ArtCAM and the Art of Architecture

ROBERT NEWMAN: Well, thank you for making it to the session so early in the morning. It's much appreciated. So to introduce myself, I'm Robert Newman. I'm the product manager for the product ArtCAM, and over the next 90 minutes we're going to be talking about-- just have to check what I'm talking about-- "The Art of Architecture."

So why the art of architecture? What is it? Well, really if I take the word, the art side of it, we're surrounded everywhere we walk, day by day, everything we look at, by art. It's subjective. People have feelings about it. It's an emotional thing. Some people like it, some people hate it.

Now, to put that in context with architecture, when I first turned up to this hotel a few days ago-- maybe like other people, maybe not-- I was like, wow, this is pretty cool. It's a quite nice hotel. Walking through the hotel up to my room, I'm like, it's quite cool. Now, imagine this hotel without columns, without corbels, without the nice features around the bed, without nice lamps, chandeliers. It would be a pretty boring hotel. It would be very plain, very simple.

Now, does anybody have children? I do. You ever taken your children to theme parks? What's the look on the face? They go, wow. They see sculptures, they see animals walking around, they see some really cool artistic features.

So the kids from an early age have got an emotion about their surroundings, about the art that is around them. They might not think of it as art, because we don't think of stuff as art all the time. But they have this connection with it. Imagine that theme park without the sculptures, the statues, the artistic stuff around. Who'd go back to one of those? Be a pretty boring place, wouldn't it? So the presentation, "The Art of Architecture," is about the emotional side, the feelings, of architecture.

So we'll start off with what is ArtCAM. Is anybody familiar with ArtCAM? Hopefully there's people who have looked at ArtCAM here or what ArtCAM is. So ArtCAM is an artistic CAD/CAM software. So it's basically software that allows you to design, but also manufacture what you design. Whether it's 3D printing, whether it's laser cutting, whether it's [INAUDIBLE], ArtCAM allows you to make everything you see on the screen. It's not just a design package.

It's in lots of different industries, from woodworking-- so think of all the things you see around this hotel. There are so many of them that are relevant ArtCAM examples. Paneling, doors, cutout sheets, architecture of buildings, faces, miniature models, wave walls on the way to the toilet.

There's something there that you think on the way to the loo, this looks really good-- the texture wall side of it. Texturing of panels. You walk into a hotel, you have that same feeling. You don't just see a plain, simple panel in front of you. You see a really nice experience when you walk into hotels these days. Furniture, whether is modern stuff, traditional, or some very, very antique furniture.

So ArtCAM is in those industries. Set design as well. So texturing you see in here, cutting out lettering. ArtCAM fits itself to those industries. Theming industry, props, large sculptures-- not only designs, but you can make these things within the software.

You can physically manufacture these sorts of work-- movie industry as well. ArtCAM been used for many years in the movie industry to make props, physical props, for movies. The movie this was in was Night at the Museum, and it was pretty much the thing that ran around the whole time of the film, which they were after.

Relief models. You can walk around most hotels here. If it's a white building like Caesar's or this one, you're going to see this sort of artwork. This is what ArtCAM specializes in. It's this sort of artwork. It's going to be very hard to create in a lot of CAD packages. Model making.

So as you can see, we're in a lot of different industries. The product's a very versatile product. Coinage. Does anybody have coins? The majority of the mints in the world use ArtCAM to design their coins. So all of this artwork on top designed in ArtCAM.

Things like Olympic medals are designed in ArtCAM and have been done for many years. So it goes from real small, high-detail stuff to big, huge sculptures with very little detail. Ice carving. Many different industries you can see ArtCAM in. It's a complete solution for designing and manufacturing.

So as this is the "Art of Architecture," let's take a look at a few different things in today's agenda. I'm hoping to get through it all in the 90 minutes. Exteriors, interiors, theming, and something special at the end. So I really need to get to that end point to do that. Actually, exteriors and interiors, they can almost go into the same sort of group, because there's a lot of overlap within there.

So starting off with exteriors, we've got textures. So that's all the waves on the walls, the wave panels that can be done, and there's numerous ways to do this. We have cladding. That's not a cladding example, but the cladding is the stuff that goes on the side of the building, either as an insulation sort of thing or for an architectural or artistic finish.

Windows-- the artistic side of windows, not your standard PVC sorts of windows-- that's quite simple-- but the artistic side. And then the big columns like you see out in the foyer and the entrance way out there. So we're going to take a look at some of those.

