We recently celebrated our first birthday here at The Autopian, the founders alternately holding yet another fun event TO WHICH I WASN’T INVITED and by blowing the remains of the housekeeping money for the year on a diminutive two stroke roadster. It’s the only thing around here that smokes more than me. But did you know how the early editions of this website came about? Torch created them during feverish all night coding sessions, hunched over his Osborne 1 powered by nothing but a desperate mania to be heard and copious amounts of fluorescent energy drinks. He’d wire the pages out every morning to paying members via a teleprinter. Eventually David and Beau took pity on him and our IT infrastructure was given a hefty upgrade to a Sinclair QL complete with Microdrive, resulting in the high-quality website pleasuring your eyeballs are right now.
Coming to The Autopian tomorrow: We explain how @JasonTorchinsky and @BeauBoeckmann ended up buying a spectacular, silly car at auction. pic.twitter.com/lxQEyWWAXC
— The Autopian (@the_autopian) April 3, 2023
Read enough below the line commentary on the platform of your choice (although, really you should be getting all your automotive content here and nowhere else or we’ll send the goons round) and accompanying every new model reveal there’ll be some coffin dodger griping that new car designs lack soul and emotion, and nothing good has been released since about 1970, to pull some arbitrary date out of my ass. They’ll inevitably place the blame for this on computers, as if cars used to be designed and forged on an anvil of enthusiasm by REAL MEN WITH PETROL NOT MICROCHIPS IN THEIR VEINS or some other such utter horseshit. Yep, those halcyon days when designers could smoke in the studio, had to wear a suit and did twelve-hour days (with no overtime) breathing in noxious marker fumes, chalk dust and God knows what kind of industrial solvents and women were nowhere to be seen.
Aren’t CAD and CAM The Same Thing?
Well I’ve got bad news for you, pops; computers have been a part of how cars are made for a very long time. The history of computers in car design and manufacturing goes back pretty much all the way to the first transistorized second-generation mainframes in the late fifties. But the mainstream never really caught onto it until CAD/CAM became a buzzword in the electronic eighties when OEMs plastered it all over their advertising copy to show how bleeding edge they were.
They might seem interchangeable, but actually Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Manufacturing are really two distinct but related things. When it came to car design, a unique type of modeling software was required to enable studios to use “the tubes” to transform their marker and paper sketches into computerized sheet metal. We’ll get to why car designers are so special they need their own software in a bit, but first let’s take a little history lesson which I promise won’t be full of math (mainly because I don’t understand the math either, and it’s boring).
Blueprinting was the original method of reproducing technical drawings. For the first time it became possible to create a technical specification drawing and distribute it maintaining accuracy and scale. The blue background made alteration impossible, so draftsmen could be sure that people using their drawings were following the given specifications exactly, useful in avoiding a Spinal Tap Stonehenge type situation. This empowered much of the industrial revolution of the late 19th century, but as a duplication method it was well obsolete by the time photocopying was introduced in 1959. (Incidentally, this is where the term ‘blueprinting’ for engines came from. Back when mass production tolerances resulted in spectacular variations in production quality, an engine hand built to the given specs would result in more power).
The ancestor of all computer aided interaction in design can be traced back to a program called Sketchpad, invented by Ivan Sutherland [Editor’s Note: Later, this same guy also scanned the first real object into a 3d wireframe. That object was a Volkswagen Beetle! – JT] for his PhD thesis at MIT in 1963. It used a light pen to interact directly on an oscilloscope screen to create rudimentary technical drawings. It might look primitive but it demonstrated several key advantages over traditional drafting methods; repeatable dimensional accuracy, the ability to store, retrieve and reproduce identical drawings, and instances, which is a duplicate that changes when the original drawing is changed. But the main advances Sketchpad introduced were twofold: it translated lines and circles on a screen into mathematical geometry that could be stored, understood and manipulated by a computer. And it was the first time that a human could interact with a computer using a GUI (Graphical User Interface).
