What’s Next in Class A Surfacing?

Nick: Yes, of course. Automotive surfacing is a fairly well-known subject, but it's mostly split into two.

You have CAS, which is Computer Aided Styling. So, this is where those really creative people make those really cool concepts. They take in the early ideas for what a vehicle's going to be. Is it an SUV? Is it a sports car? Is it a family car or whatever? And the CAS come up with various styles and themes.

It's just a loose idea of what the car is going to look like. You know, will it have a family resemblance to other cars in the range or from that brand, for example. Once the design of the car has been more or less decided upon – because there's always multiple themes – once the theme is chosen, a line is usually drawn in the sand, as it were, and the theme gets frozen. That's when Class A surfacing comes in.

So Class A surfacing is the business of taking that conceptual surface, bringing in all the engineering and manufacturing requirements, and also the safety regulations for the various parts of the world where the product is going to be sold, and making it feasible. Making it manufacturable, making it legal, and also making sure that the quality is up to the requirements as defined by the designers.

So it's the second half of the surfacing process, the sort of finishing up or the refinement of the loose, more conceptual work.

Nick: So as I mentioned, Class A really starts when a design theme or styling theme has been chosen by the organization. So, that's when the engineers’ and the suppliers’ requirements, and electrical requirements and safety requirements all come together.

So the Class A guy – because I was a Class A guy for 13 years in the industry – they sit between styling and engineering, you know, usually one on each side of you, and you have to find the middle ground between satisfying both sides of the seesaw, if you like.

So the stylist wants it to look a certain way, and the engineer wants it to be manufacturable, to pass safety regulations, and also perceived quality come along. They want the gaps to look just so, they want it to have a certain quality target to be aimed at that you have to achieve.

So, the Class A person has to take in an awful lot of information from lots of different people and come up with something that satisfies everybody in the center of that sort of studio and engineering collaboration.

Nick: Yes, of course, I was so excited to be asked to take part in that project. I'm a huge Bond fan. I've loved car design from an early age and they were hugely influential for me, the Aston Martin DB5, the Lotus Esprit Turbo, and all those wonderful cars James Bond was driving around in, chasing the bad guys.

So, I was thrilled to be asked to go to Aston Martin in a small team of five guys using CATIA ICEM Surf, we created the exterior surfaces of the new Aston Martin DB10 for Spectre. So yes, it was a big thrill to be involved in that. Possibly my most famous project that I've worked on.

I remember taking my kids to the movie and they wouldn't let me leave the cinema until all the credits had gone up the screen because they were hoping to see my name. But of course, it doesn't often work like that. But I was very excited and proud to be part of that and creating my small part that I played in creating the DB10.

Clara: Yeah, that's a really interesting experience!

Nick: Yes, you're absolutely right. Class A surfacing is mostly associated with the automotive industry, but it's also really important in others like aerospace, for example, in creating wings or turbine blades or nacelles on the jet engines, for example. It's really important that we can very carefully control the curvature continuity of the surfaces as they blend together to give it the right aerodynamic performance.

It's also used often in the medical industry because humans come in all shapes and sizes, but we're rarely made of straight lines and boxes, right? So, we have to design things like prosthetic limbs, for example, that need to fit in with the user's needs and the shapes. So, it's very important to be able to create those beautiful organic shapes and curves for that industry.

And let's not forget the marine industry for hull forms and hydrofoils and things like that. It's very important to have that very fine control of the surfaces when you're designing hulls and so on.

Clara: Right, so we talked about transportation, mobility, aerospace, healthcare, marine – those are really interesting applications for Class A surfacing.

I was recently watching a video where a Class A designer who was working for a startup was saying that developing products at speed without compromising quality was one of the main challenges that he faces. I'm guessing this applies to every aspect of product development, right? 

Nick: Yeah, again, you're right. Class A surfacing is important and quality is hugely important nowadays. When it comes to safety regulations, every car or every product that involves people has to pass regulations for safety. Of course they do. So, it is a meticulous and careful process and it takes time.

So, being able to build and check those surfaces more quickly is very, very important. Many, many things depend on the Class A surfacing, particularly going downstream through engineering and into production. Class A will set the bar as high as it's ever going to be, and the quality of the end product is only going to come down from there.

So, it's really, really important that the Class A quality is really as high as it can possibly be. And of course, it's important that if – change happens, right – change always happens. So, it's really important that if a change is required, it happens as early as possible in the design process.