First of all, textures-- many different ways to create textures. Textures are brilliant for architecture these days. You can make bathrooms look exciting. You can make a bedroom look better, or you can make the floor. We've actually created quite a lot of these before, and it is surprising how many people go up and start touching and stroking the textures to feel them. It's quite a strange sensation.

So here we have ArtCAM. So this is where ArtCAM looks like when you start, and what we've got here is a very simple way to create a texture. This is really easy. I think my mic's going in and out. Get your phone, click something, you get a texture. You send that to ArtCAM because it's a photograph and it converts it into this sort of texture, a grayscale height map.

And it looks like that. It's reasonable. You can smooth it off, you can clean it up. Very easy way to get a texture. You can adjust it and make changes to it. Again, you can machine afterwards. You can get the physical piece of the exact thing you have photographed to collect. When you let a smoothing pass over it, it looks a lot nicer with what it does.

So another way-- because there's always a few ways to do stuff in software, isn't there-- is by using vectors and machining. Now, the last way is very time-consuming when actually manufacturing, because you have to machine that whole texture. The way of doing this now is with vectors or lines. Basically you create lines, but you're using tool pathing here. So you're using the diameter of a tool, the shape of a tool to actually control your shapes.

So we have the standard things in there for machining-- so variations of tool shapes, tool sizes. As you see, we've got a V cutter here, so that will leave a really nice kind of V shape throughout the design. And then we go to set up our material. So we're working with the real material size of the piece we have in front of us.

We are manufacturing everything we do, and we can calculate this. So you can visually see exactly what it looks like, and we can simulate it. So this is what you've just seen that comes off the machine.

This is just a single line. It will do a whole load in a minute. The difference between this and the other one is the time it takes. So this is going to be done very, very quickly, and the other one could take a few hours to do because it's going from all those little dots over a texture. Just wait for it to work its way through. I'm going totally on and off the mic, aren't I?

So what that's done is it has created a single line on a V bit here, and then it's adjusted the shape. I'll just speed this up a bit. So that's doing it with multiple lines and changing the shape here. And what we can do is we can adjust and move all of our lines around, and this will change the shape of the wave that's being produced.

So that's the tool path that our tool is going to run down and going to take. So it's going to go up and down and up and down, and you can get this sort of effect. Quite simply, it's one you see a lot in hotels, bars, clubs, and it's machined very easily with a V bit tool-- changes the depths in and out and the shape of this.

So the next section is cladding. I will go into some real examples of some of these things I'm showing you as well. The next section is cladding. So cladding is the idea of taking the panels and then mounting them onto a building or a surface to create an interesting design or to add heat insulation.

Now, again, we've taken the texture here, and the problem is if you've got a texture, a large texture which you've designed to cross a big wall like that one there, how do you machine it? Because your machine's not that big. You're never going to have a machine that's that size, so you need to look at how you can break these down into pieces-- how you can say, I want a machine, this piece, and then this piece, various different sections, as you go through. So when it joins together, it maps together all quite nicely.

So we're going to go through that process now through here. We're selecting our tools. Again, we have a large tool database within the software. That's the machine, and see the machine path there compared to that last one we had?

Well, this one has some nice gaps in between it. That's going to be time-consuming to produce to that level of detail, but it is going to be a very nice tool path at the end of it. If you're looking for quality you can get it.

Again, what you see here is a simulation. Now what simulation is, it's brilliant. It's what you get off your machine at the end. Regardless, you know what you get. You haven't wasted the sheets of metal, the bits of wood. If you're working with some high-cost material, it's a brilliant piece of functionality, saves a lot of time.

So as I said, the paneling bit where we take this wall here and we section it and then we say, I want a machine this section, this section, this section. So you can place them all together afterwards. You can take these pieces out of your design. It categorizes them for you into all the numbers we have. It will split them over numerous sheets as well.

But what do you do once you've got one of those pieces, like this? So this is what your typical cladding vectors, lines, drawings would look like. You'd work with your shape number one or 100, 260, whatever it is, and then you take your cladding design and you would machine it separately. What you can actually do is you can put all of these sheets on a big bed and you can nest them.

So nesting is where you get paneled shapes, shapes like this, and it works the best way to fit any of those shapes together. So the software will minimize the amount of cutting time that's required-- brilliant, time-saving. Not just time-saving. What's really nice is cost-saving because you haven't got leftover material. And that's really what a lot of this is about-- time-saving and cost-saving, because it's machining.

