Good Design = Green Transportation
Good design + engineering excellence
hopes to usher in a new era of green transportation.
The problem
Savion Aerospace, a start-up California aerospace company has developed a new propulsion system for turbine aircraft using liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a fuel source. This system dramatically lowers C02 emissions and increases the efficiency of point to point air travel. Capitalizing on these efficiencies, Savion will be able to fly more missions than traditional air travel businesses by the use of customer networking and autonomous navigation.
While the technical challenges and business model were well established, this project lacked an industrial design for the aircraft that would attract investors and customers. An attractive package was needed to sell this technology, and that’s where Design Eye Q began.
Users & Audience
The Savion Jet is to be unveiled to investors, city officials, airline executives, and emerging technology experts. The audience has varying expertise in aerospace and business, and the product needs to grab and hold the imagination of the audience.
A unifying factor of our audience is they all have a vested interest in seeing a long term and plausible future in the air travel industry.
Team & Role
We worked directly with Savion’s President, as well as their Chief Aerodynamicist. Both are former Boeing engineers. We were presented with an engineering packaging loft with fuselage, wing and tail structures as a starting point.
We worked remotely out of our Duluth MN office relying on telecommunication tools and secure cloud-based file sharing.
Design Process
While the short term goal was renderings for the web and marketing collateral, the long term goal for this project is for us to create tooling lofts for Manufacturing Engineers to use. For this reason, we chose the highest quality CAD modeling we offer with Class A surfacing in Alias Surface, and then exported surface lofts to Maya. Typically our workflow for renderings in to go directly to Maya but this workflow gave us a head-start toward production intent CAD files.
Engineering translation
While working with the engineering package, we were to fine tune the shape of the jet into a sleek desirable machine. Other similarly sized aircraft were used to set the proportions, cabin door, and window apertures.
Paint + Graphics
In Adobe Illustrator, we ran through different paint and graphics combinations that would communicate the classiness and green focus of the jet. These graphics were UV wrapped onto the surface, realistically showing the impact of the surface curves and undulations as the graphics wrapped around them.
Rendering
To achieve the highest quality realism, we use PBR based texturing and HDR-based lighting to give the best impression to the viewer.
