Prove Your Mettle in the 2006 PTC Awards Competition

with Alex Lorman, British School of Washington  

The PTC/USER community boasts an incredible depth of design talent in every industry and region around the globe. The annual PTC Awards competition is a showcase for these exceptional designers and their creations. This contest, now open for submissions, represents an awesome opportunity to prove your mettle against the best in the world. Past winners hail from organizations such as Motorola, John Deere, Lotus, Bombardier and others known for innovative products. 

All designs will be judged by a panel of industry experts, who will select the finalists within each of the categories of Heavy Equipment, Transportation, Life Sciences, Consumer Products, High-Tech Electronics and Education (with two subcategories, K-12 and College & University). Judges will evaluate each entry against the contest criteria of product innovation, benefits, complexity and aesthetics. Category winners will be selected through an online vote, and an overall champion will be selected via online voting and voting at the PTC/USER World Event in June. Winners will be announced at the World Event and have their entries prominently published on the PTC website.

You can get more details on contest rules at www.ptc.com/go/awards. The deadline is March 13, 2006, so be sure to enter right away. Images of winning designs from past competitions—including the Open60 Class Trimaran shown here—can also be found at ptc.com.

Alex Lorman, a student at the British School of Washington and winner in the K-12 Education category in 2005, provided the following account about developing his award-winning concept in Pro/DESKTOP. A team from the University of Oklahoma also won in the College & University division in 2005, marking the first time ever that American students have taken top honors at the PTC Awards.

Sailing to Victory

The original idea for the Open60 Trimaran came when I read about the disastrous Route de Rhum transatlantic sailing race in 2002 where 8 of 18 trimarans were forced to retire. I looked at the photos of the boats and was fascinated with the incredibly complex curves and multiple hulls of the craft.

Although I was still learning the basics of Pro/DESKTOP at that point, I decided to challenge myself and attempt the design of one of the craft. The first iteration of the design was not at all successful because of the techniques I was employing in Pro/DESKTOP, namely the wrong ones. On the whole, the failure of the first “draft” of the design was due to lack of experience in Pro/DESKTOP and lack of knowledge about what tools to use where. 

At that point, the project was put on a back burner and forgotten for many months. After I had designed several other boats, including an offshore rescue lifeboat [nominated in the Education K-12 category of the PTC design awards in 2004], I thought about continuing the Open60 Trimaran project. Continuing was something of a misnomer since it involved starting the whole project afresh. With my much-improved knowledge of the program, I was able to better envision the final design while still drawing initial ideas for the design on paper. As soon as I started to put my pen and ink sketches into Pro/DESKTOP as vector lines and curves, my newfound knowledge of the program was immediately useful. I was able to properly utilize the full potential of the program. 

Although Pro/DESKTOP is marketed as the little sister to Pro/ENGINEER, it is by no means the black sheep of the family. While lacking the physics suite and some of the extremely advanced features of Pro/ENGINEER, it is still a very capable program. The interface is slightly different and there are far fewer tools to use, but Pro/DESKTOP is easy to use and has the functions most needed by the typical user. 

The design began to take shape in Pro/DESKTOP thanks to the “loft profiles” tool, which interprets multiple closed chains of lines, on different planes, and creates a three- dimensional, often curved, shape. Another tool I discovered in making this particular model was the “mirror solids” tool. The problem I faced was that the two outer hulls are not identical, but rather mirror images of each other. This design aids the boat in cutting rather than pushing its way through the water. I solved this problem by creating one hull as per the specification and then mirrored it in the final assembly to create the complete model. This tool saved significant amounts of time and effort and made the hulls identical rather than factoring human error into the design. 

3D model half completed.

When all the individual pieces were created as separate files, I began to combine them in a new file, which consisted solely of all the separate components and their positional restraints. This method of combining all the other parts into one design is the most reliable way I found for keeping restraint errors between components to a minimum. Some of the components were subassemblies, in the sense that the one file being added as a part to the main assembly file consisted of a couple of smaller files that were constrained in a particular manner. 

Completed 3D model awaiting decals and rendering.

By far the most difficult and time-consuming part of this design project was the rendering in three dimensions and addition of decals, giving the boat its lifelike appearance. When the final assembly file was complete and exactly as desired, I imported the whole file into an album view. This is Pro/DESKTOP’s visual rendering suite. The one file added to the display model that is not true to life was a large oval symbolizing the water that the catamaran was slicing through. This was for realism purposes in the final three-dimensional rendering.

During three-dimensional rendering, a whole different skill set is used, namely proficiency with Adobe Photoshop and other graphics suites. These programs then output BMP files to be applied as a decal to the three-dimensional model in Pro/DESKTOP. Getting the decals and the various textures to correspond to each other correctly and look realistic is very much a trial-and-error process that requires many redrawings of the images to ensure accuracy and consistency throughout the design. The decal system in Pro/DESKTOP is analogous to attaching two-dimensional sticky decals onto a plastic model, so that the two-dimensional image becomes “wrapped” around the three-dimensional surface.

Applying the surface decals to the hulls.

When I had completed defining the material properties of the entire model and all the decals were applied and positioned properly (not a quick task, and not helped by the fact that I lacked a powerful workstation), I started to “pose” the model. The point of posing the model when all the surface finishes were in place was to get the best view of the model rendered and also to create several different JPG images that could easily be sent by email to a potential client. This process is rather like “working the angles” in a photography shoot.

Final image of the completed design.

Like Pro/ENGINEER, Pro/DESKTOP is only as powerful as its operator. Pro/DESKTOP simply provides an easy and accessible way to visualize ideas without trying to do too many tasks in one operation, instead taking smaller steps that are more easily accomplished. Although I think I pushed Pro/DESKTOP to its limits in terms of the number of functions used and different processes completed, I still think that more creative things can be achieved with it, given enough time. As with any system, it is not perfect and improvements could be made, but thanks to PTC it is continually updated and a work in progress. 

Alex Lorman currently attends St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. He freelances as a photographer and continues to develop designs in his (limited) spare time. Alex can be reached by email at lormanalex@msn.com or through his website www.alexlorman.com.