Thomas Heermann
Freeing up creative energy, reducing cognitive demand
Design studios – automotive and industrial – are under increasing pressure to create differentiated concepts faster than ever. Development timelines are shrinking, so design teams must work faster and smarter to develop and get their transformative concepts to market.
This is the perfect time for Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has made significant inroads into the automotive design studio. AI has the potential to transform various aspects of the automotive design and manufacturing process, reducing cognitive demand on designers and freeing up their creative energy.
Designers are always looking for the next new thing. AI offers the chance to do that, to explore different ways into ideas and processes.
We see a future where all product creators are empowered by AI to express innovative ideas without being encumbered by repetitive and mundane tasks. AI also allows designers to iterate numerous ideas quickly.
That’s why we’re excited to contribute to this new reality with BlankAI.
BlankAI enables product designers to:
- Easily generate and edit proportional 3D models.
- Customize their development process with semantic control.
- Incorporate their brands’ design DNA.
- Dynamically navigate the data in their design portfolio.
BlankAI: Amplify creativity in automotive concept design
The promise of generative design is to reduce the cognitive demand on designers. It’s much more valuable for the outcome of your design (be it a watch, a car, a house) to spend more time understanding the user and their design-relevant challenges than for you to spend your time editing thousands of sketches, renderings, or 3D models on a computer screen.
AI design tools take this one step further. Our goal with BlankAI is to help dissolve the human-machine interface and reduce the creative strain on designers. We want to help designers focus more of their creativity on concepts and less of their energy on tools.
BlankAI technology will initially debut in our automotive design studio tools. It will assist creatives in the design studio to rapidly generate and explore new concept ideas in 3D with semantic controls, contextual rendering, and communication integrated into the existing design studio workflows.
As the volume and velocity of inspiration and insight expand, the challenge of creating novel and relevant designs becomes ever more complicated. In reality, design teams are increasingly inundated with data and are under extreme pressure to develop appealing 3D concepts that win hearts and minds while maintaining brand consistency, leadership buy-in, and market success.
BlankAI: Abstracting complex information
AI-infused design tools can assist concept designers by abstracting the complexity of design-relevant information, and by using generative models to bridge the gap between 2D ideation and 3D design.
Automotive and industrial design surfacing is complex. Translating design ideas into expressive and accurate 3D models is necessary, as well as time-consuming and technically meticulous. BlankAI removes the complexity from 3D concept modeling and proportion generation tasks.
BlankAI: Quickly generate and edit 3D models
Traditional 3D concept design tools can require many hours to create a product concept form. These tools require users to have expert technical skills and aesthetic understanding to make the creative leap from an idea to a formed 3D concept model. For professional designers under pressure to create multiple concept designs quickly, this is a significant creative and technical challenge.
To address this challenge, the BlankAI generative AI algorithm is trained on historical 3D designs and their associated meta-data to align the system with the context of the users’ targeted design space. The algorithm works by encoding 3D designs and metadata into a custom generative adversarial neural network (GAN) architecture, which we call XDGAN. BlankAI’s generative algorithm learns features in the training data that are used as semantic parametric controls for manipulating designs. This enables any user to quickly generate, edit, and explore potential 3D design concepts in real-time, without having to edit complex 3D models.
BlankAI: Incorporate your brand’s “Design DNA”
Design concepts must both appeal to the future needs of their customers and align with the evolution of the brand’s design DNA. That means being able to manipulate the aesthetics and characteristics of form to achieve a particular impression or feeling.
BlankAI’s novel data interaction enables designers to infuse the design DNA of their brand directly into a 3D concept in milliseconds. Designers can easily and quickly generate designs that are more aligned with a specific aesthetic, brand language, or market preference and can choose to manipulate the design by adjusting bespoke controls related to semantic definitions.
Revolutionizing the fields of Visualization and Extended Reality (XR)
Autodesk VRED leverages AI to transform vast amounts of digital design and engineering data into photorealistic, real-time experiences, facilitating informed decision-making throughout product development.
NVIDIA’s AI hardware and software, including AI-accelerated denoiser and its latest DLSS-Ray Reconstruction AI (part of its Deep Learning Super Sampling), power VRED and enable professionals to create realistic product presentations, design reviews, and virtual prototypes with exceptional visual quality, fidelity and accuracy, even for extremely large scenes.
This GPU-accelerated AI significantly reduces rendering time, provides rapid feedback to artists, and expedites the creative iteration process, resulting in quicker product development. With AI’s assistance, digital prototypes closely resemble real-world counterparts, aiding professionals in bringing products to market faster.
Bridging inspiration and design
From AI-accelerated rendering in VRED, to the acquisition of BlankAI, Autodesk is integrating AI that augments workflows and extends capabilities into our solutions so the world’s designers can do more of what they love to do and the world needs them to do.
Autodesk’s advancements in AI are helping customers meet their needs in the moment – by giving designers tools to be bold and creative, explore more and bring new products to their customers faster.
At Autodesk, we continue to invest in and innovate with AI to help our customers meet demand, but always with the mandate of doing so responsibly.