The word "stylish" is most often used to describe a unique and distinctive automotive design that through its basic shape or overall impression catches the eye. But behind the eye candy of automotive styling lies an exacting discipline that requires knowledge of the entire design-through-manufacturing process. Automotive body and interior stylists are perhaps the best example of designers who need the greatest degree of conceptual freedom while being expected to deliver the highest geometrical accuracy. Originality, competition, advancing technologies, and ever-increasing safety regulations demand that stylists be both visionary and scientific. They need tools that foster creativity yet guarantee that designs are manufacturable.
The organic approach of NX automotive design and styling allows the utmost artistic license while ensuring that surfaces retain continuity. From freeform aesthetic styling, to Class A "perfect" modeling, to production tooling development, to interfacing with Tier 1 suppliers – NX is the premier solution for fully unconstrained automotive design with sophisticated 3D surface and solid modeling.
NX enables automotive stylists to remain in control throughout the entire shape definition process, from concept through G3 surfacing and beyond. Stylists can develop complex surface shapes and manipulate and analyze them in real time, getting dynamic feedback as they go. This feedback aids everyone involved in the automotive design process, including engineering and production, in staying informed and focused toward a final design. And flexible modeling, evaluation, and visualization capabilities built on an associative database ensure that stylistic activities are not "thrown over the wall" and misconstrued or mishandled as they travel down the workflow.
Automotive stylists and designers who were reluctant to employ software so intimately integrated with CAD engineering capabilities are delighted by NX’s intuitive, front-end aesthetic tools. Plus, NX gives them tools that other industrial design packages don’t – for example, it provides the ability to create and modify highly complex parametric surfaces. Modifiable parametric surfaces save time up front, accelerate development through iterations, and easily translate downstream. This helps reduce the number of physical prototypes needed, as engineering and production, at the outset, can perform feasibility studies using virtual prototypes.
