Spatial Computing in Design? This stunning Lamborghini concept car was designed entirely in VR

As a community of people who literally help build new technologies for the world, designers aren’t new to VR-based tools. AR/VR headsets have been available for the better part of a decade now, and designers have formed perhaps one of the largest demographics to use these devices for sketching, modeling, rendering, and reviewing designs. With the announcement of the Vision Pro headset, Apple’s making a pivot to ‘spatial computing’, and it only seems like VR/AR/MR tools will get a lot more democratized in the future, not just on the design end, but also the visual-aid end, allowing consumers/customers to see products before buying them. In this case, you wouldn’t have to travel to see a car like this Lamborghini Vision Event Horizon, you could just pop on a headset and enjoy the car’s visual aesthetic virtually… or spatially, as Apple would probably say.

Designed by Taiwan-based Lewis Lin, the Lamborghini Vision Event Horizon is a next-gen hybrid supercar that’s championed by VRAD, or Virtual Reality Assisted Design – a natural progression from years of CAD or Computer Assisted Design. Lin altered his existing workflow, using tools like Procreate for sketching, Gravity Sketch for modeling, and then KeyShot for rendering. Using a VR sketching/modeling program like Gravity Sketch helped Lin actually experience the car’s overall design as he built it. Proportions and details made much more sense when viewed in scale, and the car’s overall design stood out much more when observed beyond the boundaries of a flat, 16:9 desktop monitor or laptop screen.

Designer: Lewis Lin

Rendered on KeyShot: Click Here to Download Your Free Trial Now!

The Lamborghini Vision Event Horizon is a stunning car that amps up the Italian marque’s design language in an attempt to differentiate itself from the company’s older, ICE cars. A common trend with electric or even hybrid cars is to embrace a plain, metallic paint job, which the Vision Event Horizon does too – quite similar to Polestar cars or most Priuses seen on the roads. However, unlike the aforementioned, the Vision Event Horizon embraces the Lamborghini DNA too, with an edgy, aggressive exterior, angular paneling, and a signature wedge-shaped side profile.

What stands out with this car is the headlight and taillight treatment, which feels slightly different from other Lamborghinis. The front of the car gives me Acura NSX GT3 Evo vibes, albeit with crowbar-shaped LED-strip headlights. The rear puts a neat spin on Lamborghini’s Y-shaped taillights with a more contemporary redesign. The two exhausts right below it scream power too, although given its hybrid drivetrain, there’s a sense of reassurance that the power is supplemented by clean energy too.

The Vision Event Horizon seats two in its comfortably spacious interiors. Lin only modeled the exteriors, so it’s difficult to say what the interiors look like, or what’s under the hood. If this thing’s a true modern Lamborghini, the engine will be located in the rear, right under the three fins that help with downforce and cornering, as well as working as antennas to help amplify cellular/radio signal within the car.

Lin explained his entire design process on his Behance page. “In this project, I used the GRAVITY SKETCH to enter Virtual Reality after sketching and used the sketch as a foundation to swiftly produce a realistic scale three-dimensional model in space. The sensory stimulation provided by the 3D space model is not accessible in 2D sketching. It allows me to extract more distinct thinking and ideas in the early stages of the design, giving me a more holistic picture,” he said.
“I draw a rough sketch in Procreate, and this is used as a basis to create the basic framework in the Gravity Sketch using the stroke function and laying out the uneven surfaces. After completing the exploratory model, I imported the model into Rhinoceros to meet the final model.”

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AI-generated Hìtëkw Tennis Racquet – YD x KeyShot Inspiration Hub Design of the Month #2

The second-ever YD x KeyShot Inspiration Hub Design of the Month goes to the Hìtëkw, a rather interesting-looking tennis racquet with an even more interesting back story. Designed using a combination of AI-based tools as well as generative design, the Hìtëkw boasts of a futuristic visual aesthetic that’s never been seen before… and that isn’t all. The redesigned racquet is lighter and stronger too, as a result of this AI-powered makeover!

Designer: All Design Lab

Click Here to view all designs on the YD x Keyshot Inspiration Hub website!

