Design animation for rapid product development
Guohe Liu, Han Tong Loh, A.C. Brombacher and Hong San Tan
Design Technology Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119260
ABSTRACT
This paper proposed a methodology of exploiting design animation for rapid product
development (RPD). The objective is to investigate a fast and economical communication
media for all design participants. By using commercial software: solidworks and multimedia
studio pro, a live design animation AVI file can be conveniently created and easily shared by
the whole product development group. The efficacy of using this AVI file for improving the
efficiency of design communication is demonstrated by a case study.
1 INTRODUCTION
The continual introduction of new products is the life-blood of a successful company as this is
necessary for it to keep ahead of its competitors and withstand the competitive pressure. To do
so in a timely manner requires the company to adopt a rapid and cost-efficient product
development process. By its very nature, however, such a process is iterative and the ability to
reduce the number of cycles is a key to reducing the overall process time.
In the development of new products, particularly where complicated assembly is introduced,
the design tasks are normally divided up and performed by several groups. The developing
process of a new product involves not only the work of designers, manufacturers but also the
collaboration from suppliers and marketing department as well, which makes the development
process time-consuming and labor-intensive. As time is presently the most challenging
parameter [1][2], the development process needs to be accelerated and therefore, how to offer
a fast and convenient communication environment for all design participants becomes
important. Traditionally, collaborative design is mainly based on design meetings, where the
feedbacks collected for the original design are summarized into documents and designers
communicate their design ideas by reviewing the corresponding manuals and documents, as
illustrated in Fig. 1. This document-based communication is not only time-consuming,
inconvenient but also tedious and of low efficiency, because it involves too many human and
environmental factors, e.g. designers have to read piles of documents to understand the detail
of the product design, the meeting place and the meeting schedule have to be properly planned
so that the meeting is possible for all related members. All these aspects indirectly increase the
difficulty for designers, professional requirements for technicians and thus delay the time to
launch a new product. To speed up the design communication in new product development, in
recent years, virtual reality (VR) technology has been proposed and receiving more and more
attention [3][4]. However, applying VR technology is costly in terms of hardware and
software. Moreover, there are still many problems to be solved [3]. Hence, in this paper, a
design animation method is proposed to achieve this task. The objective is to investigate a fast
and economical media tool for all design participants, with which all related people can freely
communicate and share their ideas in an efficient way.
Design
Manufacture
Supply
Market
…
Feedback
Documents
Design meeting 1
Design meeting 2
Design meeting N
Conference room
Conference room
Conference room
Product
Fig. 1 Traditional design communication for new product development
2 DESIGN ANIMATION IN NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
In essence, design animation is the production of multimedia design AVI (audio visual
interleave) files by capturing the product design from all angles and in motion so as to
effectively demonstrate how the new product will look and perform. As such design AVI files
can be conveniently emailed to the website or partners and easily viewed by anyone who has a
PC, design animation allows designers to communicate their design concepts and collaborate
more effectively, as illustrated in Fig. 2. In addition, the produced design AVI files can also
act as a live training ‘movies’ for the technicians, particularly those for assembly and
repairing. Hence, design animation would be an efficient and effective tool to help the
designers shorten the development cycle of new products. The advantages of design animation
for new product development are summarized as follows [3][4][5]:
•
Concurrent product design and marketing
Using the AVI files produced via design animation, customers, designers, sales staff and
engineers from different divisions can simultaneously evaluate a proposed product design
and would no longer be affected by some human or environmental factors such as time
and place. This not only allows for a more comprehensive assessment of design tradeoffs
with a view to manufacturability, economics, parts availability, human factors
consideration, maintenance and reliability but it also helps designers to arrive at an
agreement on the basic design decisions earlier in the design cycle. On the other hand, as
the produced design AVL files provide potential customers with the ability to visualize
various aspects of the future product, it can be used for marketing studies prior to
expensive prototype production.
•
Live technical support documentation and training materials
In design animation, the original design model can be flown around or revolved about
360° to show what it looks like from different angles; an assembly can be exploded or
collapsed to show how the corresponding components will fit together and come apart;
and the motion of moving parts of an assembly can be captured to show how they will
interact. Hence, design animation can effectively demonstrate each feature of the new
product in detail. The produced multimedia AVI files therefore become live technical
support ‘movies’ for both designers and technicians.
Design
Manufacture
Supply
Market
…
Feedback
AVI files
Designer 1
Designer 2
Designer N
Computer
Computer
Computer
Product
Fig. 2 Proposed design communication for new product development
3 THE PRODUCTION OF A MULTIMEDIA AVI FILE
The production of a multimedia design AVI file consists of two major steps: first to create
AVI file from the product design and then edit the AVI file for multimedia effects. To
implement this task, the two software Solidworks and Multimedia Studio Pro are applied in
this paper.
3.1 The creating of AVI file
As mentioned, design animation is a powerful tool for communicating design engineering
concepts more effectively. In the past, however, the high cost and time required to learn
animation software made it impractical for most designers and engineers to adopt such
technology [5]. Solidworks is a recently developed windows-based software for 3D modeling.