General Motors
Computers had been introduced into milling machines as early as 1953 – using time and XYZ inputs to move a cutting head – Computer Numerical Control (CNC). General Motors did a lot of research into how computers could help the whole design process – they found that every stage from initial sketches through to body design and final tooling used different drawings and each department had its own drafting department. Working with IBM, they developed the DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computers) running on an IBM 7090. This allowed the storage and retrieval of a unified set of drawings for everyone involved could access, and designers could even sketch with a light pen. But the data input and manipulation still had to be programmed in with a punch card.
In 1971 Patrick Hanratty (sometimes called the father of CAD/CAM) created Automated Drafting and Machinery (ADAM) for GM. For the first time it was possible to provide the data to create tool paths directly from technical drawings created digitally on a screen. CAD and CAM had finally gotten together to become one seamless process.
IBM DAC-1
But this was still only technical drawings created in 2D – the computing horsepower required for 3D didn’t really exist yet – although the original Sketchpad had been later been reprogrammed with the ability to display and rotate 3D wireframe images. For engineers this didn’t really matter too much – they’d been used to working from paper drawings anyway and the parts they designed were very geometrically shaped variations of simple primitives like cubes, cylinders and rectangles combined together. They didn’t need to be aesthetically pleasing, because the customer wouldn’t see them (these are known as ‘B’ surfaces). But for designers creating sculptural bodywork and surfaces a customer could see and touch (known as ‘A’ surfaces) a way was needed to harness this emerging technology to turn their ideas into data a computer could understand.
It Was a Math Problem
The problem was it was hard to create the more organic shape of a car’s bodywork mathematically. There was no way for a designer to create freeform curves directly on a computer. Think about it like a Lego Technic set. For the underlying mechanicals of a model vehicle it’s brilliant – but when it comes to recreating the bodywork its limitations are clearly exposed, because it wasn’t designed for those complicated compound shapes and surfaces.
Designers would work closely with clay modelers to turn their 2D marker and pastel sketches into physical models. Once a design was frozen and signed off by management, a mahogany (or sometimes plaster) buck would be made, to allow the tool makers to create the dies that would stamp out the panels. This was the master – the bible for all the external dimensions and shape of the car. Body engineers would use this as the basis to figure out how the car would be built. The problem was with so many stages, different materials, nearly 20,000 technical drawings and fallible humans involved there was a lot of scope for fucking it up. If you’ve ever wondered why the panel fit of older cars is often appalling, now you know. If a car’s shape could be turned into 3D data points and fed directly into a computer, then a more accurate, quicker and cheaper reference for drawings and tools would be the result.
Clay models were (and still are) sculpted on a perfectly flat metal floor, known as a plate. A device called a styling bridge, a large upside down U that straddles the model, could be rolled back and forth to take measurements using a series of dowels touching the clay at set intervals and then transferred over the Y axis to make sure both sides were symmetrical. This unwieldy contraption could also take dimensions in any of the three axes of the surfaces of the model in relation to the origin point. Scanners did eventually become available that could capture body shape from a full size model numerically, but this then had to be converted into CNC inputs which were imperfect because the conversion algorithms were error prone. By 1967 this analog process was digitized and further hernias avoided, by an Italian company who invented the Corporate Measuring Machine which used a metal probe mounted on a gantry powered by stepper motors to move it in three dimensions across the model. But designers were not interested in milling machines – they were more interested in getting a computer to realize their designs rather than draftsmen, a process that could take months.
What Boats Have To Do With It
The first OEM to come up with a way of creating a body shape directly in data was Renault, thanks to the work of engineer Pierre Bezier. He was influenced by shipbuilding methods from hundreds of years ago, when draftsmen used thin strips of wood as templates for hull designs. These strips could be bent to the desired shape and then fixed in place using heavy metal pucks to hold the curvature. Bezier’s breakthrough was realizing points near a curve could be used to define its shape, as opposed to points on the curve itself (similar to using the pen tool in Illustrator or Photoshop). Therefore, a computer using a preset algorithm could figure out the shape of a given curve if it knew the coordinates of these control points. This meant that you could use a series of these curves to define a surface. Coincidentally parallel research was taking place at the same time at archrivals Citroën by Paul de Castlejau but they kept it secret until the eighties, which is why Bezier gets the curves named after him.
