Collaborative 3D Design Process, Tools, and Team for End-to-End Success with Bart Massee

 

The 3D design process can be very challenging when you’re working with teams, especially right now when a lot of people are working remotely. Having the right technology, software, and tools can allow the design and product development process to be more collaborative and creative. In this podcast, Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard talk to Bart Massee, the Senior Manager and Creative Director for the Advanced Design & Strategy Team at HP. A tech savvy visionary, Bart actively engages in the growth of his team members and continuously searches for lean efficiency to operate at the highest quality levels. Tune in to this episode to know what to look for when working with a team as well as adopting new tools to build a seamless design process.

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Collaborative 3D Design Process, Tools, and Team for End-to-End Success with Bart Massee

This is exciting to talk to all these different people with such different backgrounds.

I enjoyed this interview you’re about to read because it is in our special area of interest and our education and career space of design-related issues regarded to product design and development using 3D printing and all these CAD tools that you need to use if you’re going to be in this industry.

We have Bart Massee and he is part of the HP GxD, which is a Global Experience Design division. He’s the Design Manager of the advanced design team. He’s a tech-savvy visionary. He’s a Creative Director with a passion for driving innovation and shaping relevant expression and experiences. He’s done this from around the world. He’s from the Netherlands and he’s living out of Vancouver. It’s interesting to see how he’s looking at that broader view of how you get all the different disciplines to work together, all the parts of that design and development process working together, and then how you get the tools and the resources together to put a soul in it.

It’s about bringing the human element into the design and working within a very large corporation like HP, how you focus on that complete experience.

It’s how you get the value of the human in the design process when you’ve got all this technology and tools?

Let’s go right to that interview and then we’ll be back to have a few words after that.

Bart, we’re glad to have you join us. We’re excited to talk design process. It’s exciting for us to talk about technology, 3D printing and all these different things, but someone who gets us as designers, we’re excited about that. This design process and working in teams is a big challenge. I was hoping we would start there because we’re having the challenge of working remotely, working with our team and trying to get things designed. We’ve got a lot of hobbyists and independents, and they don’t realize how most major products are all designed as a team. How do you do that because you’re heading a big design team?

That’s a good idea. That also brings us through the opportunities that this working from home event brings us to see a lot of trends. Speakers talk about how does might change that landscape. One of the big topics that we talk about a lot is the XR ability with VR to bring us closer. If we talk about product design and evaluation in XR to be in the same space together, using a VR is one of the huge opportunities that we’re working on setting up with the teams. Apart from that, there are other tools as well. The online collaboration tools that we use. In some instances, I believe it is almost beneficial to have a neutral space and we connect in a virtual space rather than a shitty conference room.

Sometimes I feel that the tools that are provided with the mural board are perhaps more powerful if you see all the different arrows moving around with the different people. It might bring more powerful in hyperspace than in actual physical life. Other times, you have to be together in a space where you work on designs. You talk about designs, talk about proportions and you’re face-to-face. We’re lucky as a profession to have the ability to do a lot in virtual space. That’s what we’re noticing. There’s still some physical building that we need to do. As HP design, we live on the brink between the physical and the digital. That’s the heart of what we are and where we live with print and with 3D prints. In that sense for us, we’re lucky to have the ability to do a lot in hyperspace.

I know from managing a team of designers myself and being a designer. A lot of times, designers have an anti-authority streak in them. You don’t conform very well to the corporate environment. While I agree, collaboration is critical in design and development especially critiquing each other’s work being open to that. I’m a big believer that two heads are better than one and seeing past your own blind spots, but I do think designers tend to thrive more if at times they’re able to do their own thing and be in their environment. I imagine the situation is not hurting the design and development process much.

It’s true. However, there are two sides to this coin. One of my favorite books is the Skunk Works. It’s the development of Blackbird SR-71 airplanes that take a team completely offsite and do skunkworks. Advanced design is all about that. Apple sometimes does the same as a reference as they have a separate building for the Macintosh back in the day.

Sometimes some group has sprints. That’s also another version of the software days now.

