Computer Aided Styling (CAS)

Is purely digital modeling the future for the car industry or is the full-size clay model still the best design tool? Traditionally sculptors would use modeling plastcine for making small models or ‘maquettes’ before starting to carve in marble. Carving in stone requires great skill because, not surprisingly, once cut from the block, material cannot […]

Note: Link directs to the book preview hosted by Google Books. Master techniques from top automotive designers and world-class game developers with this insider’s guide to designing and modeling 3D vehicles. With techniques demonstrated in 3ds Max, Maya, XSI, and Photoshop, 3D Automotive Modeling starts with a fantastic series of hot concept designs and continues […]

An increasinq number of projects in in the automotive and aeronautical industry include Class-A surface quality as a competitive advantage. Quality control tends to be too subjective, however, as it is usually entrusted to human inspectors. Optical systems are showing qreat a promise with theis high resolution, but the relevance, geometrical correctness and correlation with […]

McLaren, the Formula One racing group that is attempting to flex its muscles in road cars, vows to build machines that will leave the likes of Ferrari, Porsche and Aston Martin in the dust. And this requires the company to move faster than its rivals to adopt the latest advancements in computer graphics technology for […]

Conceptual design in the automotive industry is a time-consuming process. Iterations between concept sketches, created with traditional two dimensional methods, and 3D digital representations of a prototype are currently one of the big bottlenecks. In this paper we present a framework for an integrated 2D-3D design environment. The core of the framework is a model […]

Although a great part of the new-product development process in automotive industry is already digitalized to some degree, the level of digitalization of the styling process is not so high particularly in view of concurrent engineering. This paper is (1) to investigate the state-of-the-art of computer-aided styling (CAS), (2) to propose desirable CAS guidelines reflecting […]

Design features such as the shape of headlights play an important role in defining the characteristic of an automobile. In this paper, we developed a method for investigating the effects of design features on the perception of automobile designs, by combining a new computer tool for fast and realistic visualization of different feature compositions in […]

This paper describes a new approach to industrial styling design that combines the advantages of pen-based sketching with concepts from variational design to facilitate rapid and fluid development of 3D geometry. The approach is particularly useful for designing products that are primarily stylistic variations of existing ones. The input to the system is a 2D […]

Anyone with an iPhone has probably downloaded one or two (or 8, in my case) sketching apps. Question: What do most of them have in common? Answer: They’re pretty bare-bones and basic, and do little to separate me from sketching on a sticky note. In fact, I haven’t found any real reason to sketch on […]

The rapid development of information technology has enabled many systems that support creative work. However, it has gradually become obvious that the latest information systems have a serious drawback in that instead of promoting creative work, they often discourage it or let us stop thinking actively while doing it. In this paper, we begin by […]

In this paper we present an extended approach for stroke oversketching. The stroke oversketching technique changes a curve by redrawing parts of it. Finding the part to replace and smoothing the transition is done automatically. Our extension to oversketching constraints the change of the curve to one single side profile leaving the other side profiles […]

This paper addresses the designers’ activity and in particular the way designers express an object shape in 2D sketches through character lines. The tools currently available in commercial CAS/CAD systems to manipulate the digital models are still not sufficiently suited to support design. In this paper, we introduce the so-called Fully Free Form Deformation Features […]

The present paper describes a multimodal approach to authoring in immersive virtual environments. The technique for 3D curve input presented here is based on Taping, which is widely used in automotive design to create and modify characteristic lines of a model on a white board. Taping is used both at design review sessions or at […]

Generally speaking, Engineering in Reverse (EiR) is a process for generating a model from its properties. As there is often no biuniqueness between a model and its properties, an initializing model is required to start refinement in an EiR loop. It helps the user to solve complex problems having a high number of control parameters. […]

Renown Italian design firm Pininfarina uses Alias|Wavefront design tools to style the Ferrari Modena 360. Italian car manufacturer Ferrari leads the field in producing some of the world’s most stylish and powerful sports cars available. In 1952 the company started working with Pininfarina Group, one of Europe’s leaders in the design development and manufacture of […]

The ability to display and interact with large-scale representations of vehicles has always been a fundamental requirement of the automotive design industry. This requirement has traditionally manifested itself in a variety of media, including full-scale blueprints, tape drawings, and 3D clay models. More recently, automotive design studios have begun to explore the use of large-scale […]

This paper examines two methods of computer-based car styling: texture mapping and direct computer modelling. An overview of current activity in the field precedes a comparison and evaluation of the methods within a typical framework for automobile concep