Software that can model how a product will be built or how a place will look enables designers to work more effectively. They can endlessly examine and tinker with richly detailed views of things and places that have not yet taken physical form. These visions constructed in the software will always represent potential: they won’t fade, get dented, or fall apart.
IWC Schaffhausen, a Swiss watchmaker, uses the SolidEdge CAD software from Siemens to design the intricate mechanics of its timepieces.
For a client in Las Vegas, Hines + Dibrova Studio in New York designed a restaurant that doubles as a nightclub, seen here in a digital rendering. Using software tools they developed, the designers modeled the lighting and other details of the restaurant, which has yet to be built.
Orange County Choppers, the company featured on TV’s American Chopper, designs and builds custom motorcycles, and it needs computer modeling to do it. This is a bike that was designed using SolidWorks software, from Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks. The plans are refined in the software (inset) so that designers can determine how individual parts will need to be made.
Rendering software doesn’t have to be installed on the premises of a business; Autodesk runs a remote-rendering service it calls Project Neon. This image is a model that didn’t turn into an actual building, but it shows how the software can handle lighting, texture, and other details.
This rendering of an escalator made by Kone is another example showing how the placement and interaction of parts can be modeled in design software.
This image is taken from the architectural software that Oosterhuis_Lénárd, a Dutch firm, used to design a complex known as CET in Budapest, Hungary.