The other side to the coin is one of the biggest roles that we have in the corporation is to influence the course and the direction of the company towards customer-centric, fitting things that people cherish but also the influence of the culture shift of taking big teams of R&D and having the dialogue with marketing. In that sense, there’s this moment when we need to be producing and provoking, creating a provocative design that is building on the subconscious needs of customers and not just the rational math of, “Here we go. Here are the features.” What is the real thing that people love, but then you have to influence the R&D organization and work with them closely to bring it to market? There’s a little bit of that too where you have to be there and you have to be together.

Our brain hasn't been able to grasp what we can do with #3Dprinting; our design mind is twenty years behind. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

That’s my role usually in what we do. I completely understand how that is. I don’t want to be out of touch with those parts of the organization because the buy-in is important to the successful launch of any product.

I’ve only worked in other corporate organizations a few times and even I only would last so long there before I have to get out. I also played a role in trying to protect the designers and make the environment and the situation the best for them to produce their best work. I would be that buffer between the corporation and them. Being a designer was critical because you have to understand all that. I feel for some of how you work.

I’ve been thinking about the design process and its changes over time. It’s changed a lot. Some of what frustrated us early on when we were starting 3D printing and doing other things was that it felt like a lot less design and a lot more technicians started to come into the job. How is that like with what you’re doing and what you’re doing with HP? How are you guys always looking at the process of designing, producing and doing all those things? How are you starting to address and help remove some of that technician’s jobs so we can live in that world of creativity?

That’s one of the points we addressed. We created a provocative mission and vision statement on how computational design is going to change the landscape, using algorithms in the design process. The bigger vision there might be that what is the real value of humans in the design process? If you start analyzing this, one of the biggest things in the middle of it is that we breathe soul into an object. By using rational equations, you can come to very okay products. It’s not something you would cherish to have or to use.

The designer’s biggest role is to bring humanity, soul, and desirability. We often talk about quality and desirability. Those are at the heart of what we can bring to the equation to elevate the value. What we’re discussing right now is with computational design and bringing in algorithms. The part of the actual thing you’re discussing which is the actual craft of the tinkering, creating, and you call it almost a technician role. Ideally, the designer’s role is more elevated to a DJ. It’s orchestrating, dialing and assisting. It could almost be more artificial intelligence and computational designs. If you could code a design language, not just for digital, but also for physical, we’re now discussing how can we code our actual physical language into a DNA that could be tinkered with.

That’s quite a provocative statement but then as designers, you can elevate yourself to what is the real purpose and value of the design group. That’s always the dynamic that you see in organizations. We go up and up to find the real treasure. The tinkering or the technician stuff that you’re talking about like managing the 3D printer on your desk and spending days were bringing this thing to come alive. Those types of things should ideally all be automated in a decade from now. It’s this automation to free ourselves up to do the real important things that matter where we can bring a difference.

Tom created this 3D print tie and it was gorgeous in rendering. It’s beautiful on the screen but then going to printing, he had to create a whole new language of support system and everything to get the printer to print it. That always seemed to me as such a frustrating part of the design. I have this vision but it won’t make it if I don’t develop this other thing and then that’s all technical. I’m loving the idea of these computers and the computational design getting smarter to be able to let us do what we want to do and it supports that.

 

It’s a big shift. For me, I provocatively could state industrial design is very 1900. It’s a century ago and people still say, “You’re an industrial design or whatever.” It’s an insult to many designers because we look end-to-end. The good thing with industrial designers is they’re a little bit like the fighter pilots. They fly the plane. They make the stuff. A lot of our designers are creating value in a completely different way. To be labeled an industrial designer in an organization and to be put in a corner is quite frustrating. Everybody should say we’re UX. We’re all experienced designers, but the people who do industrial design understand the craft of that tinkering and they own it. They’re good at bringing an idea into form and to matter. They’re the ones that make it come alive. Having some of those skills is extremely valuable. Automating those skills into the future will allow more people to do the craft. There are still some basic rules you need to learn about proportion and minimalism. What is the global form language that we apply because it’s a global language?

I’ve been lucky here because we have a shorthand for having to work together for so long. I can visualize something and go, “Can we do this?” Tom will be like, “Let me figure out how to do it.” I have that as a part of my process.

Don’t call him a technician. He’s going to get mad.

He figures out how to bring the form to my idea. I’m lucky in that process but many aren’t. You have the idea but you can’t get it out and you can’t get it through that process. I get that and I’m excited about that idea of that future.