All Design Lab experimented with using OpenAI’s Dall·E2 to generate concept directions for the racquet’s design, only to realize that almost the AI could only work on a dataset of existing images; and nobody had ever made a racquet like the Hìtëkw before, which made it difficult for the AI to really think outside the box. This became the starting point for All Design Lab’s creative brief, which was to completely redesign the racquet’s silhouette itself.

To create new racquet archetypes, the All Design Lab team relied on new CAD tools. The designers created their rough form in Gravity Sketch, a VR-based 3D program that lets you sketch and sculpt in virtual reality, before taking the product to a generative algorithm to optimize the racquet’s unique frame for strength and reliability. The result was the Hìtëkw, a racquet that’s stronger and lighter than its competitors, with a distinct visual edge thanks to its organic, 3D-printed generative metal design.

“Rackets have become more lightweight and durable through new materials and advanced manufacturing techniques”, the All Design Lab team mentions. “Yet the potential is still there to envision an even lighter and stronger racket that takes advantage of new design techniques, specifically, advanced CAD processes such as generative design tools.”

If you don’t know what the YD x KeyShot Inspiration Hub is, it’s best to think of it as the ultimate destination to find the most inspirational design work, as well as to have your own work featured so that it can be seen by a global audience of thousands of designers and creatives… an ever-expanding encyclopedia of good design and great rendering, if you will.

The hub helps fulfill YD and KeyShot’s broad goal of recognizing exemplary work from a distance and helping amplify it without having to rely on an algorithm, unlike with portfolio sites and social media. It relies on YD’s two-decade-long year history of curating great ideas, concepts, and case studies and ties it to KeyShot’s powerful position as the design industry’s most powerful and preferred rendering software.

The Inspiration Hub’s jury panel will hand-pick and highlight an outstanding design each week, also awarding a ‘Design of the Week’ and ‘Design of the Year’, featuring them at the top of the hub’s page while giving winning designs a permanent badge and entering them into the Inspiration Hub’s ‘Hall of Fame’. Hall-of-Famers will also be featured on Yanko Design’s Instagram page and will win exciting prizes from KeyShot. If you think your design has a chance to get featured on the hub and win, submit your design with us here.

Learn more about how to participate by visiting the hub, and also get your hands on a free trial of KeyShot 11.

Click Here to view all designs on the YD x Keyshot Inspiration Hub website!

The post AI-generated Hìtëkw Tennis Racquet – YD x KeyShot Inspiration Hub Design of the Month #2 first appeared on Yanko Design.

This flexible single-material hiking shoe can only be mass-manufactured using 3D printing technology

Designed as a passion project, Daniel Shirkey’s Earth Moc was created as a potential recovery shoe for hikers. Shirley’s prime objective was to figure out how one single material could fulfill every aspect of a shoe’s experience from its flexibility to comfort, while giving your feet the support they need after a tough hike. Shirley’s design even comes with treads on its underside that additionally allow you to do some light hiking in, giving the right amount of traction required on moderately uneven surfaces and dirt paths.

The highlight of the Earth Moc is its design. The entire shoe is made from a single material, sort of like a Croc, except it features interwoven elements that provide the stretch and flexibility of a conventional sandal. While most single-material shoes are made by injection molding of an elastomer, Shirley’s concept goes down a different route. The interwoven elements are practically impossible to mold in a traditional injection mold, which is why Shirley resorted to 3D printing. Prototypes of the shoe were made by Switzerland-based Sintratec, a 3D printing and solutions company. Inspired by intertwining roots and vines, Shirley’s shoe was 3D printed on the Sintratec S2 system with flexible TPE.

Designer: Daniel Shirley

In the video above, Shirley describes his approach to visualizing and modeling the shoe. The Earth Moc’s complex lattice of woven straps was rather difficult to directly visualize on a sketch or in a 3D software, so Shirley went low-tech by covering a plastic shoe-insert with masking tape and directly sketching on top of it (you can see a comparison below).