The Renault system was called UNISURF and they were initially reluctant to embrace this ‘freeform curves drawn on a computer’ witchcraft, but Peugeot said oui s’il te plait after signing a 1966 technology sharing agreement with them. The Peugeot 204 of 1968 is one of the first cars to have its body designed completely using the CAD/CAM pipeline. The first Renault designed using CAD was the 14 of 1977.
How Boeing Helped Kickstart a Revolution in Car Design
As is so often the case with emergent technologies, everybody and their dog was coming up with their own proprietary CAD/CAM systems. VW developed a program called VW SURF, first used on the MKII Golf of 1983. In 1979, Boeing was researching a CAD/CAM system of its own called TIGER. Its developers realized they could use Bezier curves with another mathematical concept known as a B Spline to create something called a NURBS – Non Uniform Rational B Spline. A fully mathematical representation of a 3D surface using control points. Boeing proposed including NURBS in the new IGES file format for exchanging CAD data, and due to their size and influence it was accepted. Now there was an accepted, interoperable cross industry standard, the CAD race was truly on.
Alias/1, another NURBS based modelling program was introduced in 1985. By the mid to late eighties all the domestic OEMs were using NURBS modelling software in one form or another. Chrysler was using Alias and a program called CDRS (Conceptual Design and Rendering System) developed by creator of Sketchpad, Ivan Sutherland. Ford also used CDRS and GM being GM had developed not one but two in house programs – CGS (Corporate Graphics System) and Cadence. All of these systems needed studio heating levels of computing firepower. Alias only ran on top of the line Silicon Graphics International workstations. Even by 1998 one of these babies would still require flexing the company plastic to the tune of $38,995 (nearly £72k today). Fortunately for the OEMs, Moore’s Law was delivering on PC clones – as Windows machines got more powerful they became capable of displaying 3D graphics with the help of plug-in cards, although 2D software like AutoCAD had been happily running on IBM PCs for years by now.
Alias was eventually ported over to Windows (a move that partly led to the insolvency of SGI) and folded into the burgeoning family of Autodesk CAD software, where it remains today as one of the two main NURBS modelling programs specifically aimed at automotive design studios. The other is ICEM Surf, which came about through the purchase of VW SURF by Dassault Systemes, a subsidiary of the company that will sell you a Rafale multi role combat jet. It’s part of their integrated suite of engineering software, including CATIA which is used by engineers to build the digital version of a car before a single part is made. If you’ve seen those engineering screengrabs online of upcoming models with all the parts in lurid colors, that’s almost certainly CATIA.
Why Automotive Designers Are Special
So why do designers, and by extension design studios, need their own expensive flavor of 3D modelling software? Blender is open source, widely supported and completely free. Blender is what is known as a Sub-D (subdivision) modeling program. Like Maya or 3DS Max, it uses polygons to create 3D solids. This is great for digitally representing things on a screen like game graphics, special effects or animation. In terms of processor power, it’s a lot less CPU intensive than NURBS. That’s because it doesn’t have the complicated math underneath it to provide the dimension accuracy down to the thousandths of a millimeter required for production tolerances. NURBS modeling is like creating a complete surface out of several patches of metal, just like the real thing. It won’t let you do things that aren’t physically possible.
It gives you complete control over how the surfaces of your model are created, using control points to delicately sculpt each patch to ensure the correct continuity and tolerances with the patches around it. Both Alias and ICEM Surf comprehensive range of evaluation tools specific to the automotive industry, including the ability to check highlights across a surface and a shader to turn your model into a digital clay. It does have lighting and rendering capability, but for those functions you would transfer the model to a dedicated program like VRED (Autodesk again) or Unreal Engine.