You could talk about the democratization of manufacturing with 3D printing. Every town or village, everyone can have a little factory in their home, but there’s also the democratization of the actual creating art to a high standard instead of tooling something for $100,000. I still think our brain hasn’t been able to grasp what we can do with 3D printing yet. Our brain is twenty years behind. We’re like, “We need a computational design to make the most out of it.” We’re still talking about this stupid tool design which is like, “This what we can do.” It’s 1900 and we’re still catching up. We talk about growing products like nature. You literally can grow stuff, different materials, embedding electronics, or even printing power sources is not a secret. Imagine you can print an entire product completely ready for diagnostics in the field that you can do a test in 50 minutes in Africa, that normally would take two weeks in the lab. That’s the democratization and then the product is biodegradable and disappears in two weeks. We have not been able to make the shifts. You need a new generation of designers to understand what the possibilities are.

I agree with you on that generational thing. We were talking about that on some of our other shows here. We’re talking about megatrends and some of the other things and we were talking about those. In context, that’s exactly where we were going. The reason this shift is going to take so long for us is that we almost have to re-educate in a different way.

The new generation stands up that ignores everything. It’s like my young daughter who puts on the Quest and she accepts it as the norm. For her playing in a vacation simulator for an hour with a friend in Portland is the norm. This is how she’s growing up. We grew up with Atari, that’s what my dad gave me. We’ve seen the whole coding development from back in the day to coding BASICS to now. What Juliet will grow up with blows the mind. She accepts this VR space as normal. That generation is going to be like, “What are you talking about Gravity Sketch? I’ve already made some stuff in Gravity Sketch.”

Automating #3Ddesign skills into the future and how we are #learning3Dprinting will allow more people to create. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

They do. They see it as the normal. Not only that, but they have a greater acceptance of voice recognition, AI, and other things that are being a normal part of a daily basis. We’re looking at our young child and she could tell Alexa what to do before she could write or read. That thought process is going to alter everything that we do.

Her attitude or her expectation when she sees her older sister using a computer, she’s like, “When can I get a computer?” “You need to learn to read first.”

Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe we’re the ones who are wrong about that.

We believe the culture of books and dedication is still valid. I tell my kids, “When you’re eighteen, you can either go into the Navy and get a college free education, or you go to YouTube and you learn whatever you want?” I’m a bad parent but I want them to go to college.

Let’s talk about how some of the different technologies are now facilitating the product development process because it needs eye-opening to some of us who are still a little old school. All the different things that we have at our access to be able to use.

What we’re trying to push is very much the efficiency through using the VR space. As an organization, we might spend $100,000 or more on model making so hard models and these are big machines. They cost a lot of money. They’re made in a very high-quality model making shops. A lot of stuff is handmade. It sees and seed, finished, perfectly, beautiful things, and then what you see is what you get. Why? Because that’s $1 million worth of tooling. You need to see it in a real-life review of proportions that are sometimes millimeters like 5 millimeters. I’m talking industrial design here.

We know what you’re talking about in furniture. We’ve done it. If you don’t see it in person, you don’t know if it’s going to work.

 

However, the cost reduction or cost efficiency of, if you could only do half of that in VR, bingo. You can buy I don’t know how many HP Z rigs, the fastest one with the Reverb, for that money If you could save $20,000. That’s the equation we’re making on. What are the tools we’re using them practically to go and do that? There’s a variety of things. Gravity Sketch collaboration is going to come out soon. We have a link with those guys already. Using Gravity Sketch to be in a space together to block out things work well. I’ve done it myself. You can create almost a retail space and block it out together and talk about it. The beta of collaboration, more people in one space is coming out.

Those types of tools and there’s KeyShot VR, which is you press the button and you’re in a VR space at 90 frames per second. The CMF is a good representation of what it is. It’s not ray-traced because you can’t do that at 90 frames a second, but it’s good to observe and view proportion and things like that. It’s a click of a button. Next to that, I dived in unity quite heavily because it’s my view that gaming design tools. Because of what we talked about earlier, the ability to switch to more complex forms of modeling for 3D printing needs us to ditch old fashion CAD and go into game development CAD. You have a ZBrush. You have Blender 2.8 which is huge. The whole ability to go into polygon modeling with UV mapping means you can print in color, so all your gaming characters could be coming out of the jet fusion machine.