Once Shirley’s low-tech sketch was ready, he took it into VR-based 3D-modeling software Gravity Sketch to make an actual CAD model of the shoe. After sharing renders on his social media, Shirley teamed up with Sintratec to build a working prototype out of TPE. The Earth MOC, while a working proof of concept, isn’t available for sale at the moment, although things could change in the future.

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The Yeezy Slides wish they were as cool as these single-material 3D-printed studio runners

These don’t look like your average pair of shoes because they clearly aren’t. Designed in the metaverse by Cullan Kerner, the shoes embody an aesthetic that’s best described as ‘oddly refreshing’ and the reason is because it doesn’t stick to the constraints of regular shoe design intended for mass production. The process with shoe design is standardized to a great degree – you’ve got pre-set sizes, materials that are readily available, dies for cutting/molding these materials, and processes like stitching or gluing that bring them together. Cullan’s design process, however, is completely different. For starters, the shoes were made entirely in Gravity Sketch, a free VR software that allows you to design directly in a 3D space. Cullan designed the shoes almost like a sculptor makes an artpiece, creating in 3D space. The shoes are made for 3D printing – a process that still hasn’t been mass-accepted by the shoe industry. The idea is simple – Cullan’s model gets imported into a 3D printing software, and the printer meticulously builds the design layer by layer using a flexible elastomeric material. This means you don’t need dies, and you don’t need to work with pre-set sizes. Each shoe can be designed to fit you perfectly, and they’re all made to order. Finally, 3D printing allows the shoes to look as wildly futuristic (some may call it quirky) as possible – case in point being Cullan’s designs. They’re absurdly unique because A. new technologies allow them to be, and B. why not, eh? You have to admit they DO look refreshingly cool!

Designer: Cullan Kerner

Simply put, these shoes were designed in the metaverse, and they absolutely look the part. There’s a rejection of convention with Cullan’s ‘Sudio Runners’… a mindset that plays in beautifully with the idea of the metaverse where anything is possible. Cullan goes on to call his shoes “functional artpieces”, and although they’re not in production, the 3D files are available as NFTs on Exchange Art for people who want to 3D print their own pair of wildly futuristic shoes.

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Stunning Lamborghini Marzal concept is an off-road vehicle with the inner spirit of a raging bull

Rumor has it that Lamborghini is giving the Urus a significant facelift this year – its first since 2017 when the Urus was announced. I personally think the Urus is the kind of vehicle Lamborghini should openly embrace. After all, if your brand logo is a raging bull, why not create cars that embody that physically? Don’t get me wrong, their hypercars, if I may borrow a term from my generation, are certainly bae… but nothing says sheer unbridled power than a large vehicle with a larger-than-life presence. The Urus, to a degree, embodied that; and the Lamborghini Marzal wears that distinction proudly on its sleeve too. Meet the Marzal a conceptual off-roader designed to be just about as brutish and powerful as the ‘fighting bull’ brand it represents!

It isn’t like Lamborghini hasn’t built off-road vehicles before. The company was literally established as a tractor manufacturer before evolving into and embracing its racecar DNA. Designed by Parisian designer Andrej Suchov using Gravity Sketch, the Marzal concept is a confluence of sorts, created to be a vehicle that can shine on the tarmac but isn’t scared of leaving its comfort zone to dominate rough terrain.

Its profile certainly captures the signature Lamborghini silhouette, with its iconic wedge-shaped design… however with higher ground clearance, a larger rear, and bigger tires designed to handle rough roads. It’s quite rare to see a Lamborghini with a rear windshield, and the Marzal boasts of that too, although it does get blocked when you include the storage unit. With its aggressive design styling and that iconic yellow color, the Marzal looks every bit like something Lamborghini would make – a testament to the company’s strong visual language. It also sports a rather interesting Y-shaped taillight, often seen in Lamborghinis, but not like this. In the case of the Marzal, the Y-shape is a prominent, defining feature on the rear, and I personally think it gives the vehicle character.

