Product Development Company Accelerates Design with Geomagic Freeform

Industrial gained new business and a competitive advantage by reducing product development time with the integration of Geomagic® Freeform® Plus™ software into their design process.

Industrial is a small product development company with a network of freelance specialists and suppliers in Germany as well as Hong Kong and China. They offer a wide spectrum of products, but the two main focus areas are sports glasses design and toy design. The Industrial team oversees the product development process from the initial concept to mass production. Their facility is equipped with ten CAD stations, two CNC milling machines, and vacuum forming equipment.

Stefan Lippert and his team advise customers in the design and development of new types of glasses, either sun or sports glasses. Working on different models of glasses is one good example to show the phenomenal results after introducing Freeform Plus into the workflow.

Freeform Plus allows the designers at Industrial to completely transform the way they develop products. By providing a touch-enabled interface to a 3D sculpting software, Freeform enables designers to very quickly create complex forms. These digital forms are then used directly in standard, downstream prototyping, tooling design, and CNC machining, allowing the company to dramatically reduce time-to-market. An additional advantage of working with Freeform is the possibility to make a rapid prototype and show it to the client. Completed models are exported from Freeform as .stl files for prototyping, which provide a valuable tool for client discussions and approval meetings.

Isik Oezkan, one of the designers at Industrial, stresses the flexibility to design objects quickly and estimates the time saved in working with Freeform software. “It’s fun to work with Freeform and nowadays I can design glasses in 2 days instead of 3 weeks.” One of the difficulties of glasses design lies in the minor changes with the frame and earpieces, which have to fit perfectly. This is not an issue anymore since Industrial began using Freeform. In addition, Isik is more than happy not having to memorize hundreds of commands and understands the working process much faster. He emphasizes that while working with Freeform one feels that they are working more on the form or product than on the construction.

Industrial designs sports glasses and goggles for famous brands in Europe. In cooperation with the Chinese glasses manufacturer Tony Optical, Industrial coordinates its designs with the brands and subsequently creates the data for tool making. Entire annual collections for UVEX have already been designed.

Industrial specializes in sculpting a medieval knight world consisting of horses, knights and knight’s castles for the renowned German toy manufacturer SCHLEICH. In order to ease the work in surface modeling, especially in the case of the knight’s castle, principal designer and CEO Stefan Lippert, turned to Geomagic Freeform Plus software. “We use new technologies in order to perform our tasks”, says Stefan. According to Axel Blattner, one of the designers at Industrial, working with Freeform provides good results in few steps and little time. Blattner adds, “It is great to work totally free of strict regimentation and with little background knowledge about 3D modeling.” The 3D models originated from a computer animation, were converted and then imported into Freeform Plus. In this way, a real medieval toy world can be created from virtual data.

By incorporating Freeform into their workflow Stefan Lippert and the team at Industrial significantly reduce their overall development time. Industrial gained a lot of new ideas, thereby expanding their work into the fields of bicycle accessories, medicine, and care, among others.

Stefan Lippert is excited about the speed and the competitive advantage attained by working with Geomagic Freeform Plus. In addition, he states that the expenses amortize very fast and stresses the fact that being able to produce 3D models so quickly enables the Industrial team to evaluate designs much earlier in the design process.