Designers are not meant to be expert NURBS modelers – that is a separate role for CAD modelers. But they should be able to manipulate and tweak data they may have received from the surfacing team or use existing models to create something new. I spent an entire summer break during my undergrad course learning Alias, dutifully following all the tutorials to understand how to build a model of a car starting with nothing but a sketch and a few curves. That meant I was able to get my electric Hot Rod model looking exactly how I wanted (within the limits of my modeling ability).
I was able to use this data not only to it milled at the university saving me thousands of pounds, but I was also able to use it to create renders as well, exactly the same processes that I would later use in a real design studio, albeit it at a much bigger and more expensive scale.
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OMFG I remember working on SGI workstations in my engineering college computer lab.
At that time Amazon was a river in South America and the biggest presidential scandal involved a certain blue dress.
I’m old as fuck.
Looks just like Rhino, which is what I use to create 3D-printed objects. They then have to be downgraded to meshes before they can be printed, which always feels a bit of a letdown.
Yes, Rhino is another NURBs modelling software, but it’s not really used by OEMs. I think it might be more prevalent in boat design.
Correct, lots of Rhino in the marine space.
Architects use it too, but it’s really not good for it. Revit is obviously what we should be using but that’s a whole ‘nother universe and the cost of entry (time and money and restructuring everything) are steep.
My brother went to Artcenter in Pasedena in the 90s. He and a classmate decided to do their senior design digitally in Alias with only a handfull of hand sketches to start with. They were fround upon for doing that and recieved lower grades. They ended up going into computer animation instead of automotive design. I guess they were ahead of their time.
Back in those days you would have been expected to make your degree model by hand, scratch building it entirely. These days students (in the UK at least) are more inclined to produce only digital models for their degree show model, which I understand because of the costs involved, but I always discourage because seeing a physical model tells me a lot instantly about that student’s ability.
Killer article – I love these peaks behind the curtain!
Indeed very interesting. Thanks!
Do an article on that EV Hot Rod some other day 😎
If people are interested, I can do.
Blueprinting machines were still used up until the early 2000. It wasn’t until large format lasers and scanners became economical that the died off.
My first job was at a university, so we had money, and a variety of drawings of all the campus buildings: there were drawings by Albert Kahn (who also designed the River Rouge plant) and Eero Saarinen among others in the archives that had to be reproduced. The best at the turn of the century were the wide format HP ink jets that took a minute to print each page – so if you needed 10 sets of a 100 sheet set for bid, that’s a whole lot of time! Using the ammonia blueprinter was a whole lot faster.
By 2006, everyone had OCe large format lasers (OCe is now owned by Canon) that’ll put out many square feet per minute – two E/A0/32×46 sheets per minute for the cheapest printer today. That was the final nail in the coffin and blueprinting was dead in Architecture.
I was talking in generalities and it wasn’t really meant to be the thrust of the article, more useful background and context for what I was going to talk about, but o appreciate there are always very specific use cases for older technology. Thanks for the additional info!
It was the only point of reference I had, beyond all the Autodesk references! Been using AutoCAD since 98 and Revit since 07, so I only keep tangentially aware of what else we are forced to buy from autodesk…
We’ve used Océ printers at my work over the years. My favorite was always the one named “can you see?”….. Nothing like printing out a copy of the star spangled banner on it.
Thank you for a good article on an unexpected topic. I enjoyed it. It’s interesting, but not surprising, that The Autopian has so many engineering or engineering-adjacent readers.
Very interesting, and I’m curious, if within the car design community, there are many known glitches or mistakes done in the CAD modeling that made it through all the stages and all the way to production? (without outing the designers of course)
No, modelling mistakes would never happen. There are too many reviews, gateways and checks for sub-standard work to be signed off. Plus, there is a whole department (in JLR it was known as the Cubing Team) whose job it is to check the integrity of the data. They will actually create a special kind of model that proves the feasibility of all the surfacing, and use that as the baseline that production stamping are checked against.
But do mistakes actually happen in the design process? More often than not they’re not really mistakes, more problems that couldn’t be solved optimally because of time or cost constraints, so you end up with a bodge that get rectified later as a rolling update.