We talk about that all the time here that the old industrial design model does it in gray, add color later, and I come from the color background going, “They’re intertwined. If you want to design a great product, you better have your color figured out from the beginning.”

Let’s go back a little bit to the industrial design process. How we would do that for printers? I created Unity Scenes where you download a Unity Environment. There’s this company Art Piece. You go to the Asset Store in Unity and they make these insanely gorgeous, very modern, progressive houses like you have this list of houses, it’s all big textures. You get in and you’re blown away because it’s very high-quality materials. What I do then is you grab any Rhino model, you drop it in there. You then go in and observe how it looks in a modern office.

We talked to those guys and they can also create special spaces for us. We can make a factory to put a 3D printer inferences and observe it. That’s the stuff that we’re doing with Unity. As far as the industrial design process, we’ll be able to observe proportion and do design reviews in VR at a larger scale. The only reason we’re slow is that we’re so busy that it takes effort to switch and to adapt to get the machines and the rigs, and then get Singapore to work with Vancouver in the same space at the same time and getting people in workshops.

That’s the near-term goal. We’re a little behind the curve but it’s a great way to demonstrate our machines. We have rigs set up and we’re doing it. I keep talking about the gaming world. If you look at the gaming world, they’re billions of gaming characters in full color that are out there. We have a collaboration with Valve. HP is bringing a new headset with Valve. The gaming giant that brought out Half-Life. HP and Valve have a collaboration that’s coming out with a headset. Imagine if you can unlock the world of the gaming characters, of Fortnite characters, you download it and you can have them print it in full color, that’s where the real money is. The real money is in gaming. There are billions of dollars going around in skins and stuff like that. When I talk about color printing, that will be unleashing the funnel of printing. There will be phenomenal. I’m mixing in a lot of things here in one very lengthy answer.

It’s a fantastic answer. Those are all great resources. People need to know about it and understand, and how things were accomplished in a meaningful way where the goal of all these tools is to have a seamless flowing process from our mind’s eye of what it should be and what the user experience should be to creating the product. Technology tools have always been limitations and interrupting the process, don’t you think?

People with the passion will find the right #3Ddesign tools. It’s just a matter of democratizing #3Dprintlearning. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

There’s an interesting comment we have in our HP Z presentation about that. I use this knife as an example. The metal and mood are crafted by hand. If I compare it to my Letterman which is stamped, formed and is not comfortable, this thing is 100 years old and it feels it has the warmth. It also means that the machine has dictated this form. The machine that has been used in the shop has dictated the shape. There’s a guy holding it against the grain. The toolbox is changing. The computational will change the form language of the structure as well as the bicycle that’s designed like a human bone.

We had Kalani in the last century doing this stuff. A century ahead of his time and a Swiss guy that made this organic stuff. I’m not seeing organic form language as the answer but you do see it in instructors and things like that. The essence of this is that the tool you use completely changes the landscape of the outcome and form. We’ll see a big shift going on in lighter, more efficient, less material use. A frame that is calculated to optimize.

That’s where the AI comes into play. That’s where some of the advantages of AI. Hopefully, the feeding the AI is accurate then that’s one issue but let’s assume that it is. You don’t have to guess or make assumptions so much about how much material is going to meet the needs. The classic examples of some of the buildings in New York City are way overbuilt structurally for what was needed. The Empire State Building, a plane in the ‘40s flew into it accidentally like World War II B-17 Bomber and crashed, and it went into it but the building was very much intact because it was way overbuilt for materials. That’s some of the advantages but if we let the AI and machine learning do the design work, the engineering is fine but the design work then we’re losing something big.

One of the very first lectures that I attended when we started into the 3D print world and we were going out to trade shows and other things was this one by Autodesk. They’re showing off how amazing the underwater ROV design that was much more efficient as water goes through. I thought, “Great.” There’s no person in that. You want it to be efficient. It’s doing all these things. That’s a smart use of it. They show what the computer would generate to make an airplane. I turned to Tom and I go, “That’s when a human being needs to step in.” He said, “People are going to be too afraid to sit in that plane.” As understanding human nature as designers, we have to step in and say, “That’s great. Let’s put a skin on it before people flip out.”

