Developing the Cover's Cool Caliper

The caliper rendering on the cover of our September issue (highlighting this Top Shops benchmarking results story) was produced by CAD specialists at Autodesk. What’s impressive is not just the end result, but also the speed at which they were able to complete this project.

Autodesk’s Sachlene Singh and Tanner Reid, Autodesk technical evangelists (awesome job title) along with Jay Tedeschi, technical marketing specialist for the manufacturing group, worked collaboratively on this project. They used a variety of Autodesk software design platforms to develop three different caliper concepts for us to consider. Tanner used Inventor (CAD product), Sachlene used Fusion 360 (cloud-based CAD product) and Jay used 3ds Max (3D modeling, animation and rendering software).

Because Fusion 360 is cloud-based product, it enabled the team to speed the design process by serving as a central repository where they could all access existing caliper models, in any number of file formats, rather than starting from scratch. Initial renderings were completed and presented to us in just two to three hours. In fact, those renderings were sufficiently detailed that they weren’t too far off from a final design. Once we picked the one we liked best, Jay spent a little more than a day tweaking the model in 3ds Max. This software effectively gives users the types of lighting, shading and other such tools that’d be used in an actual photo studio. The cool result is what you see on our September cover. Many thanks to our new friends at Autodesk.