Alias and VRED Instruction Methodology from Auburn University

BENJAMIN BUSH: Hey, this is Alias and VRED Instruction Methodology from Auburn University. It's me, Ben Bush. I'm associate professor of Industrial Design at Auburn University, and I'll be talking about Alias and VRED collaboration with Nissan Digital Designer from the Spring semester of 2024.

So like most good stories, it starts off with a conversation. I know Jeff Smith from years ago, his involvement with IDSA, him being a professor at RIT, and him being a really big proponent of pushing high-level sketching and high-level CAD to industrial design is probably over in the entire nation. So I believe we were going up an escalator at conference. And he's like, hey, Ben, I hear you teach CAD. What do you teach?

And with confidence, I look back and I said, I teach what I feel is appropriate to teach. Of everything that I've taught in the past 15 years of my academic life, I've taught CAD every single semester, and so I know it pretty well. I'm pretty confident in my ability. And when he had a proposal, I'm like, let's see where this thing goes.

And so what I like about this is before we even really got into the conversation about working with a potential partner and him using his education background and now his sales background in a certain offering, it was, I have the trust of my administration to do what I feel is right. I've taught it long enough. My student outcomes are high enough where if we're looking into something and it matched the learning outcomes and the students are excited about it, we're probably going to do it.

I also had a big transition in teaching this over 15 years, and hopefully, you have some growing and transition in the way you teach, in your pedagogical approach. But I realized I didn't know the type of software that future employers would be needing. And since that is really-- it's important, I needed to be skilled and ready for the job and workforce. I don't know what that moving target is.

And so if that's true, instead of teaching a singular software package, it started making sense to teach philosophy and approach to CAD because different tools create different things. And we know this, but if you're only good at one thing, and you come into a job, they're like, do this software? I really want this job. I'm going to tell them that I do, even though I don't. But if how different CAD packages work, and you have a good framework of understanding process and what different software packages like to do, you're probably going to be pretty adaptable no matter where you go. Of course, you're going to have your favorites, but you're definitely flexible.

To give you a look into my typical Spring semester, I've got 15 weeks. The 16th week is for exams. But I do my first five weeks in Rhino 3D, the second five weeks in SolidWorks, and the last I usually use Sculpt Fusion or a little bit of KeyShot. And a lot of this is I'm trying to make sure my students are well versed in different types of CAD approaches.

We teach SolidWorks as an undergrad. And so the next year, as we were talking about this, I had a cohort that really didn't need any more SolidWorks teaching. They were interested in something else. I'm like, all right, well, if I'm going to be dependent on what I say is possible, which is responding to trends and industry needs, when students bring something to me that can render model, do video, and it's free, all right. We'll look into it and see if it's good. So this idea of mixing and matching different software to meet student needs and meeting potential trends, directions in the industry in terms of CAD wasn't really new. And I was already prepared to be flexible again.

It's also important for me to talk a little bit about the timeline, and how in my CAD classes with the graduates, I've got two classes on Tuesday and Thursday where we get to meet an hour 15, hour-and-a-half, each takes me three hours a week. In contrast to my studio environment, I get them 3.5 hours a day for three days, so I don't have as many contact hours with the CAD class as I do with the studio class. This is going to be important later down the road.

With industry collaborations, I not only have trust from administration to teach how and what I feel is appropriate and good, but also, with the 30 plus years of Auburn's involvement with corporate sponsors and corporate partners, I don't really have to go ask for permission. They already know that we have a good framework, that we've done it before. And so if we bring this up, we're probably going to be green-lit. And they're going to give us permission to run these types of projects.

Now, the responsibility is on me to make sure it runs well. I'm the point person on all things. But if you want that relationship, you can go out and get it. They endorse that.

So with building and relationship, there's things I need to measure and keep in balance. And it's from an academic student side, but also considering who we're working with. So for the us portion, does it deliver the necessary skills to compete in the job market? Can they use that project or series of projects to show off the skill sets? That is a very well-- it's a very real condition that needs to be met.

For the corporate sponsor capacity, it needs to meet their short-term and long-term values. It could be they want to create a pipeline. They might want to just get involved for philanthropic reasons. It could be they're looking for interns.

