NPOWER Software - Advanced Modeling Plugins for 3DSMAX and RHINO

After primary school, I did an apprenticeship as a commercial photographer, so the making of pictures for marketing use has always been a natural part of my work, one way or another. The first contact I had with computer-based drawing was in the mid-nineties at Copenhagen Polytechnic School, where I soon began to discover the fascination and power of 3D tools in the early versions of AutoCAD and 3d studio..

After my studies, I worked for different architectural companies,  ending up in working for some of the major Scandinavian and German firms specialized in architectural renderings.   In 2001, I moved business and began to work in the Aerospatiale industry at Airbus in Germany.  There,  for the first time, I was challenged with the difficulties of rendering manufacturing CAD data, often resulting in a very high poly count when taken into  3D programs like Maya.

In my time at Airbus GmbH, we had some painstaking experiences in trying to convert CAD solids of 380 Airliner cabins using only 3dsmax and polytrans. Later, we started to use Deltagen for tessellating CAD solids into meshes, which was a time-consuming process but you had good visual control and some good cleanup tools in Deltagen. Later, the 3D-meshes were used for virtual-reality presentations or 3D work done in Maya or Lightwave.

Enormously, although you might be able to load an entire two-stroke engine using the default import filters in Maya, there is no way that you could work on it for more than 10 minutes without bringing down the whole system. The nPower tool provides you with a set of tools that are easy to use and that takes away one of the bottlenecks (the other one is the rendering engine) of rendering large CAD datasets. It would not have been possible to make an entire two-stroke engine with our tight budget and in a decent quality without nPower.

I believe that real-time rendering technologies will be more strongly presented in the future, but that this technology is far from ready yet and is too scattered into different applications and standards. At MAN Diesel, we have not embraced the idea of virtual photography like the automobile industry has done, and are also much more cost-conscious and not as dependent on selling our product by looks rather than performance. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t see any value in presenting a two-stroke engine in all its beauty on the cover of a magazine, not to mention that making studio-like photographs of engineering on our scale is simply not possible, so that’s where 3D visualizations have a big value for us.

Taking nPower for Maya into consideration, then I would say that adding materials to the models can be a bit painstaking, especially when you like to do this with the help of Hypergraph. Here, it would be nice if materials could be added just by selecting the parent nodes in the hierarchy.