Virtual Prototyping at Bosch Siemens Hausgeräte ... - PI-VR GmbH

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Virtual Prototyping at Bosch
Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH
Nowadays, almost every industrial designer or engineer is confronted
with VR technology when trying to compress the development time of
their products and projects. Early-staged product data has to be analyzed
and visualised in time, while the final data might be used for pursuing
marketing campaigns. VRED Professional is software that is especially
designed for these demands: 3D visualisation is the solution more and
more companies count on.
VRED has been widely adopted in the global automobile industry; in
other manufacturing and development situations the software is gaining
traction, but is still unknown by some users. It is used in different
engineering and design departments when it comes to Virtual
Prototyping and product visualisations. For users, the software helps to
close the gap between different workflows among a variety of
departments. Even though VRED Professional is a high-cost software
solution for Virtual Prototyping and high-end visualisations, the ROI is
obvious within a short period of time after implementation.
Here, Marc Pascó from B/S/H Bosch Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH gives
an insight into how VRED Professional is used in his company:
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“When looking for a new VR software, VRED succeeded against
Deltagen and Showcase in a benchmark, because of its speed and render
quality. After that, B/S/H decided to implement VRED throughout their
whole product development lifecycle. Engineers use it for virtual
prototyping; the design department use it for animations and to review
their ideas in presentations. Recently, the marketing department has also
started using VRED to create final renderings of new products. In the
future, VRED shall also be used for training.
“The clipping tool for cutting through an object at any point and hiding
the outer parts of a product come in very handy when analyzing material
composition of a part.
“At the beginning it was very hard to convince the designers to use
VRED Professional, because they were used to Keyshot. On the one
hand, VRED is very complex software with a lot of features and finding
the right icons or modules is not always easy. On the other hand, Keyshot
does not offer the same range of functions that VRED Professional does.
The customised training avialable from the PI-VR team is very helpful
when getting started.

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“The main features that convinced B/S/H to invest in the costly software
are the real-time ray tracing engine and the amount of data you are able
to work with. You can cluster as much hardware as needed and work on
your scenario in real-time. With the new ‘team center’ application offered
by the PI-VR and implemented at B/S/H, every department can upload
their actual files and the virtual prototype is updated every day.
“I guess, in the future it will also be necessary to have an intelligent VR
software. In order to improve design and production processes even more,
our software should be able to find out what next step the user wants to
do when working with the product. The interaction between software
and user has to be optimized. As mentioned, the interface of VRED still
needs some improvement in order to make it more intuitive.
Nevertheless, so far, no other software offers the same quality when
rendering at such high speed.”
VRED Professional comes in a modular configuration in order to leave
the product as customisable as possible.
VRED helps you to upload your CAD model, add material to your
geometry, chose lighting, set cameras, load up an HDR image and stage
products in an impressive scenario — all this in real-time. If you want to
go one step further and convince Management boards or clients with an
impressive presentation, Cave- or Power Wall-Setups can be accessed in
mono or stereo display. For accelerated rendering or for handling very
large data, you can use a number of distributed rendering technologies.
VRED Professional includes important functionalities like the analyzing
module, which plays a central role in an engineer’s daily work. By
enabling engineers to take a closer look at the displayed content, surface
analysis, point to point, edge to edge, or even joint measurements and
many more are conducted in a virtual set-up. Also included is a clipping
tool, that can create object slices in order to cut through geometries and
get an overview of the insights. Intersections can be saved for later
evaluations when needed. Annotations can be added to any geometry of
the scene and saved within the dataset. This is especially useful when
different departments work on the same prototype.
Apart from the technological and development side, VRED Professional is
also used by 3D artists and photographers to realise marketing campaigns
for their clients. Different Camera set-ups include a lot of tools (e.g. Field
of View, Depth of Field) that can also be found in the professional
photographer's terminology. For example, with the animation tool motion
blur and depth of field effects can be implemented for objects in motion
on such a high level that almost no image editing software (e.g. Adobe
Photoshop) work has to be added. Lighting or lensflare effects can mimic
reality from within VRED. Again, it is the speed of the rendering system is
the real USP for most of the PI-VR's clients.
The new version 6.0 of VRED Professional, which is to be released
imminently, offers new features that give engineers and designers the
chance to work on visualisations on a new level of perfection.
For example, the new daylight system opens up new possibilities for the
physically correct simulation of objects in different day and night
situations. Also, newly integrated functions like subsurface scattering for
the simulation of translucent objects or 3D real-time displacement to
realistically deform surfaces lead to high-quality results.
A completely reworked and ergonomically improved MaterialEditor, as
well as the new material library in available in VRED Professional 6.0.
Now, new materials like denim, silk, and velvet can be added to the scene
and the user gets instant photorealistic feedback. New icons offer
orientation and control over single commands and options.
Together with the newly integrated interactive render passes, a 360°
spherical lens has been implemented. You can look at your interactive
render passes in real-time which enables you to make changes especially
on your Depth or Material ID pass. (VRED Pro Youtube Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/VREDPRO?feature=mhee)
As with every software, there still is some room for improvement. A
problem facing uptake of the software is that not a lot of people know
how to use VRED! To combat this, PI-VR recommends in-house training
and also offers project specific consulting. On the one hand, it might be
easier to learn and use VRED Professional when effort will be put into
further development of the User Inferface. On the other hand, VRED
Professional is supposed to be used by people with know-how in 3D
visualisations. Starters can try VRED Essentials which costs €999 and is
used mainly for on the field pre-visualisations.
Developments in the automobile and even textile industry show that in
the future, Virtual Prototyping and other VR technologies will play a
more and more important role. It is especially necessary to have a
prototype at an early stage of product development to reduce production
costs. VR software like VRED Professional 6.0 comes in handy for
optimising workflows at an early stage.
PI-VR
www.pi-vr.de
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