So, the longer it's left, the more of an impact it'll have on the downstream use cases or applications like production and so on. So, the challenge for Class A people is to try to avoid late changes by detecting problems earlier in the process.

But also, the collaboration with the other departments is vital. So, this is where using CATIA on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can be really beneficial because it helps to bring styling, simulation, production and engineering all together to reference the Class A surfaces.

And they can actually start their jobs a little bit earlier. 3DEXPERIENCE is a fantastic collaboration tool because normally, the traditional design processes – these departments, they work in silos and, you know, there's a bit of an “over the wall“ type approach. So once the design is finished, they can pass it over and they give it to someone else to work on it.

But with 3DEXPERIENCE, we have the opportunity now to actually let everybody start working earlier, get access to the data earlier in the process, so that if there are problems or changes that are needed, that can be communicated effectively to everybody taking part in the project. CATIA and 3DEXPERIENCE combined with ENOVIA and SIMULIA and DELMIA and 3DEXCITE is an incredible tool to really compress the timescales and improve the communication and collaboration between departments.

And something that we noticed with COVID is – a wonderful benefit that's come out, a silver lining from the pandemic, if you like. When – something I've seen with our customers, with people that I look after in the UK – when everybody got sent home, it was a huge problem for people that didn't have cloud access to their data, to their work, their everyday applications.

But with 3DEXPERIENCE, the designers and the engineers went home and then just taking their laptop or their iPad, they could still access their apps, their models and their projects through the 3DEXPERIENCE through the cloud.

Automotive companies are very, very careful with data security. It's a big concern: they need to share information, but they need to share it at the right time to the right people. And it's very, very important for them that they can control that, and they need to trust that that's what's happening with their data.

So, before COVID, working from home in design studios was a very rare thing indeed. In fact, it was not allowed in many cases. But then after COVID, that's completely changed because our customers have recognized that using the cloud and using 3DEXPERIENCE really is a very effective way to keep your data safe, but to share it with your remote workers and your suppliers, of course.

Clara: So, to recap you would say: improve collaboration and avoid late changes and improve access to the tools for everyone, right?

Nick: Yes, all departments.

Clara: You have a lot of experience in Class A surfacing, Nick. So, you've worked for major automotive brands in the UK, and you're our Class A surface expert here at Dassault Systèmes.

Nick: Well, I'm glad you asked me that. In Dassault Systèmes and on 3DEXPERIENCE, we've just released a new surfacing app called the ICEM Design Experience. We call it IDX.

Now, ICEM Surf is our legacy Bezier surface modeling tool, and it's a bit like digital sculpting. It's an explicit modeler. That means that it's not associative, it's not parametric, it doesn't have history. So it's more like a digital sculpture, which you can push and pull using control points and curves.

But now on the ICEM Design Experience, it's a lot more like classic parametric CATIA. It sort of mixes the free-form nature of ICEM Surf with Bezier control point modeling and curves and surfaces, but it also brings in classic CATIA surfacing, which is parametric, feature-based and associative.

So it's blending two worlds together: parametrics and explicit type modeling. But on top of that, as it's CATIA, of course, we also have CATIA Imagine & Shape, which is our sub-D modeler. So what I'm saying here is: I'm seeing a huge change in the way that modelers are using different paradigms.

So they're using free-form sketching, they're using parametrics, and they're using sub-D modeling, and they're also using, you know, new patterns.

If you look on the grill of a new car, you're probably going to see some fade out patterns that are really complicated to model. It's not a regular pattern. It's sort of a more of a biological pattern, for want of a better word. So, these patterns are very difficult to make.

These trends are changing the way that you're creating the models, using new tools – CATIA on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows you to use, you know, the sort of modeling paradigm that you wish to, and you can mix them together at any time.

So, Bezier, sub-D, NURBS, you can mix them all together. And CATIA doesn't care. That's one of the beautiful things about it. And also, in the latest release – no, actually in 2023 – we released Visual Scripting. This is our tool for making these wonderful patterns in a slightly different way where you're using more like a graph, almost like a visual programming language to define those patterns and shapes. So that's something that's very, very new in terms of modeling.

And then moving on to the world that we live in. Of course, we're here in the twenty-first century and there's some huge changes in the industry. We have EVs, you know, zero-emissions electric vehicles. Of course, they're everywhere, aren't they, with oil running out. So there's no longer a need to put an internal combustion engine in the front of your car or in the middle, in the back or whatever, you know.