We have rendering here so you can show your clients what you want it to look like, if it's out of slate or whatever it is-- if it's out of gold, it's out of silver. I mean, not that you're probably going to be making gold facades for the side of your building. Could happen in Dubai, I suppose.

On average, we're not going to do those, but we have all those sorts of colors, the woods, the metals, plastics. So you can actually visualize and send these to your clients, and you can send them as 3D PDFs if you want. So you can say, hey, this is what the textures on your building or your cladding is going to look like.

Windows. Now, as I said, the thing with Windows is we're not looking at the UPVC sort of window. We're not looking at the standard cutout window. We're looking at really some of the more complicated shapes of Windows with curves in, round ones, and the detail that we can add to your windows.

So this was a guy in the UK who did a barn conversion. And actually our guy down here, Leighton, has managed to talk him into doing kind of a decorative, port hall-style window for him, doing all the kind of artistic stuff across there. What you're seeing here is one of the tools within ArtCAM.

The tool itself is called the weave wizard, so it's brilliant for creating weaves, knots. Everything in the software now is very live. So if you are familiar with ArtCAM from before, what you used to have to do was create a shape and then go, it's not quite right, undo, redo it. You don't have to do that now.

The tools work live. You can move them, manipulate them, and adjust them, and they just all work seamlessly and live within here. So as you can see here, it's just being dragged around, and you're changing the shape as you see it.

So once you have those shapes, you have the ability to reuse them. So this is really powerful, because if you've walked around this hotel the amount of lion's heads that are around in various different forms, of different sizes-- left-orientation, right-orientation-- whether they have been spun around, something like what we're about to do here, they're absolutely everywhere. But I did think about seeing if I could count all of them on the way back, but that was probably not the best use of my time.

But also there's small lines on the mouldings. There's goats' heads, and they can all be reused within the software. So that's a great advantage of doing that. Now, obviously we're designing here and we're creating from scratch.

But what happens if you go somewhere, like I come here and somebody says to me, oh, well, see all of that stuff up there, it's falling apart a little bit, it kind of needs capturing, and we want that in every single room? So you can think, I could just design that from scratch-- perfectly capable of it. But Autodesk also have software called ReMake, which you can go with your camera and just go around and capture an object with a camera.

Now, sometimes that's a great result. Sometimes it's not. It depends upon the room, the darkness, exactly where you are. In the perfect situation, ReMake is a fantastic bit of software, but you don't always have that luxury.

Sometimes you come into a room like this, there's a corbel in the corner, it's really dark. So you capture it. You can bring it into ArtCAM, and you can start to work and manipulate and clean all of your model up within there. So you can bring that little bit of detail in, you can reuse it across your design, you can save it into a library, and you can start to do exactly what you're doing here, which I've reused a couple of designs.

So we've picked out this one section. And now because it's gone blue, it means it's live, and I can start to do whatever I want with that. I can save it out somewhere, I can change the shapes of it, and I can copy it around my design.

Now there's many different ways of doing that. The really nice thing is the ability to save it to a library, a clip art library, which means that not only can you share it for yourself but also it's one that you can send to other people. If you put it in a format like Dropbox, you can share it live with everybody else as well. So you can share your file formats with everybody, your relief files.

Columns-- these aren't really the things that people do every day with ArtCAM, because not many people manufacture columns. But what columns are is they're rotary. They're things that are done rotary. So the way to think about this is, yeah, there's lots of columns out here, there's lots of columns in Italy, there's quite a few in Greece. There's a lot in theme parks, but we're not seeing them absolutely everywhere we go.

But it's a rotary object. So by rotary, if we have a think to what we see on a daily basis, think of a house, a staircase. You've got a newel post as you go up. You've got the balustrades as you go up. Sometimes you've got handles as you go up.

Some countries, they're very plain and simple. They have a piece of wood which you hold to go up the stairs. In other countries, they've got some real nice vines or shapes wrapped around them. So they're not just columns. They're rotary objects. They could be anything. They could be a bottle of wine. It's rotary.

So the thing with the software is what you see, and the easiest way to describe ArtCAM is a piece of paper. If you're a designer or an artist, you start with a sketch. You're in a bar, you're having a drink, you draw on some kind of napkin. It's what you do. If you're a jeweler, you scribble something for a client. Stuff usually starts with an idea or a thought, a scribble.