Never say never. There are far more sensitive projects with more safety controls than cars that have had mistakes made. Something as simple as metric to standard to kensworth? Not that i know of any i could barely understand the article. But i tried hopefully something new stuck in my brain
The blobby ford Taurus has an imperfection on ONE side of the trunk lid; if you get the reflections right it’s a slight concave area near the hinge/rear window. It’s present on one side and not the other. I always heard it was a mistake.
I’ve been using Solidworks since 2006 and Alias since 2015. Both have pros and cons, and ideally I’d like to have the ability to use either depending on what type of part I am designing. One thing that is often repeated, and wrong, is that Solidworks can’t do surfacing. It can, and it works pretty well, but the problem is 99% of solidworks users suck at it. This is the tutorial that really taught me how to ‘think’ in terms of surfacing:
https://youtu.be/PuppqhY00w4
Have you played with VR much yet? I use Alias on the daily but corporate won’t approve VR goggles for it and I am sad about it. Being able to see your designs in 1:1 scale in 3 dimensions is amazing and improves the design process imho.
I have very little experience of Solidworks, but I know it can do *some* surfacing. Can it do it to G3 continuity? Because that’s what’s needed for tooling releases.
We did have a VR set up in the studio, but when I was there it was still very much at the ‘fun to play around with’ stage. It wasn’t integrated into the workflow at all. We also had VR at the RCA and I played around with Gravity Sketch. I’m still not convinced that it’s much more than a gimmick at the moment, because it’s not as good as sketching in Photoshop and not as good for a scratch model as Blender or Maya. But Gravity Sketch is the hot new thing at the moment.
I guess the difference is in a car design studio you’ve got full size physical models, and that’s not going to change.
Yeah, it can do G3. The biggest difference is it’s all history tree based, so it’s a lot just harder to drag control/cv points around and have it now blow up the model. Small tweaks on curves early in the tree can cause feature failures which just snowball and then your file is trashed and you need to spend hours fixing it. Alias has history too, but when it fails your model is still there, there might be some edges you need to fix but it just sort of handles it a lot easier. That said…. if you build a solidworks model correctly, it’s pretty interesting if you start based on a simple sketch with boxes with parameters, and then snap all your curves to that as you build. Once you’re done, you can go back and change dimensions and the model will just update, allowing you to knock out a lot of variations in a short amount of time.
Check out that Audi R8 tutorial. I think the surface quality still isn’t AS GOOD as alias, but it’s pretty good. Most people just suck at it.
For VR, the biggest thing to me is instead of thinking about exteriors, think of interiors. It’s a game changer. Suddenly you can insert yourself into the car, and figure out what the reach feels like for each button, or what’s even in your field of view while looking out the windshield. I did a whole boat interior in VR on the google version of gravity sketch and it was crude in terms of surfacing, but super powerful from a usability/interior/ergo perspective.
I had a quick skim through that tutorial – the patch layout doesn’t look……. optimal.
Dassault also owns SolidWorks, which is also used by a lot of folks and which is especially interesting because it was started by a guy with money made as part of an MIT card-counting team.
Yeah they do. My understanding it that it’s pitched as a slightly lower capability software (therefore cheaper) than CATIA, for smaller engineering firms that don’t need the full CATIA capability.
Idk about lower capability or cheaper…. Solidworks is rapidly becoming the industry standard for industrial design as a whole; if you check out some of the polls on r/industrialdesign it’s ahead of all the other software packages by a large margin. I used to work at a consultancy and worked with a ton of clients, I would say most companies that aren’t Ford/Gm/Chrysler use Solidworks or Creo.
Creo can go and die.
I started with Solidworks and then moved to a Creo company. The way of building in Creo just felt so backwards.
Now I don’t do much modeling, but the place I’m at used Solidworks again. So the rare time I have to make parts again, I’m in my happy place.
