Umberto Palermo Design
Alfa romeo 4C Mole – Virtual Prototyping
THE CHALLENGE
The designer Umberto Palermo, with the approval of FCA, has reinterpreted the Alfa Romeo 4C. Its new version is renamed Alfa Romeo Mole Costruzioni Artigianali 001 and aims to be presented at the fourth edition of the Turin Motor Show held at Parco Valentino. The prototyping phase of this one-off was entirely realized using the immersive virtual reality provided by SHOWin3D, supporting an activity between different production sites.
THE CUSTOMER
Umberto Palermo, emerging today as the new face of Italian design and “carrozzeria italiana” coach building, has devoted himself to the evolution of concept, design and engineering. In 2010 founded UP Design, located in the town of Rivoli nearby Turin, with the aim of contributing to the development of automotive, product and industrial design. An overall team of more than 40 people and 5.000 sqm operates effectively, serving various clients spread around Europe, Asia and South America. COMPREHENSION
The process of prototyping and building a super car of this kind required rapid iterations
and the rapid preparation of an instrument that combines on one side an effective workflow in the conversion of CAD data and on the other an extremely realistic immersive rendering in order to correctly display shapes, dimensions and materials.
All this has also required a great optimization of data to be transferred, which, thanks to the cloud of AWS have been transmitted safely and effective between the various locations of the actors involved in the process.
THE SOLUTION / THE PROJECT
Using SHOWin3D an interactive 3D viewer was created that allowed the UP design team to immersely view the Alfa 4C Mole using an HTC Vive VR device: the car could be viewed in a very realistic way in different scenarios using a PBR rendering and an Image Based Lighting system to provide accurate material rendering.
Using Amazon AWS, a serverless architecture was created thanks to the Lambda service to efficiently process resources (mesh converted from 3D cad files and textures) that were then stored on S3. The CDN was created using CloudFront to provide the customer an effective system of distribution of VR totally pay-as-you-go.
- VR
- RENDERING PBR
- IMAGE BASE LIGHTING
- AMAZON AWS
- SERVERLESS
- CAD CONVERSION
- CLOUDFRONT
- PAY-AS-YOU-GO
ADVANTAGES
VIRTUAL PROTOTYPING
Virtual prototyping allowed to have very short iteration cycles and cost savings avoiding physical maquettes.
REDUCED TIMES
SHOWin3D has made it possible to quickly and cost-effectively produce 2 complementary tools: the immersive prototyping tool and a viewer for the end user that allows the display of the super car in multiple scenarios and with different colors.
SOLIDITY
The solidity and flexibility of AWS has made it possible to adapt and extend the SHOWin3D Cloud architecture in a short time, at low cost and guaranteeing maximum security to the customer’s files.
Virtuale
Reale
Progettazione Alfa Romeo Mole
Among the companies that made this dream possible, I want to mention Shin Software, a Piedmontese company of excellence that has created a real injection of innovative technology in our team. Before designing a car you have to see it, imagine it and thanks to Stefano Provenzano and SHOWin3D we have been able to have a Virtual Design room to perform all the preliminary evaluations of prototyping of the design forms using the an great immersive virtual reality
SUCCESSIVE PHASES
After this first successful experience, SHOWin3D has become for UP Design the flagship tool for prototyping and presenting other creations, ranging from automotive to helicopter interior design.