Harley Davidson Goes Digital
March 19, 2013, GPU Technology Conference, San Jose, CA—Mathew Gueller from Harley-Davidson described the changes in their workflows and the resulting improvements in turn around time for new motorcycles. The new modeling and visualization tools enable better designs.
Harley started making motorcycles 110 years ago and had a design flow that started with drawings, progressed to solid models, and then to prototype designs. The standard automotive-type flow has a low learning curve and produces good results. The downsides are that iterations are hard and time-consuming, and often designers would have to revert to original designs if a big fix was identified late in the process.
The new surface and design flow generates models for mockups, visualization, and pre-CAD implementations. By adding conceptual models and rapid prototyping through 3-D printing, they enabled a soft data mockup for new machines. Now, their design flow spans three flows; a class a full engineering flow, mockups, and visualizations. The last two flows use software originally design to develop games.
They are using and Autodesk suite of tools including 3-D Studio Max, Maya, Mud Box and Alias. Alias is a styling tool that renders through Mental Ray, 3-D studio Max is a polygon modeling tool that allows subdivisional surfaces. It now takes less than four hours to generate a full visualization model using these tools. Maya uses nurbs and polygons to generate files for the CAD systems.
Rhinoceros 3-D has a specific task model for complicated modeling and can be opened for additional plug-ins and t-splines. To convert the drawings from polygons to nurbs. Mud Box is a 3-D painting program that behaves like “digital clay” and works with Z-brush to change complex surface models.
Now, a group can work with both the styling people and the engineers to make fast changes that are close to the final engineering versions. The new flow facilitates fast feedback and captures the essence of the design. In addition, the drawings can be sent to a 3-D printer to produce full-size models of any part.
Visualization is an evolving process within the group, and allows them to showcase potential designs to management. The newer tools provide a better quality of mockup and enable design in real-time. In addition, the tools reduce the number and complexity of changes because they can provide complete views of a motorcycle. Visualization allows him to score more concepts and they can pick a version for a mockup as a physical validation of the visual design. This physical validation can be at full scale. Another benefit of these new tools is that the assets can be used for marketing collateral materials.
The 3-D modeling and render capture an image is a better match to the final, including the paint and textures. The tools allow porting of the images to a 65 inch display, which helps engineering and management get a better feel for the new motorcycle. The resulting near real-time display takes advantage of a hardware and software infrastructure that is 4,000 times faster than the older design flows.