Having used both SW and CATIA, I do prefer the SolidWorks interface, especially for assembly design (so easy to mate features and it gives you so much control on how it happens). However, the shear horsepower of CATIA (you got enough GPUs you can load an entire 747 model, all 6 million+ parts of it) is why it will remain the standard.
I have noticed that ever since Dassault bought SW out, it’s becoming easier to design something in SW and port it over to CATIA. I predict in a few years they’ll just merge the two in an update cycle.
That’s why once a design was frozen it would be rebuilt in ICEM Surf because it’s easier to have the whole car in one place.
I work at an independent mechanical & electrical engineering & consulting firm; we use primarily Solidworks but also will use whatever modeling package the customer requires. SW is by far the most commonly used package in my experience. It’s got a really good mix of power, features, usability, and I’m assuming price so lots of different industries gravitate towards it. It also seems to be the most widely known by engineers/designers so it makes getting new hires up to speed that much easier. CATIA is a bit more specialized and can be a lot more powerful, but we really only see it when a customer needs that specialization or power. I’m assuming it has to be a decent amount more expensive because even at our customers using CATIA, lots of them will have the majority of their guys running SW with a handful running CATIA (or have specific departments run one over the other). Our aerospace customers really seem to gravitate towards it more than anyone else. At least with the clients we work with, Inventor, Fusion360 plain AutoCAD 3D / Mechanical, and what not are used about as often as CATIA; but it’s a big drop from SW. Creo still seems to be out there with some frequency too, but the only reason I ever really get why is because the company has always used it and doesn’t want to change.
Reminds me of a rather bizarre series of commercials that ran during the recent Academy Awards. The campaign seemed to be a quite expensive advertisement to people who already know exactly what that product is. I’ll skip to the end to provide a few moving pictures to complement this great article:
https://youtu.be/h2nrvx2ZrqQ?t=92
Edit: OH MY GOD THERE’S AN EDIT FEATURE!!!
I once questioned the incongruity of an add placed in a particular program (I think it was a Range Rover ad run during Britain’s Got Talent or some other such mind rot) and someone said to me, “think about EXACTLY who else is watching this show, other than people too fat to be out on a Saturday night” (I might be adding extra humor).
Blender and Unreal Engine are very much looking to move into the Pro space. Blender is free even for corporations and companies like Autodesk and Adobe have been taking this piss for years.
It felt more like one of those periodic celebratory/self-congratulatory kinds of things than an advertisement. I’m Maya adjacent and was pretty sure the ad was about Autodesk from the beginning. I did think about who was watching, but can’t imagine who among them need to be reminded about the Autodesk brands. To be fair, though, perhaps with competition in the feature film space they need an occasional bump. Awfully expensive ad buy, though.
Just a quick correction – Corporate Measuring Machine should read Coordinate Measuring Machine, which is used to measure the XYZ coordinates of an item and to help create a #D CAD model of it.
Thanks, I’m gonna go right ahead and blame autocorrect for that one…. Do you know who it was made by? My reference didn’t say.
Ferranti, although despite the name they are actually Scottish and not Italian.
Believe it or not there is a big ex-pat Italian community in Scotland (and Wales). I’ve just checked the dreaded wiki and you’re right, so thanks for that. I was only going from one source for that (A Century of Automotive Style by Dave Holls and Michael Lamm).
Hi Adrian, great article! As i am working in the CAD business, a nice historical perspective. The picture with the peugeot 204 styling buck however… isnt this a moskvich 412? The 204 never was that ugly (hahahahaha)
Oh man, I was getting ready to sternly correct you and went to look at the picture but after a look I think you are absolutely correct. That dropping swage line and the rearward sloping front fender cutline and more.
Again, this is wonderful deep arcane automotive knowledge you could not find on any other generalist automotive blog!
Thank you!
When I asked my employer, Boeing Aerospace Co for a leave of absence to attend the 1984 Olympics in LA and go on an around the US VW bus camping honeymoon, they said no. So, I resigned. Instead of just letting me work for two weeks, they sent me to Unigraphics training. Awesome! That was an very expensive two-week training session that they paid for.