Its embedded Animator is an easy-to-use and economical animation tool. Hence, we choose
Solidworks for animation design.
Animating a product design includes the design for motion, the change of view-angle and the
zooming of local feature details of the product. For assemblies, it also includes the design for
assembly sequence and disassembly sequence. With Solidworks, these tasks can be performed
in a simple way. For example, when creating a moving sequence, the designer needs to define
only several key positions, as illustrated in Fig. 3. The software will automatically generate a
smooth path passing through all these defined positions. Similar procedure applies for the
design of view-angle change and local product feature zooming. As for the design of assembly
and disassembly sequence, the software provides automatic exploding and collapsing function
to fit and separate the components of the assembly, and the designer’s main work is to
schedule the time occurring sequence, as illustrated in Fig. 4. By combining the use of
abovementioned functions, animation design such as flying and rolling for the product can be
obtained, and this animation can be easily recorded and output as an AVI file by Solidworks
Animator recorder.
Key position 2
z
y
x
Key position N
Key position 1
Fig. 3 Automatic generation of smooth motion path in Solidworks
A
A
B
C
D
Explode
B
C
Collapse
A
B
C
D
D
Time 3
Time 4
Time 1
Time 2
Explode A
Explode D
Explode B
ABCD
Explode C
Time 10
Time 5
Collapse A
Collapse D
Collapse C
Collapse B
ABCD
Time 9
Time 8
Time 6
Time 7
Fig.4 Automatically explode and collapse the assembly and schedule the time sequence
3.2 Editing AVI file for multimedia effects
Although the produced AVI file by Animator can effectively demonstrate how a new product
will look and perform, the AVI file is not yet ready or effective for design demonstration.
Without sound, sometimes, it is still hard for some design participants to understand the
product design. For example, suppose an AVI file is presented to customers to show how a
new product will function, if there is no description notes, it could be still difficult for
customers to get the corresponding idea. Hence, we apply software Multimedia Studio Pro to
further process the ‘silent’ AVI file for more impressive effects.
Editing AVI file mainly involves inserting notes files and audio files. The notes file is used to
describe the animation design in detail in the format of Text and the audio file is in the format
of Sound. These two kinds of files need to be prepared before insertion. Multimedia Studio
Pro offers user a convenient Timeline tool to implement these tasks. As illustrated in Fig. 5,
with timeline, notes file and audio file generated can be easily inserted into the AVI frames by
drag-and-drop. Moreover, Timline allows user to insert more than 3 audio files. Hence, beside
the audio file created to describe the animation design, we can also create an audio file for
musical purpose so that the reviewing of the AVI would not be tedious. For assemblies, we
can also create more audio files to simulate the assembly process, such as the ‘sound’ when
components collide. With the inserted description notes and music sound, the ‘silent’ AVI file
takes on multimedia effects and therefore would be more effective by a more ‘life-like’
appearance.
4 AN APPLICATION EXAMPLE
In this paper, we use an assembly product to illustrate the animation design for RPD. This
assembly is a front door cabinet taken from an audio product. It comprises 19 components. A
multimedia design AVI file is produced to demonstrate how these components are fitted into
the cabinet and how they are separated after assembly.
In the animation design, at first, we applied the automatic functions provided by Solidworks to
explode and collapse the cabinet. Then the time sequence for the exploding and collapsing
sequence is re-scheduled, as illustrated in Fig. 6. For each motion of the component, the
motion time is defined with 3-5 seconds. To enhance the animation effects, some motions of
the components are designed with flying and rolling path, as illustrated in Fig. 7, and some
components are designed with local zooming to show the detail (Fig. 8). To create the AVI
file, the whole animation process is recorded at a rate of 7.5 frames per second. For the
produced AVI file, description notes and sound are added to be in conjunction with the
corresponding animation effects for multimedia effects, as illustrated in Fig. 9. The size of the
final produced AVI is about 73 MB and the time to play the file is about 3.5 minutes.
In the experiment, this multimedia design AVI file is emailed to technicians for assembly and
repairing. They were able to rapidly capture the design idea by just playing the file several
times, whereas with traditional documents, they would normally need several days to
understand the assembly idea. This indicates that design animation is an effective tool for
RPD and the multimedia design AVI files are live technical ‘movies’ for rapid design
communication.
Video files
Drag-and-drop
Audio files
Fig.5 Timeline tool for editing AVI files in Multimedia Studio Pro
Fig. 6 Animation sequence of the assembly
Fig.8 Animation design of local zooming
Fig.7 Animation design for rolling and
flying effects
Fig. 9 The AVI file having description
notes and sound
5 CONCLUSIONS
This paper proposed a methodology of exploiting design animation to enhance the design
communication in the new product development. By using readily available and reliable
commercial software Solidworks and Multimedia Studio Pro, multimedia based design
animation file (AVI file) can be conveniently created and easily shared by all the design
participants. The generated AVI file has been demonstrated by an assembly case study to be
not only a high efficient communication media for designers, but also a live technical support
‘movie’ for technicians.
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5. www.solidworks.com
6. The manual of Solidworks 2000.
7. The manual of Multimedia Studio Pro 6.5.