Free evaluation for automotive styling software

An ICEM product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Aug 17, 2004

ICEM has commenced shipments of its new automotive styling and industrial design software, ICEM Style, to customers worldwide.

ICEM has commenced shipments of its new automotive styling and industrial design software, ICEM Style, to customers worldwide.

This follows the successful completion of beta testing of the software at a number of ICEM's leading customers, including Lotus Cars, Volkswagen, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Porsche, Seat, Ital Design and Pininfarina.

At the same time, the company also announced that designers with an interest in finding out for themselves what ICEM Style has to offer will be able to download a free-trial version from the ICEM website.

Included with the download is a quick start guide, together with a modelling environment, basic material libraries and a selection of packaged data sets to help people get started as quickly as possible.

Although the evaluation software includes all of ICEM Style's sketching, modelling and real-time visualisation functionality, it has limited data import and export capabilities, unlike the full production version.

ICEM Style introduces a number of unique capabilities.

For example, with ICEM Style it is now possible, for the first time in a concept design tool, to design in a real-time photorealistic modelling environment.

This means that third-party, stand-alone visualisation products are no longer required to visualise the complete design, nor a time-consuming wait for a static rendering to be generated.

Modelling and real-time visualisation for concept design can be performed within a unified environment.

As an aid to both original and face-lift design projects, ICEM Style also provides digital tape facilities for the first time in an integrated product styling and concept modelling tool.

Multiple tape sizes, styles and colours can be saved and used for different purposes and - just as with real tape - the user is able to "pinch" and "pull" the tape in order to achieve the desired character line.

Using ICEM Style, the ease with which true digital geometry can be created and edited - with tools such as geometry sketching, digital taping and automatic surface generation - means that designs can be created and evaluated much faster than with traditional tools.

ICEM Style ensures that only the tools needed to model and visualise the design are presented to the designer, thereby avoiding the complexity and confusion often experienced with other software.

Significantly, the use within ICEM Style of the same data architecture as is used within ICEM Surf - the company's leading Class A surfaces development software suite - ensures that the original design data remains intact and fully re-usable downstream once the design data is ready to evolve.

The more sophisticated surface construction and analysis tools found in ICEM Surf can then be used to iterate the design through to final production tooling design.