1: Virtual Prototype Design
Conceptualization, Design and Analysis in 3D Modeling: Virtual Prototype Development
It’s a wonderful time to be an engineer. Today’s computer software and hardware have evolved the virtual world (3D Modeling) into an engineer’s playground. A playground perfectly tailored for prototype development. It is here where your prototype will unfold and be revealed. To your specifications and requirements, your design takes shape as a virtual 3D model. This virtual prototype development can take many directions – some as life-like imagery or as powerful renderings that can bring your product to life long before it is physically prototyped. While other forms will be used as analytical 3D models and analyses that reveal your designs’ inner most secrets which guide our engineers to an optimized solution meeting otherwise unobtainable capabilities and performance goals.
3D Modeling and Analysis is at the heart of prototype development and affords the engineer tremendous insight. It has always been the Engineers’ job to be able to visualize, conceptualize and then create what others might only dream of. 30 years ago an Engineer did this with a mere pencil, paper and calculator (slide rules before that!). Today armed with high powered computers and truly amazing software, the engineers’ world is alive in 3D and beyond.
These capabilities are witnessed everyday by our blind acceptance and enjoyment of the countless incredible devices operating in plain sight, while many more carry on anonymously.
Primarily the purpose of prototyping is to answer or clarify uncertainties thereby reducing risk. A great deal of this risk reduction is done as virtual 3D models. Computer simulations saves countless hours and trials. In a gross sense the prototype might be an entire embodiment of the design to be used for discussions, attracting investors or allowing the ability to hold and touch the concept. However, more often the prototype is used to evaluate a concept to prove that it will deliver. Despite the extensive insight today’s computers and software grant us the need to correlate analysis, check assumptions or merely appease doubters, a prototype does its job here. More on this in our functional prototype development page.