So 2D is how we've been modeling the rest of this stuff. What happens when you roll the paper up? It becomes rotary. That's how ArtCAM works. It's that simple for creating rotary objects. Very simple design there, not complicated at all, but if you take that piece of paper and you come up to the rotary setting and just pick how you want to spin it, all of a sudden you've got a cylinder.

So if you're used to working in flat, it's not a full CAD model. It's not a full 3D CAD model, like your Fusions, your Inventor, your Power Shapes, your other products. It's like working on a piece of paper as you goes through. Now what you see in here is how we can add detail to that model and how we can do that detail live. If we're not happy with it, we can adjust it when we're working our way through.

So that's kind of adding it to the surface. So I suppose the bit I haven't explained about ArtCAM for those that don't know is ArtCAM isn't a full CAD package. It works on kind of a height map or a triangle mesh. Most of it, to create in ArtCAM, is just a shape editor. You simply have a line and you raise it. You say I want to raise it like a dome, I want to raise it like a pyramid, I want to just kind of pick that line and just roll that shape around it.

So to understand it, it's very simple. It's perfect for children to understand. It's used quite widely amongst education for some of the younger children around the world-- not fully on the education program as of yet. But we are looking at getting into the education program as soon as we can. But it's used in F1 for schools for children to start making, manufacturing the car. Because it's easy for them to design, and it's easy for them to actually make the piece as well.

It's very nice and simple. So this first bit here, going on into interiors, "appliques," is kind of reliefs. It's onlays. It's very simple ArtCAM stuff, and this is where ArtCAM really shines. This is where its power is. So things like this-- they're either mounted on, they're designed for stuff, they're on-laid onto architecture and installations. Sorry. Yes?

AUDIENCE: In what way does it connect to the technology currently being used in BIM Landscape?

ROBERT NEWMAN: In BIM Landscape, did you say? That I honestly couldn't tell you the answer to, because I'm not too familiar with BIM Landscape, to be honest.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the technologies used in BIM as well?

ROBERT NEWMAN: Were the technologies using BIM?

AUDIENCE: Like is it possible for us to retrieve 3D information out of Revit, out of [INAUDIBLE].

ROBERT NEWMAN: I mean, if we can export files out of those software, then we can import and we can import file formats in a relief if they're actually those triangles or any of those sorts of formats. I must admit, I'm not to up on the Revit side of the BIM 360 side-- more on the manufacturing side. But also we can export from the software in various different file formats, which a lot of the products can take in. I'm sorry that doesn't quite answer you. I'm not quite up on some of the other architectures.

AUDIENCE: Is it possible to export and what kind of formats?

ROBERT NEWMAN: STLs, OBJs, vectors, vector stuff-- DXF, EPS, AIs, formats like that. We are going to be looking at closer collaboration with some of the other teams. So the history of ArtCAM is ArtCAM is an acquisition as part of a bigger company Delcam by Autodesk.

So at the moment we are just getting fully integrated into Autodesk, and now we're just starting to have meetings to discuss how we start to integrate our products' crossover file formats, functionality, how they start to all fit together a little bit more, and how Autodesk starts to look at manufacturing. Because it's something that Autodesk haven't really done, is the manufacturing side before. So I'm sorry if that doesn't fully answer your question. I'm not a BIM expert.

So appliques-- they are these sorts of designs. They can be absolutely anything-- relief, file format, all the stuff you'd see through Rome or the stuff you'd see through Greece, even very simple stuff. Floral stuff you see absolutely everywhere on mouldings.

It's huge in America for mouldings, door things, door items, panels. Most Home Depots and DIY shops you can buy these sorts of things, but also you can add these to any of your other designs as well. Lots of things you can do with these.

So this is about how you core create in ArtCAM. This is the foundations, the very simple things, of how you would create things in ArtCAM. You bring in an image.

You draw a vector, which is a line around the item. You adjust the lines to get them to the exact point, so you draw them rough if you want. You can draw them exact. And you can see they are smooth lines.

Now where we differ from the graphic package is that ours are designed specifically for machining, not for sending to a printer or color printer to do letters or vinyls. Our vectors are all designed for machining, so they're nice, smooth, clean vectors or clean lines. As you can see, the vector actually has a direction associated with it. So that's the way that the tools are potentially going to go, or the way that, in this case, the model, the drive is going to go.

