Specialising in modern domestic light fittings, Astro Lighting supply innovative lighting products to leading UK and European retailers such as The Conran Shop, Habitat, Heal’s and John Lewis. As a design-led organization, Astro pay great attention to the styling, use of materials, and effectiveness of each light design.

“We want to wow the client with our design ideas, but we also want to make sure that they can fully appreciate and understand the design – just from the 3D visualization,” said Astro Lighting Design Director James Bassant. “To do that, we have switched to RenderDrive.”

A long-time SolidWorks user, Astro had become frustrated with the quality of visualization that PhotoWorks, SolidWorks’ photorealistic rendering module, could produce and approached ART VPS to see whether their virtual photography solutions could help. All design work is still carried out in SolidWorks where Astro is able to block models out, assemble parts for clash detection, and produce engineering drawings, but all visualization is now created with a RenderDrive system shared by the design team.

According to Bassant, the images created with SolidWorks were not up to the task. “Too often the buyer would be asking ‘what material is that?’ – the visualizations we were creating with PhotoWorks and showing the buyer were just not communicating the designs effectively. They were clearly computer illustrations. To change that, we went looking for new rendering solutions.”

Astro Lighting approached ART VPS after research showed that ART VPS solutions could create stunningly real looking images and animations.

“We were amazed by the realism of the images that RenderDrive could create,” says Bassant, “and ART VPS were able to show us how to integrate RenderDrive with our SolidWorks CAD data. We considered RenderDrive in the same way that we would look at investing in manufacturing machinery – and knew that RenderDrive would allow us to stay ahead of and extend the gap to our competition.”

Integrating RenderDrive with CAD applications such as SolidWorks – for which no direct RenderDrive interface is available – is achieved through ART VPS CAD|CAMERA software bundle. This provides a powerful and flexible visualization environment capable of accepting geometry data from a wide number of CAD applications including SolidWorks.

“RenderDrive is easy and natural to use,” comments Bassant. “It is a very physical visualization environment – materials such as glass and chrome just look real.”

RenderDrive simulates the complex physics of the real world to create an image from a 3D CAD model. The results are undistinguishable from a photograph. Uniquely, RenderDrive performs its physically based rendering within specialised ray tracing graphics chips enabling images to be generated many times faster than with conventional software rendering. With RenderDrive, designers can employ and combine all the rendering features that are traditionally expensive and time-consuming to calculate - such as multiple area lights, accurate motion blur and depth of field, secondary illumination, and physically based materials, lighting and camera properties.

This rendering performance and operational simplicity is vital for Astro, as lead times between an initial discussion with a retailer and product on sale is typically just six to eight months. In this time, designs have to be produced, modified, approved, manufactured and shipped to the client. As manufacturing is completed in China, shipping alone accounts for four weeks of this time. Visualization is used throughout the process to ensure that everyone is aware of the designs.

Today, Astro Lighting is using RenderDrive to produce visualizations of new design concepts for client presentation. However, like many other RenderDrive users, Bassant sees the opportunity to apply this high quality visualization to other areas.

“We’re looking at using RenderDrive created images in our product catalogs,” adds Bassant, “and also for the photographic labels that go on the light’s carton exterior. Using computer visualization for these labels would enable us to create the artwork before or in parallel with manufacturing – meaning far fewer hold-ups to the production run.”

“Images created with RenderDrive take away a lot of the questions in the retail buyer’s mind,” says Bassant. “They remove the language barrier between designer and buyer – no assumptions need to be made. We’d like customers to be confident enough to buy off the page from seeing the visualization. RenderDrive makes that possible.”