Large engineering corporation not valuing its talent shocker. JLR is exactly the same.
That was a very good article. It gave me a bit of insight into stuff that I didn’t use in CAD programs that I had to subscribe to, to enable me to work as a consultant.
At various points in my past I was doing architectural work that got computerized from about 1980 onward and also working with industrial clients who were evolving much faster. One in particular stands out in my mind, a small tool and precision die company, that once catered to limited runs for primarily the aerospace folks and evolved amongst other things into automotive work with the building being expanded to house huge production presses to verify the suitability of their final product. They grabbed computerization and ran with it and still do.
Awesome article, thanks Adrian. I’m a graphic designer who thinks in Bézier curves (25+ years of Illustrator experience) who did a brief 5 year detour in video game production. Our main tool was 3DS Max but I was told I should learn Alias if I wanted to continue; I was laid off and went back to what I was always best at. I do miss building in 3D though.
I’ve been staring at a CATIA screen in exchange for money since 1996 in aerospace.
I challenge anyone that points to an UI and says it’s not user friendly to sit down to a CATIA v4 session. The complaining about the other app will cease immediately.
BTW, my first CATIA workstations I worked at cost $100 000 Canadian in 1996. Roughly $25K for the hardware, the rest the CATIA licences.
We’re talking a speedy 133MHz machine with a whopping 128MB if RAM. I had an assembly that would take 12-16 to generate each view!
Yeah, the UI on legacy industry software is often horrible, partly because it’s built on top of older versions, and partly because they can’t change it too much because of the inertia in retraining everyone (see also 737 Max). Alias is pretty user unfriendly as well, but it’s to remember these are professional tools not aimed at the layman, so a slick UI isn’t necessarily a design priority (I’m not saying this is the correct approach, but it’s understandable).
Sometimes I actually miss the old menu driven UI of Pro/E…
The GM G-vans and “squarebody” pickups were also said to be designed on computers, at least with respect to their overall shapes and aerodynamics*(!) and the parts that made up the final body assemblies and their manufacturing.
*G-vans and squarebody pickups might seem as aerodynamic as bricks at first glance, but if you get up close and really examine them, there’s some clever design going on. GM can do some really good work when they get it right. (On the other hand, when GM screws up, it can be epic…)
I’ve been using vector-based graphic design and 2D CAD/CAM software for 26 years (in the sign industry). I never knew Bezier curves were named after an automotive engineer. What a great bit of completely useless knowledge to have!
Great article. 2 days ago my Windows 3.1 computer running MasterCAM from 1992 died. I have to learn a modern CAM system, what a bummer. I’ve been doing machining so long that I remember using punch tape to run programs. Interesting (maybe uninteresting) on modern CNC machines when you upload a program it’s still called punch as in punch tape. Kids don’t know how good they have it.
There’s a free version of AutoCAD called TinkerCAD which I know a lot of hobbyists use for 3D printing. Might be a good place to start, depending on what you need it for.
TinkerCAD is great for quickly ‘sketching’ a 3D shape, but anyone who’s used a proper CAD program will find it limiting I think. I’ve heard good things about FreeCAD, but couldn’t get on with it myself.
I’ve been using OnShape recently and once I ‘clicked’ with it’s way of working I’ve found it perfect for my needs. (It was recommended to me by Emily Velasco in the comments to an article of hers, so thanks Emily!)
I’m replying to this comment solely so I can find it again when I’m in a space to tinker with CAD programs. I recently acquired a 3D printer, but all my CAD training was on CATIA in school. As a result, I’ve found some free-to-use CAD programs work in exactly the “wrong” way from how I’m thinking about creating 3D shapes.
I’ve been using Autodesk Fusion 360 for a few years now for modeling and CAM work on products, machining fixtures, and welding fixtures. There’s a free tier, but if you want more than 10 models unlocked at the same time, or you want to use G00 rapids, you’ll need a license. Last I checked, it’s about $450 per year. Unless you need to do full 5-axis work, you probably won’t need the Machining add-on. I do 3+1 work with the basic subscription pretty regularly.