So you can see that's created a shape. All we've done there is select two lines, left and right, and say I want to fit this triangle between really simple stuff within their to create that sort of shape. And then we can start to look at other pieces of this design.

The nice thing about the software is it is layer-based as well, so it's as you'd expect. You can work between different layers, which means you can tweak these. It means that if your customer, your client comes in to you again and says, oh, I really liked that flourish you did for me, but can I change this section here, then you can. You can take that out. You can change it. You can switch it around.

What we've done here now is just, again, exactly the same two lines, and we're going to draft a different shape between those two lines. So this is a tool that we call the two rail sweep. I keep going in and out on this mic, don't I. And you can see it's live adjusting.

So that's the really nice thing, is you just create your rough shape of your design and you move it around. It's like working with clay. You never get it exact when you put a bit of clay on something. You put it on and then you start to smooth out. You think, well, that's not right.

You start to change the shape of the material. And the real nice thing is that obviously you can correct it, you can undo it, you can manipulate your shapes as much as you want. And at any point, obviously, you can just go back, because your vectors are there, and just start to create them and move them around.

So we're going to work our way through this model. So you can see it's a relatively quick model to create. But if you see this on the side of your bed, you think, wow, that's quite complicated. That's probably going to take me a while to do, when in reality it's a few minutes' work to create. Because what you've done, in fact, is create one side, flipped it over to the other side to create a mirror image of the other side. It's quite easy to do.

And then all you're doing is adding any bits of the detail which you see on your design. If you're not happy with it, you change it. And if we look at most decorative items-- I keep looking up at this piece behind us above the door-- that's exactly what we're doing on the screen at the moment. It's exactly what we're doing.

We have created one piece, and we've mirrored it over. This piece up here behind-- won't take us long to recreate that. Try doing that in a solid CAD package. It is complicated to do.

So you see we just created the center with a rough shape again, and we're always just making small tweaks and adjustments within our designs to get it right. It's an artistic package. It's designed for artists, so you get the ability to tweak and play around. But as I said, it is an artistic package, but you think of the level of detail that coins have and what have you.

And you can really add some detail to your artwork. So it doesn't have to just be this free-form as you've seen here. It can really be some high detail artwork. Typically some of the engraving companies, some of the mints will go down to sort of eight micron in level of detail. So it will be very, very detailed artwork.

Now, again, back onto textures-- as I said, there is an overlap, interior/exteriors, of textures. This is actually a customer example. So this company Artifacturing-- brilliant company-- and they take on a lot of bespoke projects for people. It could be that they happen to be a woodworking shop and they don't have the ability to do this sort of thing. Or it could be that it's a large company that's come in and said, we want some of the hotels doing, can you design it and we'll sort out the manufacturing somewhere else.

They take on a lot of bespoke jobs for people. And then in this case the design was done exactly as you saw in that earlier demo with lines, with vector artwork. So it's quick and it was easy to machine. You can see they've got quite a few panels on the bed itself.

So they're not planning on spending a couple of days to machine each panel. That's not going to be cost-effective to them, especially when we look at this, when you think, hang on, they've done the whole room in textured panels. We want this to actually be produced high quality and quickly, so the perfect thing for this is tool pathing.

So as you can see, everything is textured, possibly could be. So I thought this was some sort of night club or some sort of swanky bar. So it happens to be a guy's man cave downstairs in his basement that was done. I thought when I saw this, oh, brilliant. That's quite great use of the software, probably in a club.

No, it's a guy's man cave downstairs where he's got a snooker table and a fish tank and everything else. This guy has really won. This guy's kind of done, although I'm not sure that some of the things I'd go for. I wouldn't see the table and pool table or snooker table or billiards table or whatever it is in the corner of there. So, again, the work surfaces, the textures all done within the ArtCAM software itself. It looks like he's got a projector back there as well-- so some great use of texture within software. How are we doing for time?

So over two doors. Doors can be in all sorts of formats, all sorts of shapes, all sorts of sizes. It can be very, very basic doors. It can be a lot more complicated.

So this here is actually taken from some doors at a library. I'd hate to think how long this took to machine and to do design, but they were two massive doors, like we've got at the back. And each door was commissioned by a guy called Joe [? Valasek ?] for a library. I think he sold each door at $10,000 per door.