One of the crazy stats that I remember from Elon Musk is it’s also an accepted consumer belief that a human should do it because they’re better. One of his stats was that 1 in 100 million miles, 90 million miles of a normal car is one death on traffic. The Tesla Autonomous was already at 120 million miles for one death and going up exponentially. The thing is with these innovations, they go up exponentially like COVID. Even though you might not see the curve yet at a certain moment, that car will never have an accident even if it’s 500 million miles. The computer power of the exponential improvements in learning is such that we cannot keep up. That’s what they always talk about.

I signed up for the letter of Artificial Intelligence on the Life.org with Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, everybody signed up for this letter that says, “We need to make sure AI remains safe. We need to invest in the Artificial Intelligence Code bookode that makes it safe and protecting humans. It’s almost like the Law of Asimov, the Three Laws.” There’s a whole institute where all those people signed it. If you read a lot about it, it’s not the beginning of Artificial Intelligence, but the exponential explosion of what they call Artificial Superintelligence. When that happens, we end. We’re just going to be monkeys. We’re left behind, but what you’re talking about is, can the humans still trust what the machine has done that it’s better for us?

This is something we talk about on the show a lot but also in general, the way that we design, and what we personally do. Our job and our role as industrial designers is because we make consumer products that are near term. These are not things that are twenty years out or ten years out. They’re coming out in six months. Our job is to create that bridging between what we see now, what we want tomorrow, and help to create the minds gap for human beings to accept it.

 

A big part of our job is the expression of the function and how to use it. Those are all the things you do. If you automate it and you do it right, the computer could be better at it. However, the question is, can they bring the soul into something? We only know poetry. We cannot write poetry because it will be meaningless. To harness our role in that process as the value of humanity, poetry, passion, and love are you get back to John Lennon or whatever but that’s the essence. The computer can never and shall never replace it but it will liberate us. That’s what the books about the rise of the robotics and the economy of Artificial Intelligence. That’s what the core of that message is about. Our role will be elevated and we’ll have more time. If we do it right, it will be a utopia. We’ll make better stuff. It’s the optimist view of that equation.

It’s interesting that you say that and you mentioned COVID briefly. What we were seeing is a lot of our friends and colleagues in the various industry struggling whether they’re in design or editing in TV and video and other things like that. We’re seeing them all struggle with the process themselves, once they leave the office like, “How do I render? How do I do this so that I’m not creating a time crunch for myself of having now not enough computing power on my machine.” I was thinking of Liam Lawyer specifically.

We have a friend who edits video for television and he has this problem of remote video editing using VPN for the more powerful machines. You have similar needs with your team and rendering the visualization part of the design and have some great tools of these rendering farms to achieve that in a rapid way.

That’s the power of the Cloud indeed. The Z by HP is launching a similar system where we can use insane brain power or CPU power. What we do is we go with KeyShot with their biggest rendering. Somebody mentioned the new record is a fifteen-gigabyte KeyShot file. That was the mind wreck because it’s a desolated polygon. Normally, that will be Jeff Hayden from KeyShot who will go, “You guys are nuts.” It’s hard to strip all the contents out of it. You always lose bits, render it, and there are black holes. This is a lineup of fifteen of these machines. What we do with the files that can be shipped over to the Cloud is they go to the render farms and then you have a whole list. You see everybody there who’s shipping stuff. It’s processing at lightning speed. Things you can do in minutes that otherwise would take on your desktop, queue them up for an overnighter. You know what happened when you come back the next day and it’s like, “That’s not right.” It’s instant now. Limited only by the bandwidth of you shipping that file to the farmer, to the remote access tools. That’s liberating designers and HP also offers a lot of that stuff for use and testing outside. That’s powerful stuff.

I love the idea of being much more integrative in the process. Integrative design and that inset in general. We’re starting to look at experienced design. We always talk about that our job is to make sure that we’re always speaking on the role of the user, consumer, or whoever that might be. We’re trying to play that fine line between trying to push the innovation envelope and then making sure that we have this voice of the user. “Do I understand it? Do I get it? Will I buy it?” All of those things are our role in the job and it is hard to do that when you’re concerned with like, “I better make and release small files so that this prints fast so I can get onto the next thing.” It constraints you. This starts to open that up.

