Car companies and 3D-Companies – how do they communicate?

[C••••••l]

Originally Posted by greenvampire

I have worked with this method before, but for water valves rather than cars... I was given a dxf file, had to import it, "clean" the mesh (remove / turn bad edges, smoothgroups, mats), and then render some simple views of the valve.

So did you have the real valve at hand at that time to be able to verify that your mesh cleaning isn't going to skew the original data?

Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to criticise. I just want to get a picture about what the players involved in that game are doing to make their data communication easy and flawless.

[greenvampire]

nope, had no valve at hand,

basically, the shape of the valve was not altered in the export, the majority of the mesh is usually sound,

usually, its just a few flat edges that need attention, or a couple of faces that need filling.... other than that its just correcting smooth groups on the corners etc to make it look asthetically pleasing rather than seeing every polygon as a hard edge

I would guess that the car firms would probably supply good ref pics on the request of the artist, but overall renderings etc dont usually have to be 100% accurate.... the human eye can only take in so much information....
infact, i did a study of this at university, ... we looked at a photograph for 15 seconds and had to pick out anything that didnt fit... knowone spoted the donkey in the background lol

i guess it depends what the end use is for, but id like to guess that no 3D model is 100% accurate anyway, infact most of the ones used for car ad's etc always look too cleancut, with beautiful flowing reflections... when in reality that would never happen lol

[Dazmo]

Some kind of data from Alias Studio is probably what you are most likely to be given. I have made cars for games and the info we got ranged from some splines of the curves of the car to almost a full production quality file that included all nuts, washers etc. The former was the best and easiest to use, the latter needed a few days to get it to a level that I could actually use ie: removing all those little washers, nuts etc and keeping only the info I needed.

Getting those kind of files makes the cars extremely accurate, using blueprints/ref pics is always open to errors.

[DenimTiger]

As far as I know all major auto-manufacturers produce their own 3D models, imagery and designs. What they do release are rendered images meant for advertising in different territories. There's not external production for roadcars, ever. It's all internal and there's no way they'd let their specs float around with anyone.