Getting rid of the internal combustion engine is really opening up car design and what a car is supposed to be. It's no longer just a faster than walking or a convenient way to get to work, you know, it's becoming a mobile leisure space, it's becoming a mobile working place or resting place. And then we're getting into autonomous vehicles.

And also a huge, huge topic, of course, is sustainability. Designers, previously, they didn't really have to worry too much about what their cars were made of. A luxury vehicle could be made out of the finest metals, the finest wood veneers, the finest leather.

But now with sustainability being an issue, the designers have to be very, very careful with their material choices to ensure that their products are going to have the right lifetime, so the end of life has to be considered, and the recyclability has to be considered too.

So, just lately the world of automotive design has changed enormously. That big old motor is gone so that space has come back. The motors can be in the wheels, so, you know, the boundaries and restrictions are changing enormously.

But the expectations of the end users are also changing. They want the connectivity. They want that experience, and the autonomous driving – all those factors are having to be taken into account. So, taking full advantage of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can really help our customers bring all of those things together and really take advantage and beat the competition to bring their product to market faster or better.

And lately there have been new ways to produce or to manufacture parts with additive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing is like 3D printing. Previously, we could make something, we could cast it, or we could machine it, or we could make it out of sheet metal parts and bend it. But now, with additive manufacturing, we can actually print out parts that were previously not possible to be made.

They were not manufacturable before, but with printing out metal or plastic or many different materials, this opens the door up to lots of different design possibilities. So, this is another aspect of the way that the design world is changing.

Another trend I'm seeing in automotive design, or design in general, is the uptake in using virtual reality devices. On 3DEXPERIENCE, every single 3D app is VR capable. Even the smallest, simplest 3D modeling review tool, 3D Play, is VR capable. And because the hardware supplier – so the graphics cards and the HMDs, that's head-mounted displays – the technology is just accelerating so rapidly that we're getting new HMDs and new GPUs, you know, almost on a month-by-month basis.

So, a lot of our customers are embracing virtual reality or mixed reality, I should say. This is terribly useful. This came to be in COVID times – because I was working with my team at Dassault Systèmes, with my colleagues in Germany and in North America, and I actually found it really beneficial to be able to put on my VR headset when we were designing a new model between us. And we could meet in VR and we could do a design review in virtual reality.

I actually found that very comforting because in COVID, you know, in lockdown, you didn't really get to meet people. Everything went on Zoom and Skype, everything went on remote video conferencing. So being able to use virtual reality to meet your colleagues was actually quite a relief, and it's a very effective way to work together if you're in a different location.

We can support very basic HMD, so it's just a very basic VR experience, so you could just plug it into your laptop and away you go. Or we can support the really sophisticated mixed reality devices with hand tracking, where you can see your hands in the VR space, and you can see your colleagues as well, and you can see the room around you.

So virtual reality is really bringing a renaissance to automotive design because the price point in those devices is really coming down. And I think it won't be long before we see a VR headset on every desk.

Clara: Yeah, that sounds fun, actually.

Nick: Yeah, it is. It's really good fun too. So it's nice that we can bring this into our working lives.

Nick: Right. Well, no crystal balls here, but I would say – so IDX is quite a new product and it's evolving and has evolved since its arrival. We take input from our customers into what they want our apps to do. So, we're listening to all our customers. So IDX is going to continue to improve.

It's going to get more capability, we're going to bring more things into it because it's a very customizable interface with IDX. But also, something I think we're going to see a lot more of, is bringing artificial intelligence into the way we design things.

I was asked just the other day: did I think that artificial intelligence is going to replace Class A surfacing? Well, no, I don't think it will. It's going to help us do some of the more mundane, repetitive tasks that we have to do.

It's going to maybe make those faster and easier for us, giving us more time to concentrate on the tasks that require real skill and care and attention to detail, the sort of thing that you couldn't teach a computer to do. So I think we're going to see an awful lot more of artificial intelligence coming into our daily lives as we design new products for the future.

Clara: Well, I learned a lot today, Nick. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast and sharing your insights with us.

Nick: Well, it's been my absolute pleasure, Clara. I hope you found it interesting and yeah, you've learned a few new things today.

Thank you for listening to Designing Impactful Innovation. To find out more, go to 3ds.com/cloud. Don't forget to subscribe for more insights and stories from our guest experts.