I need to know how it fits into their bigger picture. To quote a hip hop lyricist, "If it doesn't make dollars, it doesn't make sense." So I need to know what are the things at stake before we get into.

And the reason why I'm putting this into the presentation is like when you start getting into these relationships, it's like getting engaged. Specifically, for this first round through, it's going to increase your workload by at least 25%. There's a lot of planning that needs to go on. There's a lot of communication. And then there's back and forth and adjustment throughout the entire semester.

And so this is not just set it and forget it. You're going to be going back and forth. And so you want to make sure from a friendship or a cordial sort of way that if things get a little bit bumpy, you have the social equity that you can run things out.

All right, so we say this is a good project. We want to make sure we're honoring and protecting this relationship and this investment. So I'm looking into IP protection for both the client and the student. And if appropriate, how will funding work in this situation.

So for the IP, the intellectual property protection, are we protecting the partner? I want them to give us all the secrets. I want my students to have cutting edge education. I want them to have the insights they're not going to get from anywhere else.

And so if I want those things, we need to make sure we protect and revere that relationship and those assets. Also, for the students, they're the ones who will be applying for jobs in the next semester, next year. And so I need to make sure that if they do come up with something, who owns the intellectual property.

And also, we need to do this in a timely manner. We can't have these negotiations go into the semester. We need to be very specific. If there's things that needs to be worked out in terms of legal or resources, the quicker we can get this project pinned down, the better.

All right, decides it a good idea. I'll talk with Brad our partner at Nissan. We decided this is a good direction to go. All right, we're going to craft a vehicle that considers ergonomics, built to accomplish a task, has correct proportions, looks beautiful. Sounds great.

Let's start spit-balling, throwing ideas, what type of project should we run where my students can use those projects immediately, and it benefits you as a designer and Nissan as a company. So let's do a single person drone delivery of fast food on college campus. This makes sense. I mean, one of our core competencies, we've got a lot of college students. So in terms of their unhealthy food needs, we've got very good primary research. And as a Taco Bell lover, I really want to see this thing come to fruition. But all right, that's an idea. Kind put a pin in that.

What's another one? Well, what if we do an avalanche rescue. Let's do snow tracks, the treads. Let's have multiple modes of rescue-- rescuing pets, rescuing skiers, rescuing parties-- and also have some type of alternative travel on board. All right. That's cool. I like the aesthetic. There's not a lot of snow around the Southeastern United States, but conceptually, it's going to look awesome.

How about this one? This is where I get kind of weird. I'm leaning into possibly what I do the best. We're going to play around with ideas. So let's pick a super cute animal, a Nightjar, a gecko, a chinchilla, a gerbil. You pick whatever cute animal to you. Dumbo octopus, Dumbo squid, you know what I'm talking about.

Let's take this animal. Let's also choose an anime style for a little bit of visual texture and inspiration. We need to pick a mode of transportation that is tangential to Nissan. Do they do that vehicle already? Do they a lot about it? We can glean some of that.

And let's assign them an absurd task to accomplish. Let us do this. We're going to get a chinchilla. We're going to assign the aesthetic of Cyberpunk Edgerunners. You're going to go off-roading in a van or an SUV. And we're going to do cranberry harvesting and delivery. This is going to be fantastic. I know. How could it not turn out great?

Problem-- as much as I'm excited about this, Brad comes back and says, will potential employers see the value in this project? Maybe. Maybe not. So we started asking the question. I was encouraged to ask the question, what kind of project would potential employers appreciate? That way they can see what's being done and know how that's going to translate into a new hire.

So we get to a chosen project direction. We're going to create automotive concept vehicles for brands that don't yet have automotive divisions. And this ends up being a really good brief for multiple reasons.

For my students, they immediately get to show their work. Carhartt's not going to come at us and say, listen, we were already doing vehicles. You already started taking some of our stuff. Will you please cease and desist. They're not going to say that. So it's very applicable for our students to use.

And it's highly relevant. They can see that they worked with the corporate sponsor. They have these insights. So for the students, it's a really good deal.

