Virtual photography contains prototype costs

An ARTVPS product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Apr 17, 2003

Virtual photography is helping a pioneering UK packaging solutions company to reduce the time and costs associated with delivering new product designs.

ART VPS is helping a pioneering UK packaging solutions company to reduce the time and costs associated with delivering new product designs.

Within one of the most comprehensive independent plastic conversion facilities in Europe, Audus Noble has been solving packaging problems since 1964.

From being the first UK company to mould a plastic sweet jar, Audus Noble today offers a wide range of PVC, polyethylene terephtalate (PET), and injection moulded containers to companies such as Nestle and Jeyes.

Audus Noble has recently adopted the Pure virtual photography CAD visualisation solution from ART VPS, and is using this within its design and development department.

The company adopted Pure to assist in its objective of reducing the number of physical prototypes built throughout the product development process.

By using Pure's unique photographic-quality 3D visualisation technology, Audus Noble are able to visualise proposed product designs more quickly and explore designs more effectively than with other CAD tools.

This means that designs can be evaluated and modified before a physical prototype is built.

Reducing the number of physical prototypes in this way can have a major impact on the time required and the costs associated with getting a new product design into production.

"The quality of the images we obtain with Pure is simply stunning", commented Ian Tennick, designer at Audus Noble.

"This level of quality means that a new design can be fully explored before committing to the expense of a physical prototype.

We can be more innovative in trying new ideas, yet reduce the product design costs as we can focus our resources on those designs that we know meet the customers criteria.

Pure really helps in improving and streamlining our development process".

The design department at Audus Noble employs Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks and Alias Wavefront software to design and model new product designs.

Detailed models are created of the design and then these designs are visualised using ART VPS's Pure visualisation card.

As well as its use in design evaluation and prototyping, Audus Noble is using the virtual photographs created with Pure to help in market research and market promotion for new product designs.

The images are so lifelike that they appear as photographs to the viewer - enabling accurate feedback to be collected, and product catalogues to be created in parallel with the production phase.

The containers that Audus Noble produces are used in a wide variety of industries including confectionary, food, beauty products, healthcare, cosmetics, novelty and seasonal goods.

While virtual photography has become established within the architectural market and is gaining significant adoption within the aerospace and electronics product manufacturing market, Audus Noble is one of the first to capitalise on this technology for the containers and packaging industry.