It’s a big step up from when I wrote a spreadsheet to generate code to deburr the intersection of two holes with a ball burr on my live-spindle lathe. (I still use that spreadsheet, though.)
This reminds me that I’ve been saving a set of Win 3.1 disks in shrink wrap until someday I can put them on Ebay and make as much as, oh, eleven dollars!
Find the right Facebook group and someone will purchase them for more than you might think.
My dad started a manufacturing company in the 70s making parts for Pratt & Whitney. He was a master manual machinist, but even better businessman and converted to CNC in the late 70s. He then started a company retrofitting old Bullard VTLs to CNC control. He sold that company but those retrofitted Bullards are still used all over the place. He was a relative computer Luddite but was absolutely fascinated and a huge advocate of technology in manufacturing.
And you might find this small bit amusing, for well into the 2010s he still called CNC programs “the tapes.”
This article was very informative. I do CAD work as part of my electrical engineering job in an industry completely unrelated to cars, and found some familiarity with the terms and concepts in the article, but overall, most of it was new to me. I did not know but also am not surprised that CAD in the automotive industry goes back so far.
Once I get a hand sketch for a vehicle finalized, I’d like to try to make a design in a 3D modeling program. I don’t need to worry about manufacturing tolerances, so Blender would probably be my go-to.
Yeah, I didn’t want to get too far off track, but you absolutely can use Blender to create a watertight .STL mesh for 3D printing or milling from wood or foam. It won’t be perfect, but it will be good enough.
When I was in design school (for industrial design), the old timer professors told us that in the US there was a point circa early 70s when union rules changed such that designers could no longer work clay models–only clay modelers could do the actual manipulation from that point forward. This is purely anecdotal and may be completely false. But it was interesting to imagine how that barrier could hypothetically impact some of the more sculptural aspects of form development (describing how to change a curve versus physically feeling it).
I was also told that Pro E is what was used to design the space shuttle, which was created using only revolve and extrusion commands! Your timeline of CAD in the auto industry seems to put some of that into question, though. This was a very interesting article, I love to hear the history and I’d be eager to hear more about how design is executed in the auto industry these days, like hearing about those larger scale/more expensive processes!
There probably is some truth to this about the clay modellers. The JLR guys were all unionised and took their breaks at specified times etc. as designers we were allowed to put on tapes and decals, but any fettling or fitting of parts had to be done by the modellers themselves. (FWIW I’m generally pro-union, but clay modellers ain’t exactly at the coal face, and the contract guys were some of the most highly paid – along with the CAD guys – in the whole studio).
That’s interesting – thanks!
I was a Sun Microsystems guy in the 1990s but had the opportunity to work on some SGI boxen as well. They were very nice, as one might expect.
Fun fact: the original ‘Jurassic Park’ CGI work was done on SGI workstations, and some SGI machines were visible in the lab scenes in the movie.
Yes researching this article I came across an SGI/Wavefront sizzle reel and amongst the terrible TV graphic idents there were scenes from Jurassic Park.
A lot of good info there Adrian. My first CAD software was CGS at GM in the early 90’s, right as they were transitioning to UNIX workstations. We had a few SGI workstations where a handful of guys were taking raw scanned data from the clay models and working it into higher quality surface data than CGS could create – or they could do it a lot faster than CGS. But then I moved to Boeing where I learned CATIA V4 (obv we use V5 now).
The workflow at JLR would be to model the whole thing in Alias up until the design freeze, and then rebuild it in ICEM for the production surfaces, for easier integration into CATIA. Quite often this would be used to update the clays, and then the clays worked by hand, those surfaces scanned and rebuilt in ICEM, and so on until release.
And then test the result by lead-footing it up and down the M1 in the middle of the night. 🙂
The M40 which runs right by Gaydon, and I’m convinced is Britain’s fastest motorway (I had possibly the only Chevy Bolt in the UK up to its speed limiter and STILL had to move over for faster traffic!).