AVID CAD Animation Mini Case Study: 3

The AVID EVO Electric Machine CAD Animation

Early in 2017 AVID signed a deal with GKN to take over development and manufacturing of the EVO Electric Motors. AVID tasked TL Multimedia with animating their new EVO CAD model for the AF130 motor. This video is pure animation from start to finish: no live-action video. While there is only one product being presented for most of the video the EVO motor is a particularly complex beast. Being based in Newcastle upon Tyne we do have a magpie streak, so it was especially enjoyable to make all the shiny parts of this motor shine.

Optimising and Rigging the CAD for Animation

As you can see from the video, CAD as complex as the EVO motor has a mind-blowing number of parts. When we get the CAD sent to us by engineers it still doesn’t often have every little wire and coating layer in the file. Such details would be excessively complex to actually model as CAD and it isn’t generally necessary. So we sometimes have to do a bit of inventive addition to fill in these elements. In the EVO video, for example, we had to create the sleeved copper stator windings and also come up with a way to demonstrate the carbon fibre tape wrapping around the rotor. We rigged the various ‘exploding’ parts to control handles we made in order to give us the ability to pull different parts out at different stages and get it all back together again as required.

Materials and Texturing in Maya – Making it POP AND SHINE

Another thing which tends to happen when we bring CAD from an engineering package is the models come in with a single plain default “clay” Lambert material. You might think going from Autodesk Inventor into Autodesk Maya would be a somewhat ‘cohesive’ process. While you can import STP files into Maya, it’s heavy on computing and loading times: so we find it more efficient to go a different route to import. Since the EVO machine has so many different silvery parts we wanted to slightly differentiate them to make it easy to tell them apart. The ultra light-weight carbon fibre parts (rotor core and surrounding tape) needed a purpose made texture to give the CF pattern a look close to reality:

Post Production Elements

In addition to layering together the 3D animated and rendered parts, we also overlaid some 2D elements. These include explanatory text and, key for this product, an indication of the complex coolant flow path through the housing jacket. We are very pleased with the results of this whole video and glad that it has become one of the most viewed on AVID’s YouTube Channel.

Meet TL Multimedia at VentureFest North East

If you are interested in connecting with TL Multimedia then come and see us in person at the Innovation Showcase at VentureFest North East on Nov 14th 2018. Or you can get in touch via the TL Multimedia web site: tlmultimedia.co.uk/contact/