For the Nissan side, I'm just excited we don't have to get legal involved. As long as we protect the videos and the assets they share with us, we're not getting into their new brand strategy for 2030. We're not messing with that. And so it's good from that perspective.

Also, Brad gets to leave students who do speculative design. There's things going back in the recesses of his mind that he might want to explore. And so he was like, well, what if I feed this into an student and see where it goes?

He also gets to talk aesthetics and CAD best practices, which I'm really excited about. Yes, he's incredibly good at 3D modeling, but when you've been around the car industry long enough to hear him talk about trends and directions and the reason why things are the way they are, you just sit back and go, oh, man, this dude knows a lot more about cars than I gave him credit for.

So we green-lit the project. If the company to the right-- Crocs, Carhartt, Gucci, Muji, Apple-- if they do a vehicle, how might that offering stay on brand? So it's-- we'll establish a brand and then tease that out into a form.

And really, the funding of this one is pretty easy because it's our first interaction. We're not going to be very particular. We're just going to say, we're going to test drive. If in the future it's mutually beneficial to both parties, we can talk about dollar amounts, but the first round, no funding required. We're just going to see how it turns out.

How much time do we need to allocate? I already do five for my introductory session through Rhino. I've never taught this. So what's the learning curve, Brad? Where should we put some emphasis? Leaning on my partner again for this.

I believe what we went through after debating do we do Alias heavy, VRED heavy, a balance of the two, I believe the direction we went on was like 40% Alias, 45% Alias, but the majority is going to be VRED.

So we choose that, and then we start asking the question, how might we achieve a quality vehicle development and new software at the same time? I've only got three hours a week, and so I'm asking them to do way more than what they maybe have the time allocation for. So how do I address this issue? How do I take advantage of the resources that I already have?

And here's my solution. I'll just integrate my studio. 30 years, they already really want to work with Nissan, and from the beginning of the semester, I'm like, I need to see if you have the effort going to be required to do this project well. After running three or four weeks in studio, all right, you're-- I don't want to say worthy, but I can trust you with this investment.

And so what I did, I kind of a vertical situation where I paired the grad students who are more like design managers. And then my third-year students as design employees, where they went back and forth and talked about decisions. But ultimately, the decision capability, when it comes down to this car, is going to look like this, or I need to have this form transition work this way, comes to the grasps are the ones have to execute on that vision.

And the giant plus to this is like everyone gets a sticker. So when you go to LinkedIn, you start scrolling down, the first thing you see to the left, these little icons, everybody gets the icon. Everyone gets to share the work in their portfolio. So the grads get to pull the sketches and the development and the mood boards. And the undergrads get the visualization. So it's a really good way for everyone to share and to interacting and engaging with this household brand.

So very excited. We deliver the design brief to the students. We go, we think these companies have a lot of potential. And of course, they didn't agree with us. They said, thanks for all that extra work. They don't know how much-- they don't care. We want to substitute our own brands-- Montblanc, PlayStation, Dyson, and Sea-Doo.

All right, my feelings were hurt. I was a little bit wounded. They had no idea how many hours, how many days it took to get to that point. But I will say this-- I appreciated their confidence and their buy-in. Because at this point, when you got to choose your own visual direction and you messed it up, that's on you. So have conviction. And this way, optimistically, they're more bought in because they had that level of decision, that level of autonomy.

So we start the grads on the software. I do my five weeks in Rhino, drinking my fire hydrant. I get them up to speed with terminology and workflow foundations.

We were getting in Alias. I start hitting some roadblocks. We need to learn the interface. It's unlike anything we've done before. There are some similarities, but more differences.

And so I asked for the software to be installed to KP Lab. That way, we could hit the ground running. And we log in, and it doesn't pull up. I'm like, IT, what's going on? They're like, I'm having troubles with the distribution of the licenses.

He doesn't have the time to sit down at every computer and do an individual install or uninstall the previous version new install. So it has to be deployed from his machines. And so he just wrestled with doing that.

All right, I'm flexible. We can make this work. We're going to be OK.

The students, laptops, what do you got? Windows, everybody? No, only half. All right, so we can get some progress working in pairs. For those who have Macs, do you have parallels of Boot Camp? No? Could you install it? No? You're going to kill your computer? All right.