Part slick supercar, part all-terrain vehicle, the Marzal definitely is a hybrid, but looks quite comfortable in its skin. It boasts of a hexagonal windscreen that extends into the hood, and rather unusual doors that curve upward into the roof and don’t really come with any pillars. Rather, there’s a horizontal bar running through the door that I can’t help but attribute to the designer’s creative license. On the inside, the car seats four – with yellow leather-clad carbon-fiber seats. The driver, however, gets the best experience with an incredibly stylish cockpit outfitted with a neat sporty steering wheel.

Designer: Andrej Suchov

Gravity Sketch, the popular VR 3D modeling software, is now completely free to use

The go-to VR CAD modeling app for a large chunk of the design industry, Gravity Sketch, has announced it is shifting from a paid application to a free app on the Oculus (Rift + Quest) stores and Steam. The decision comes as the company experienced healthy growth in the app’s usage over the pandemic. In July, Gravity Sketch debuted its collaborative feature codenamed Co-Creation that allowed multiple teams to remotely work on projects together, leaving feedback, making edits, and proposing new ideas within the same project, which would get synchronized with the new edits and changes in real-time. The Co-Creation feature was unveiled within Landing Pad, Gravity Sketch’s cloud-based product, in the hopes to make working from home easier during the pandemic.

In November, the company announced it had raised $3.7 million in seed funding, which would go a long way in helping the app achieve its “mission to help creatives work more effectively and expressively with digital media”. On January 25th, the app will become absolutely free on all platforms for individual users, while remaining paid for business and enterprise users. The app will even be able to support IGES and FBX model types (FBX was only supported on tethered PC headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive), helping further democratize digital 3D design by lifting any barriers for creatives to get involved. Gravity Sketch is even working on an iPad 3D modeling app which is currently in its beta stage. This expansion and the shift to the free business model will help bring more nascent designers and companies into the fold, allowing them to use the same 3D modeling and visualization software currently used by some of the world’s leading companies, such as Ford, Nissan and Reebok, alongside 60 universities and over 50,000 creative professionals worldwide.

Click Here to read more about Gravity Sketch’s announcement.

Gravity sketch launches collaborative tool to let remote teams design together in virtual reality

Gravity Sketch has easily been one of the breakthrough design tools of the last few years, allowing people to draw and model naturally, using their hands to create surfaces rather than commands and lines of code. The Virtual Reality CAD tool gives designers and creators the unique ability to design at scale, making life-size models and mockups of products that can be viewed and adjusted as you go, breaking the barriers of the computer screen and allowing people to actually (virtually) experience products at their real scale and even in their appropriate environment.

With the unprecedented shift towards remote working because of the Coronavirus pandemic, the team at Gravity Sketch has prioritized the deployment of their latest cloud collaboration feature. Available within the cloud-based product LandingPad, Gravity Sketch’s cloud collaboration feature (codenamed Co-Creation) allows designers, teams, studios, and clients to collectively visualize, ideate, and refine product ideas. Merely wearing the VR headset transports you into the virtual workspace, allowing wearers to use the remote controller to highlight parts of a design, make edits/suggestions, or leave feedback. The tool has been used in enterprises with large design teams (Ford, Nissan, Reebok), but given the current circumstances with most people working remotely, Gravity Sketch hopes the publicly available collaborative platform will help teams work better together from their remote workspaces. Through LandingPad, users can manage and review work seamlessly across all hardware platforms as well as via web browsers, which synchronizes files across teams with virtual reality headsets.

The video above demonstrates how Belgium-based Achilles Design has been using the Co-Creation collaborative feature to help designers collectively ideate and clients collectively visualize products, allowing for a seamless exchange of ideas and feedback. “Virtual reality in the business space has been a solo-experience for years. With Co-Creation, designers and clients can finally collaborate directly. The fact that I have been able to join clients in VR while working from home is unprecedented, both for them and for myself. Co-Creation is the most effective way of communicating spatial designs to all the stakeholders of a project”, says Lucas Van Dorpe, Industrial Designer at Achilles Design.

Gravity Sketch’s cloud-based collaboration platform is now available for free trials for 30 days.
Click Here to sign up for Beta Access!

Gravity Sketch’s cloud-based collaboration platform is now available for free trials for 30 days.
Click Here to sign up for Beta Access!