Airborne Industries Ltd, of Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, sells products such as advertising balloons, escape chutes for airliners, and promotional inflatables. These range from clowns to champagne bottles. The company has made considerable productivity and commercial gains since the adoption of a 3D CAD (computer-aided design) system in early 1993. The system consists of AutoCAD running on an IRIS Indigo(tm) R3000 from Silicon Graphics.
The design and manufacture of Airborne's products brings its own particular range of specialist challenges. Before the implementation of the 3D CAD system, the design process was very laborious.
"Each 3D surface had to be converted to flat 2D panels and then drawn to scale at various viewpoints, allowing calculation of `true-lengths'. This could take weeks, depending on the complexity of the surface," said David Belton, design engineer at Airborne Industries.
A Need For 3D CAD
Airborne found that this process was taking too long and had become very costly, hence the need for a 3D CAD system.
"AutoCAD was the obvious choice for the software. It was the most cost-effective system we evaluated, and has become the universal standard across the design and drafting industry," said Belton.
For the hardware, Airborne Industries purchased an IRIS Indigo R3000 workstation from Silicon Graphics. The company also has two Sun workstations, which were purchased three years ago. According to Belton, these are being gradually phased out in favour of the IRIS Indigo, as they do not offer the same high levels of flexibility and processing speed.
Airborne Industries has been using the new CAD system for nine months, and has already noticed many benefits.
"Our design engineers can construct the finished article in 3D, and then manipulate it in real time from any viewpoint in space, or twist it around from any angle. The system allows us to take the required true lengths directly from the 3D wireframe representation. This is a far easier and more accurate method. We are now able to complete jobs in half the time needed previously when dealing with hand-drawn designs," said Belton.
Airborne Industries is also making use of the other software which was provided with the IRIS Indigo. For example, the rendering capabilities of the IRIS View(tm) and IRIS Inventor(tm) software packages allow shading of the design's surfaces and the incorporation of realistic light sources.
Visualizing the Finished Product
"This is particularly useful when someone is finding it hard to visualise the finished product. We can display the full colour 3D design on the screen, with lighting and shading as appropriate," said Belton.
Airborne is also currently experimenting with IRIS Showcase(tm), Silicon Graphics' presentation package. IRIS Showcase is a multimedia presentation tool that combines text, diagrams and static images with animated images and sound. It is bundled with all Silicon Graphics' workstations. According to Belton, the company hopes to use IRIS Showcase to produce internal documents and corporate presentations.
"The CAD system has not only speeded up our design process, and increased the accuracy of the designs, but it also represents excellent value for money. The facilities offered by the IRIS Indigo have considerably enhanced our output, and we can see ourselves working with both AutoCAD and Silicon Graphics well into the future," said Belton.