The last one was to go to our virtual lab. It's a computer sitting over in another building. If I log in with my Mac into that PC, I can use it. That wasn't an option either.

So unfortunately, this set us back a week. And I wish I could say like, yeah, it's fine, we absorbed it, but this has implications all the way through the end of the semester.

And as I get my students into Alias, I know by just teaching the fundamentals of CAD, if I don't do a really good, solid foundation, everything we build on top is going to be less stable. And at this point, since I'm still like a young learner to the software, I'm doing the best I can. But it's hard for me to know the right path of the tutorials.

I want them to understand something comprehensively. I really want them to get into the sub-D realm. It's what I think maybe the software does better than anything else out there. And as I see that my partner is using hybrid modeling, I want to get into hybrid modeling. So how can I teach the interface in a way that targets them to walk down this workflow?

So I went with LinkedIn Learning. In maintenance at the time, it's what I've done in the past. If you are into trading stocks, that past success does not guarantee or indicate future results. So we did it. It was good. I think in the future, I'll get a lot better at cherry picking the best tutorials from different sources.

Also, I'll get to the point where I can go, all right, I see where this tutorial is going to go. I see where it's useful now, but also useful in the future in the way that it evolves. I can also use that as a metaphor off previous assignments and previous classes. I can't do that yet, but that will become part of my teaching approach.

The instruction was good, but they came in like vignettes. You would work on a tool, work on an object, and then you go to something else. What I really want is something more comprehensive, where instead of learning in isolation, this project goes from tool to tool to tool in a way that makes sense. And that way, when you get done, you see how everything applies to everything else.

I downloaded the videos. I pushed it out. I pushed out the example files. It was good. But now that I've done it, I know better ways to do it. There's a legacy F1 tutorials.

Sometimes you need to be in the shade to appreciate the sunshine. And this was a scenario here. And that's why it's called learning. It's not uploading. So doing it, realizing there's better ways to do it moving forward.

Also, the interface is rather complex, yet customizable. I wasn't ready for the dexterity required for the hotkeys, but now I know. It makes a lot of sense when you get into it, but initially, it's part of the user experience you need to level up towards.

So the best tutorial we got into during the early days was this making of the Fiat 500. It's from Alias Teacher TV. There's three parts to it, and it takes cumulatively an hour.

What I like about it is sequential. I can see how one decision up front makes decisions and makes implications down the road. It's all sub-D modeling. There is some hybrid modeling in terms of surface cuts, a little bit of lattice rigging.

And this is what we're going to be doing. We're making vehicles, so it helps to know how to make a simple vehicle. A slight downside is the vehicles that my students are constructing are going to be more complex than a Fiat. We'll see how that turns out as we go along.

Also, this entire process, I started learning Alias in October, and at this point, it's January, February. And so if you've ever taught something before, you realize the first two times teaching through are going to be kind of rough. I'm a day or two ahead of them. I'm learning as much. I'm making the best decisions that I can. But you need to teach it two or three times before you really can start hitting at a pace.

This is why I felt like it's so important and such a benefit to have a partner. It's like Brad would run us a demo, and then we'd have just all of the magic. It wasn't just him telling things, and like us drinking from the water fountain. We went through and wrestled with things ourselves.

That way, he had educated questions and go, Brad, when I'm trying to do this, this isn't working the way I want to. And him and the experience, he goes, you know, when I do it. This is the approach I like to take. But this is-- it's an approach. There's other methodologies to use it. And the only way you can learn that is from somebody who's done it for decades. So it's a great honor to share the workspace with someone like that.

Also, if you want, from a partner's perspective, to build a pipeline of new graduates into your program, what better way to do it. We all take our own approach to learning CAD. And so if you learn it from the basics, I don't have to ask as many questions of, hey, when you're starting to build this out, why did you start with that? If you can integrate them in a workflow that's familiar and beneficial from the get go, why not do that?

So this is kind of a metaphor. If CAD is a language, and we're learning it, let's make sure we're learning with the right grammar and the right accents. It's not just like Duolingo. It's being fully immersed in that culture. And that's what's beautiful about this relationship.

