Car body design helped by software suite

An ICEM product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Dec 21, 2005

ICEM unveils software suite for automotive vehicle body and interior and other product design development.

ICEM has unveiled a software suite for automotive vehicle body and interior and other product design development.

ICEM Shape Design follows a software development and marketing agreement between ICEM and Dassault Systemes in March 2005.

The software provides intuitive tools for creating, validating and modifying any type of surface, from freeform surfaces to complex mechanical shapes.

It was developed on Dassault's CAA V5 software architecture and integrates seamlessly with the firm's Catia V5 collaborative product development and manufacturing software and CAA V5-based PLM environments.

The software is available either as a collaborative installation, where access is granted to all Catia V5 products licensed on a network, or as standalone software, where no installed Catia V5 software is required.

Shape Design can handle general surface modelling and the specialised surface design and engineering requirements of specific industry sectors, such as automotive body and interior components, aircraft exterior skins, business jet and luxury yacht interiors, consumer durable goods, and complex tyre designs.

Jeff King, Digital Design Data Manager of Bentley Motors, said: "The use of Shape Design will enable native CAA V5-based design data to be used throughout the entire vehicle design development, engineering and manufacturing process".

"This would remove the need to translate data at any stage, thereby improving the overall product development workflow and avoiding costly delays caused by incomplete data".

The software suite comprises modules addressing different aspects of the product development process.

Three standard configurations - CE3, EX3 and RE3 - each act as the prerequisite for further modules.

All three configurations are based on the ISD Centre product, which provides surface modelling and validation tools, including tools for modelling Class A surfaces.

The three configurations are: CE3 comprising ISD Centre plus ISD Realtime Renderer and an IGES interface; EX3 comprising ISD Centre plus ISD Expert and an IGES interface; and RE3 comprising ISD Centre plus ISD Scan, ISD Quick Surfacer, ISD Form and an IGES interface.

Seven optional modules provide more surface modelling capabilities, as well as reverse engineering, data manipulation, surface model analysis and photo-realistic design visualisation facilities.

These can be added to the standard configurations.

Between them they provide such facilities as: specialised Class A functionality, including the creation of tube surfaces, helix features and advanced fillets and profiles; the ability to integrate designers' initial 2D sketches and renderings into the 3D environment as the basis for surface model creation; the import, filtering, trimming, tessellation and character line definition of digitised data as part of the reverse engineering process; simple and rapid construction of surfaces from digitised data; the ability for non-CAD specialists to create aesthetic and conceptual forms using sculpting techniques, to add details to a model and to copy and paste features from one model to another; the ability to create interactively realistic and dynamic renderings and animations of digital models, in real time; and the ability to create visually realistic static and moving simulations of the digital model using a ray-tracing engine to compute soft shadows and accurate reflections and refractions of light.