It does because I remember having to only render a portion of a product that I was designing. That can be effective in some situations. It’s not ideal because you’re not evaluating the entire thing.

In the last few years, KeyShot and good powerful HPZ or rigs are insane. We had one presentation from the same guys in Singapore. It’s so beautiful. The HTRI lighting of the details and it’s better than a photo. It has this quality. You could never put it in a studio and get that level out of it. That’s powerful stuff.

The last thing before we go that I want to touch on and talk about is this idea of what does need to change? How do we train our designers? How do we also hire on our employee side of things? How do we make this future go faster? Give them tools and get them trained. You were talking about getting your team, all the VR gig and all the stuff that they need. How do you get them all to buy-in and do that? That’s a challenging job as a manager as well.

That’s a big topic. It is self-motivated. People with passion will find tools. What I found is simply to democratization of learning through YouTube friends. We do train people. We have specific training. We did a Grasshopper training couple of years ago. It was a computational design for Rhino. You’ll see, as a dynamic of it is a fairly high bar or something like that. It’s a very specific tool so few will pick it up. Not everybody will be able to have that time to dive in. I do a lot of learning in the evenings on YouTube. All I do is spend time on YouTube. I look at podcasts. I love podcasts. I listened to hours of podcasts where people chatting about various topics.

I learned Unity by looking at endless YouTube videos of Brackeys. If you want to learn Blender 2.8, you go to the guy who does the donut, Andrew Price from Australia. He’s the owner of Poliigon, which is a texture’s website. They have all these texture tools, insane woods and ceramics. If you want to learn Blender, you dive in Andrew Price’s donut tutorial. You’ll learn how to build and render donuts with glaze on it and beautifully ran it in a Blender. The bottom line is you go in with these tutorials and went in a week, you know the basics of Blenders. The democratization of learning is the power that is available to all. The biggest thing that I find exciting right now is the ability to connect with the developers of software. Not only can you shape the hardware side by designing stuff for HP but also the software side. You can get in touch with the CEO of Gravity Sketch and he’ll send you a list of questions. You can help shape the tools for the trade by having that dialogue. Does it fairly close dialogue with the guys from Rhino?

It sounds to me that we have to hire and get in continuous learners. People who value the learning process in and of themselves are always looking to continuously improve their own. You’re like that. You absolutely will dive into anything, figure it out, and nothing seems out of reach. We have to do that. What we’re discovering here, and you see this too, Bart, that the power of what you guys are doing at HP is demonstrating that power of collaboration with other organizations who are deep experts in various things.

I do quite a few modules with students at the moment. We’re having one running with the University of Auburn. That’s been running for months. We do Zoom classes, lectures and then they present their brilliant ideas to us. We get inspired as well. As an initiative of the university all around COVID, they’re organizing these student activities to come up with solutions around COVID. We’ve been asked to join. We’re joining as coaches, collaborators, and consultants to help them through creating these innovations to battle COVID or to get people protected, things like that. We connected with the outside world in that sense.

It’s sure the power of getting designers together to solve problems. Bart, this has been fascinating. Is there anything that you’d like to leave our audience with things that you’d like them to think about or things that you want to share with us?

I’m excited about this wave of opportunity and technology. There’s a huge paradigm shift happening with moving into this XR world, AR world, and also the blending of Gaming Design Tools within that old-fashioned Industrial Design Tools. I’m excited about the whole dynamic. That’s where we are at this moment in time.

Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it.

It was a pleasure.

Thank you very much.

Collaborative 3D Design Process, Tools, and Team for End-to-End Success — Final Thoughts

This is so eye-opening to me, Tom, that we think about these. We were talking about that at the very end of the interview, the way to hire and the types of people. That’s why we’ve been successful. We never stop learning new things. We were always adopting new technologies and bringing them in. That’s how the 3D print came into our lives. We were like, “This is an inefficient way to do it is using these model makers. Let’s do this.” We didn’t abandon it. This is what I think is important to you is when you’re looking at the efficiencies of adopting new tools, if it’s not replacing something with something better, you don’t do it. We didn’t always replace creating 3D print models.

