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Technicon Design
Customer Success Story

Perfect Shapes
Using Autodesk AliasStudio, Technicon masters the most demanding surfacing tasks in automotive design.

Autodesk® AliasStudio™

AliasStudio offers us the greatest range of options.
—Werner Strathaus Director Technicon Design, Germany

Project Summary With offices in England, France, Germany, China, and the United States, TechniconDesign (Technicon) has been working on the front lines of automobile development for thirty years. The company’s client list is an automotive who’s who, including BMW, Ford, Honda, GM, Porsche, Renault, and many others. Technicon’s highly skilled creative staff provides design services such as surfacing, visualization, and design development to top-tier automobile makers all over the world.Technicon relies on the Autodesk® AliasStudio™ software to: • Produce Class-A surfaces of perfect quality • Move from NURBS to Bezier geometry using a single software application • Translate designers’ inspiration into 3D concept models • Save time and reduce design changes

The Challenge In the automotive manufacturing industry, firms like Technicon must develop designs of increasingly highquality. For example, most manufactures demand Class-A surfaces that have near perfect curvature and tangency alignment. Meeting these requirements is highly specialized work that must be carried out by creative experts with extensive mechanical and manufacturing knowledge. Technicon’s design experts are expected to develop Class-A surfaces with several levels of geometric continuity. To createthese surfaces, Technicon needed sophisticated software capable of translating designer ideas into flawless 3D concept models with surfaces featuring perfect curvature and transitions. The company also wanted software that could incorporate engineering and manufacturing considerations early in the design process. That way, Techicon’s designers would be able to produce viable concepts from thevery outset of a project— reducing late design and engineering changes and shortening the design cycle.

Technicon has been using AliasStudio for two decades to develop perfect surfaces.
The Solution With automotive manufacturers expecting perfect surfaces, Technicon turned to the Autodesk AliasStudio product line. “AliasStudio offers us the greatest range of options,” says Werner Strathaus,director of Technicon Design in Russelsheim, Germany. AliasStudio provides several tools that help meet the exacting standards of Class-A surfaces. For example, direct modeling tools give designers control over surface shapes so that they can achieve the exact form and surface quality required. They can easily manipulate and smooth surface vertices and hulls and use curve-based surfacing tools todefine the shape at edges. Designers can choose single-span (Bezier) geometry or multi-span NURBS (non-uniform rational B-spline) geometry, and can explicitly define the number of spans and the degree of created surfaces. Surface evaluation tools let designers verify the quality of the surfaces they’ve created, including curvature and radii analyses, and even test for safety regulations thatrestrict sharp radii on interior surface areas. In addition, using AliasStudio helps Technicon complete work from start to finish using an all-digital workflow—and then pass on its 3D concept models to its clients’ engineering teams to incorporate into digital prototypes. And because AliasStudio enables Technicon to gather, handle and display various data—as CATIA® V5 data and NX data via Autodesk®DirectConnect, as well as image data in formats like TIFF and JPEG—the company can incorporate engineering, design and manufacturing considerations early in the design cycle. “A welcome result of this early integration is an overall shortening of the process,” says Strathaus. “We also reduce the need for late design and engineering changes.” Achieving G3 Continuity Technicon’s surfacing...