How to go about making a solar car body?

[Anonymous]

We're a team starting a design for our aero-body next year for our solar car and are looking for a new CAD software as Solidworks is trash for surface modeling. I'm trying out Alias and trying to build something similar to these cars below:

The general shape consists of a body with a canopy on top and wheel fairings below. As far as complexity goes it's honestly pretty simple but even after watching the initial set of tutorials F1-F6 (foundation tutorials) I'm having trouble figuring out how to make something like this in Alias. I've made a curved top body but have no idea how to make the driver canopy. In particular I'm not sure how to place curves in the proper places while maintaining the proper relationships. I haven't even started with the wheel fairings but again am not sure on how to go about making those shapes. Could anyone give general advice on which tools they'd use in trying to make a solar car body? Generally we make something that we think looks nice, do aero simulations on it, and iterate over and over until our drag coefficient is down to something we can dea with. The iterating process I believe will be immensely easier with Alias due to everything being based around CVs but I have no idea where to start with some of these shapes. Thanks for the help!

[Anonymous]

Wow, this seems to be a great project! I wish you the best of luck with it!

Anyways, modeling a design with Alias is very different from modeling with Solidworks. Sure, both do surfaces and Alias is the better choice for it, in my opinion. But you also have to know how to handle the software. Car designers and Class-A engineers take years of practice to model in a quality which allows producibility. The tutorials, Autodesk provides for learning the fundamentals, are great, but they don´t replace years of experience and if you try to build solely on that, you may end up waisting a lot of time in modeling quality that is neither producible nor pretty.

So actually I hate to say this, but you should maybe try to hire some kind of designer that already knows the software. In a project I was working on in my studys was a car for formula student and for the bodywork we got in contact with a design university where some students treated this as an own project. The results we received were amazing and changes have been adapted by one student in very short periods of time.

Even though that was not the answer you expected, I still hope, it helps you to deal with the problem!

Cheers

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

I appreciate you taking the time write out this response! I don't disagree with you that Alias takes a lot time to master but hiring a designer to do it just isn't an option for us. As a solar car engineering design team a large part of the challenge and process for us is designing an ultra aerodynamic body in house and that includes doing the CAD. So part of the process is learning different softwares and grinding through it as thats part of the experience. We also don't have the budget for a designer haha.

For this year our body isn't anything crazy and we could make in Solidworks in a few hours. We tried out Alias and can't get some basic surfaces to take shape (as you saw in the cockpit thread). We really aren't trying to make vast use of Alias for now but if we could even get a start that'd be massively beneficial for us. Thanks for taking the time to reply again!

[Anonymous]

So in this case I´d recommend that you completely go through the Autodesk tutorials that are provided. After that you can have try on some simple surfaces. Also there is a new Class A tutorial series in video format, which will help you getting more knowledge of the software and how it can be useful. If you can effort this, I´d recommend an advanced training course when you completely reproduced the workflows of the fundamental tutorials.

This is still a long process and if you want to achieve fast results, you should maybe stick to Solidworks for work that has a close expiring date.

[systembolaget]

Hej vdesai2014,

if you have budget for Solidworks and Alias licenses, you have budget for external consultant ; )

What I would say from professional and teaching experience alike is that the most important thing for novices (of any 3D software, really) is to figure out possible patch layouts - meaning to be able to decompose the form into its constituent parts. This could be done by sketches or taking good photographs or a scale mock-up to then simply draw possible surface boundaries on it, before fiddling aimlessly in software right away. See the two images attached (consumer goods). Once a credible patch layout has been identified, starting and commencing in 3D is fairly straightforward, because you know "where things should go".

Good luck with your project!