We never did that of our big furniture pieces because it was inefficient and it was time-consuming. It took longer than it would for us to have our model shops and Asia and create them for us. It wasn’t there yet. Maybe VR would do that and XR could do that for us. We wouldn’t have to but we were always looking for how can we be efficient and which tool is ready for what we need because most designers, and this is what part intimately understood and was expressing is it’s great to adopt cool new tools, but if they’re not making something more cost-efficient like taking out $100,000 spent on model making and allowing you to make more iterations and changes than you were in the previous process. Looking at that, we have to look at the technology and tools and say, “Are they ready for us yet?” It doesn’t mean we say they’ll never be ready. We have to look back at them all the time.

It has to improve the process in some way. They’ve got to reduce the amount of time spent, the amount of money spent, or create a better outcome for the product in some way.

It frees you up to be more creative.

That’s not always the case with a new tool or there’s a learning curve with a new tool. You have to have some personal inefficiency to be able to get up to speed and be able to do it. I can see how he has his eye on the ball.

This is what I’m loving about what we’re learning about all the members of the HP team. Bart Massee expresses this to the nth degree is this power of collaboration between technology and the designer between designers and their teams and all of that. I love the idea of this cross-collaboration working to build a better ecosystem overall of tools, people processes.

It is quite an ecosystem. I’m jealous of the render farms they have and the fact that they can be distributed in each designer in their homes, doing their work on their local computer. When they printed it, it goes into the Cloud and is rendered. It allows them to keep working on something else and let the major horsepower of the render farm produce it. I remember having a render farm locally within one of the companies that I worked with more than a decade ago. That was very helpful then. This is a quantum leap above that.

We have some things that we’re going to keep mentioning throughout there that calls to action, some things for you to test out and try. We have one that is fun. We didn’t talk about it in great detail. We’ll talk about it I’m sure at another time. It adds to this idea of being able to create boosts and productivity increases within your toolsets. Z Central Remote Boost 2020 software has a free 90-day download. It’s cool. They give such a nice long trial window which you need. Whenever you’re trying out these new tools, it is important that you have enough time not only to understand the tool itself but understand how to integrate it into your design process as we talked here.

A lot of times, these software trials will give you 30 days. Quite honestly, I never think that’s enough time. I was happy to see that with this special offer, you get 90 days’ worth. That’s an ample amount of time to try it out and prove that it’s going to work for you.

We’ll be talking more about some of these tools and other things that are integrated into other episodes. You may have heard about it ahead of time, or you may have heard about it afterward, depending on when this episode is published. I hope you guys have been enjoying this experience as much as we have of exploring some of our older episodes, refreshing them, and coming up with that, why they’re still relevant now and then interspersing these. People were being exposed to these new case studies of how far the 3D print has been coming since we started this show.

Hopefully, you’ve seen by now and I’ve been feeling it. It has come a long way. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still using a desktop 3D printer. We’re using them here in our business every day and certainly every week. It’s very valuable, but there are many new things going on here with what HP is doing. Renewed energy for us. Great advances in the results of what you can produce with their process.

Sometimes it takes taking a step back and then looking back again and seeing how far things come in. I’m glad we’ve been doing this. You are going to want to stay tuned to the rest of the series. We’ve got some more great episodes coming up for you. We’re excited that you joined us here. Thank you so much. I’m so proud to be back here with you all.

 

Get Even More!

Case Study: Oakley and Their 3D MJF Design Process

Sign the Open Letter for Safe AI

 

Important Links

• Bart Massee LinkedIn
• Skunk Works
• Gravity Sketch
• KeyShot VR
• Life.org
• Brackeys YouTube
• Poliigon
• Z Central Remote Boost
• Lazy Tutorials: A new trend combining stand-up comedy with Insane speedy tutorials featuring Ian Hubert
• Blender: Free and open source 3D creation suite
• Alessandro Zomparelli Design Inspiration
• Does self generative behavior link to Brownian motion and link to Social behavior patterns?

 

More About HP

Capture and Create with Z by HP, Inspiring you for your next creative breakthrough with the Z portfolio designed and built to improve the way you create. Discover the latest Z Book to help you with your latest creative project.

Experience your design with HP Multi Jet Fusion technology and solutions reinvent design and manufacturing, unlocking the full potential of 3D printing and bringing down the barriers of 3D printing adoption across industries through materials innovation. For more details about Multi Jet Fusion technology click here.

[DISPLAY_ULTIMATE_SOCIAL_ICONS]