Project Panther - PTAddict's 1969 Camaro

[PantherCADkid]

Hey guys!

This is will be the first of many posts here and I want to share my story with you. I'm working as an intern at Autodesk in Lake Oswego, Oregon. I will be going over Reality Capture and how it fits into car design and customization. I want to share what we can do today. My posts in this thread will be focusing on Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM), and Simulation (SIM). Welcome to Project Panther!

We will be focusing on this 1969 Camaro. https://lateral-g.net/members/borduin/



Some of you may recognize this from the Lateral-g.net December '10 Feature of the Month. At the moment, the cars restrictions on track come from overheating. At high speed, we suspect this is due to not enough air flow over the radiator surface to cool the fluid. We aim to use our tools to find the best placement for hood vents to try and rectify this issue. We suspect that the problem is that we can’t evacuate enough air out from the engine bay aft of the radiator. Over time, everything but the radiator has been sealed off to try and increase airflow over the surfaces of the radiator. The aim of this work is to use reality captured data from the car and usher it through our CAD and SIM tools to see where we stand today, make changes to the car and, attempt to validate the results on track. The car is outfitted with an autosportlabs racecapture/pro system that will allow us to capture and analyze data from a number of sensors when we get there

Our aim is to be able to review all proposed changes in a digital space. We want to see the impact of our work on the car before we start cutting away or making replacement parts. Later, we hope to identify other possible solutions for this vehicles performance. This added bonus is one that will exist for the lifetime of the car. As changes happen, we can capture the changes and merge these with existing data.

Because of the extensive modifications and age of the car, it is a great place to start. We have no cad data or files to begin with, only software and hardware to look at the world to capture and see the things around us as they exist today, in a digital environment. I started testing this by taking pictures of the car and running it through the workflows. Here is how it turned out!



I took pictures with my iPhone on an ideal day. It was overcast and defused lighting provides the best result for photogrammetry. Using Memento, I transferred the pictures and Memento stitched them together and created a model of the car. It roughly resembled the car in form, and accurately depicted the colors as well. It’s far from accurate, the data in was low quality. This did give me enough to create some fun renderings based on the shape and dimensions of the car. I continued this workflow of photogrammetry to practice with my car, a black Jetta. However the black paint created poor surfaces because of its reflective properties and finish. With the orange paint, the process produced much better results. Still, objects like the headlights and mirrors failed to compute accurately. This can be mitigated by applying dulling products like scanning spray or other no damaging powders. I chose to use paper over the windows so that I didn’t capture the geometry from the seats in the car.



Next, I took this mesh and brought it through our mesh modeling tool MeshMixer to work with and remove the environment around the car and set it up on the origin for later use in CAD. then I used Fusion 360 and its the sculpting tool to make some modifications and later tested them in Flowdesign.




Looking at the simulation, we can see the pressures on the rear wing, and front grill, main intake and low splitter. Right at the gap between the window and hood we see higher pressures, right were we would expect. From here, we can generalize for design intent. We can change the shape and form of the car. We can see the increase in frontal area when trying to get more downforce, and the increased drag. All tradeoffs that have to we have to consider when modifying a car. At the end of the day, I was able to produce a surface model of the car and render it in Fusion 360 and run that smoother surface through flow design.



If you build a certain kind of car or work with custom builds, being able to pull up a generic stock file as well as being able to capture the customers car as it is today and then propose modifications and design visions that can be rendered on the spot with a customer seems like a valuable toolset to me. This workflow goes beyond traditional cad. While it’s possible to do with photogrammetry, an iPhone probably isn't the right tool if we want to manufacture a part from our proposed modifications. Next time, we will be taking a look at some powerful scanning tools and taking a crack at the Camaro in more detail.

In conclusion, the hardware and software tools that I used were:

• My iPhone 6 for pictures
• A Dell laptop
• Autodesk Memento for Realty Capture and photogrammetry
• Autodesk Meshmixer for mesh editing and design work
• Autodesk Fusion 360 Ultimate, a collaborative CAD, CAM & SIM tool for surfacing & rendering
• Autodesk Flowdesign for an overview of design intent implications