Imagine the amount of machining time that would go into a piece like this-- very, very intricate. Two doors exactly the same artistic-wise, but obviously the pattern change is reversed and there's waterfalls. Now one thing to note here is you could think, oh, this would take a long, long time to design, but we can see things in this image. Most of those trees are pretty identical.

So we saw in the previous demonstration how we could take a piece and reuse it, scale it, adjust it, twist it a little bit. Then it looks different. You don't have to spend hours and hours designing something. You can reuse components and adjust them, twist them, move them around if you need to.

He's done that with the deers. He's made heads around. Can you imagine recreating that animal every single time? Could you imagine creating a door by hand that looked like this? This is actually what he did used to do, was by hand to do stuff, and it would take him three months per door to hand carve a door our, which you just think is impressive. But it's very time-consuming.

And the thing about hand carving, apart from it really, really, really hurts your hand, is that the art is not in the detail. The art is in the roughing. Because if you mess the roughing up and you go down to the wrong depth, that's it. You've got to start refilling it, and it doesn't look right.

So the art is in the roughing and taking the majority of the material out, and then you can finish it quite nicely afterwards by hand. But still three months to do stuff, which you could design these sorts of doors in a day in the software. But it's going to take you a few days worth of machining per door. Again, it's a massive time saver.

But that's the really complicated doors, whereas this is a lot more simple. This is what most people see on a daily basis. It's a very basic door. It's simple vector lines, it's simple cutouts of wood, but we have the nesting functionality in there.

And this is what I was talking about with time-saving earlier, the fact that we can take our vectors, we can have a nice piece of wood. It's fine if you're cutting out some sort of chip board or some thin sort of board. It's not costing us a lot. But you can imagine if you're cutting out a nice piece of oak because you're doing a really nice door, it's going to start to get expensive.

Now, the advantage to the nest in this is not just the fact that you are saving on material and saving on time. It's the fact that you can shove as many different items onto a sheet as you want it. So you could have three doors on there. You could have two doors and a chair on there. You could add as many different vector things on there as you want. You can save those out, so you can reuse them. You can bring the pieces back in again.

So you see within ArtCAM there's a lot of reuse of artwork if needed to be, and that's something you can't easily do by hand, is reuse and reuse work over and over again. So, again, over to creating a door-- this is a very simple door. What I mentioned before was our relief clip art library. So in there we've got about 500 pieces of artwork which you can use.

Obviously this is the one we've just created within the software. So we've just designed that. We've shoved it to the site. We don't know what we're going to use it for. We don't have a clue. Could be for a piece of crown molding, could be for a simple doorstop. But in this case, we're using it actually for the center of the door, and we're going to apply it to the top of it.

Likelihood is that you could have either created this door within the software, or you could have bought a door. You could've bought a really nice, expensive door, and you could have just added that applique to it in a negative format or cut it out and then stuck it onto it. You see a lot of those things in a lot of bespoke kitchens.

Mouldings. Now, these are things like-- what do you call them, Leighton, the type you've just done.

AUDIENCE: Corbels.

ROBERT NEWMAN: Corbels. The kind of rosette things that are on the top, any sort of-- my brain's gone to sleep.

AUDIENCE: Fleur-de-lis.

ROBERT NEWMAN: Fleur-de-lis and things like that, any sort of moulding that we typically would have. So in this case, we're taking that same or a very similar piece of clip art. And we're amending it, adjusting it, and we're starting to rotate it around. Again, change the shapes and add things to create mouldings to go on stuff.

Now there's various different ways. Could you imagine machining every single scroll that you see here, every single lion that you see here? I mean, that's quite time consuming. What you can do is take your finished design or your artwork here and actually invert it and create a mould. So you could pour plaster in it, and you could just do plaster moulds from the software.

So not only can you machine the actual design. You can invert it to a negative. Now where do we see that? Well, they create negatives because they stamp coins-- confectionery industry, creating mouldings for chocolates, for sweets, for things like that. So creating a negative mould so you can pour items in.

I'm not talking about full [INAUDIBLE] dyes. We're talking about some of the smaller things, some of the stuff where it's more of the traditional artistic side. So we've created a piece of artwork-- moulding as well. So we're talking about the panel molding that goes around the side of a room.

We've got a bit around here. It's exactly the same shape that you've got there. So rather than having it round, you could have it straight to go round to create a dado rail. We'll create a rosette in a minute, but exactly the same functionality. We're creating relief artwork to reuse and to manipulate and move around places.

