing modeling tools will be added later to strengthen form creation capability inside OnShape. Or even further, it will be ideal that the subdivision modeling be also available in the future.

I have not tried out every major feature in OnShape but if all claims made by its developers are true, OnShpe will be an amazing and ground breaking development in CAD industry.
 

Best Design Trend Spotter Ever Online

The best online place for me to find inspiration and reference on design trends in form creation, material, color and finish is: AWOL trends, http://awoltrends.com/

Industrial designer Andy Logan set up his shop AWOL in southern California and has a company website at http://awolcompany.com/

He and the CMF (Color/Material/Finish) consultant Reiko Abo Morrison at the firm has done tremendous homework to spot and articulate the trends. They detail the findings in the page for a specific trend and then support the reasoning with plentiful examples gathered from all kinds of resource.   The collection of examples they assemble can come from visual art, architecture, interior design, fashion, graphics, and of course product design.

This design trend site is my go-to place if my project comes up and I am required to do research on design styles and trends. It is highly recommended for any designer or product development team member who want to scout for latest trends related to product design.