So you just create one circle and you just block, copy, rotate. You see there's a lot simple tools in there to get you to your end result quickly. Again, if you've got too many, you can remove them. You can adjust them.

You can pick the spacing, you can pick the sizing within the software, but this is the real simple bit, the shape added to there, where you click your shape. And then you say, do I want a dome, do I want a triangle, do I want a flat line. And then you can create something like this in minutes from either existing stock or stock you pre-created, covering most of the items, again, which you've seen in this building.

So we're just smoothing the item out now, but then we are going to use this top shape up here and some of the vector artwork around the site. We're actually going to create a dome around that area. So we're going to blend between one shape and the next.

So now there's various different ways that you can do this, like with all software. You can either use some of the tools, or a faster way to do this, if you were just creating a very simple moulding, is with a tool. So if you're just doing a simple dado rail, a piece of coven a piece of skirting, then you can just do this with a tool. It's a simple line and you use something called an OG cutter, and it's basically a cutter which has got a shape in it. And you just quickly run that around and you create a really nice detail around there.

You can just go and add any bits of detail afterwards. So you wouldn't necessarily have to model everything with ArtCAM. You can machine stuff that's artistic to speed up exactly what you're doing. Let's just speed this video up.

So this is the shape for around the outside. If you're not happy with it, again, you just adjust it. You just move bits about. And that's the nice thing is being able to see stuff live as you're going through at any point. So we'll just put the pieces all together and say we're creating our master here.

All we'd have to do is just invert the design and then you get a negative, and then you'd just be able to happily pour away your plaster into the mould and then just keep doing that. So a great education project for this is chocolate moulds. It's brilliant.

So every single time we get students in, we get them to create some sort of chocolate mould doing this sort of thing. So they get a piece of artwork which they design however they want the artwork to be, and then they machine it in a block of wax. So very small, low-cost machines, and the machine's something like this in negative-- sorry, in positive. Then they poor food-grade silicone into it, and then they've got their mould out out of it, which they can create chocolate moulds over and over again.

So it's a great one for kids in education to be able to see exactly what real manufacturing will potentially be like. It's only food-grade silicone and mould, but it's an introduction to moulding and creating stuff and creating plasters, things like that. So we're just playing around with the lighting, again, within this model.

So this is, I suppose, more of the glitz and glamor side to the software. This is the theming side-- so not kind of your everyday stuff. But as I was saying about the kid when they go to the theme park at the start and they see all this fantastic stuff or walk into a restaurant or a themed restaurant-- this is the sort of thing that you see that can inspire to create the sorts of designs.

And if we take a look at this design here, it's exactly the same processes we've just been through. This sword could have been done in rotary, but it wasn't done in rotary. It was done in two halves and then glued together afterwards. So it would have taken a lot longer, and they may not have even had the machine to do a rotary. Because to do something rotary on a machine-- a normal machine will just do this for a standard three-axis, but a rotary needs something to go around on it.

So there's ways around things, and, again, a quick way to do it would be to do it in two halves and to machine it. So you design it as one piece and you say split it. Let's do just one section. Let's machine another section, as we saw in the MultiPlate demo, where we picked a model and split it out to create something bigger than this guy.

And as you can see, appliques placed all around these as well. So everything that you've seen in all the previous demos can be put together to create other pieces of artwork. Once he's got this design, he can create miniature ones of these. So you can imagine the movie industry, where they produce big, big models. You can easily produce little models of it as well.

So this is a very, very basic demo, but it's actually what a lot of people do. It may not be with a green alien. It could be with a company logo. You bring in a bitmap, a JPEG, an image, some sort of image-- very, very simple. This was actually some of the foundations of ArtCAM, was this very basic-- 20 years ago when the product started-- was working with an image and turning it into a 3D model.

So here what we've done is we've basically brought in a bitmap image, and we've said vectorize it. Add some lines around it to particular colors. We've reduced the colors that we've got to three from the original amount.

Now if it's a bitmap, it's going to come in with only a few colors. If it's a JPEG, it's probably going to come in with 256 colors into our software. If it's a TIFF, it's going to have an awful lot more. So you reduce the colors to make them as clean as possible so you can vectorize the shapes and create them.

I'm going to go back just a second, because I was talking over it. But as I said, this is the fundamental in ArtCAM. You create a vector and you create a shape, and you just add the height to it-- simple. I want a dome, I just want to change it. I don't like that; I'll adjust it. Very simple functionality within the software.