One of the things I learned the hard way is the idea of wheel wells and windows, places to start where the geometry will not change. I tell you this with kind of from a painful perspective. The Fiat 500 led us astray, which put the blame on myself because it didn't really address windows. It fixed that later. But our vehicles had more atypical curvature. And so we spent a week, half a week trying to remake windows when we should have done it in the very beginning. Learn from my mistakes.

All right, so the graduate students are good on the interface. They're starting to get into vehicle development. Let's see what's happening back in the junior studio.

And in order for them to develop out this company going into vehicular development, they have to really have a good understanding of who the company is, express that direction in metaphor, but also synonyms. And be able to define if you do have an image, what part of the image represents the company and how will it translate into your vehicle?

And I really can't take credit for that. That's because we have an incredible second-year design foundation program that gets the students to know this stuff so intuitively. You're going to see soon that we go through sketches. The sketches aren't impressive, but the outcomes are impressive. Is that a condition of our students having a good eye based on foundations, or is it just AI pushing out things that are familiar?

So we're looking at Dyson. We're looking at Montblanc. This was a new brand for me, which I thought was a little difficult to extract, but they did a good job. Because this is a little bit more further away from what I would call traditional product forms you can pull easy language from, they put out this vocabulary. Sumptuous is not a word I would use, but it's a word that I can use to define the brand. So sumptuous, timeless, and presidential.

They also did some benchmarking. Not that they want to copy the Rolls Royce the Bentley, and the Aston Martin, but they wanted it in such a way that when you put this new vehicle in the midst of the other ones, that it felt like it was appropriate and that it fit in. So referencing proportions, transitions, and also overall styling.

With Sea-Doo, it's a little more complicated. The hull is a necessity. And you take the hull away when you do vehicular. So what things are going to be consistent? What things need to change?

They definitely have a very solid, very sporty design language. And they define it as being dynamic, energetic, and durable. And we want to keep these things, even though some of those visual surfaces are rather complicated. They even got to the point of thinking more about, yes, the form, but also the color material finish.

And then we get into the sketches. And we're doing good. They're giving feedback. They're thinking the elements are working according to the brand. Elements are not working according to the brand. And so I like their ability to be decision makers, but I'm not really happy with the sketches. Not enough information is being conveyed.

This is also referencing a former professor of mine said, there's nothing wrong with drawing something ugly as long as you know it's ugly. So how do we take something that is not as attractive and change it into a way that we can make intelligent design decisions and move forwards?

All right, we're going to dip into some AI development. So we chose Vizcom. And my concern was I wanted the students to drive the tool instead of the tool leading them in a direction that they don't understand. So we plugged in both our sketches and influential imagery, and we pump out really beautiful side views.

And so I'm enjoying these. We're able to have discussions about them. Are they appropriate to the brand? And the students really just like it turned into a game. They're playing with this and really getting into the idea of exploring what it could be with all these different options.

This is what I'm most impressed about. Of all the options, they said, you know what, there's no one of these concepts that works from top to bottom. We like this slice. We like this slice. We like this slice.

What can we do? You could be a designer. Take these. Put them into Photoshop. Blend the alignment.

And so we were kitbashing. Very much a three dimensional approach applied to a digital media. And then we took this stitched frankensteined conceptual car. And then letting Vizcom work some of those transitions back into one. So I really impressed with the students leveraging the tool to fit their needs than the other way around. And I'm pretty happy with the visual outcomes.

Now, I do want to say this. When you're talking about AI, it doesn't have the intuition. It doesn't understand human intent. And so sometimes a straight line on a sketch can lead to a really cool spoiler. And that didn't happen-- yet.

Sometimes that straight line without intent or purpose can turn into a crease that defies physics. And that one is painful. And you have to figure that out on the backend. Both of these things can happen.

So I'm not saying that AI will take over this type of development. It's just something you have. It's a tool. Can you use the tool, and can you have control over the tool to get the outcomes you desire?

So we get the beautiful side views, but Vizcom does not understand three dimensionality. At least it doesn't understand it to a level that we need it to yet. So happy mistakes turn into a little bit less happy. If it doesn't understand our approach, the straight lines and the smudges turn into things we don't want them to. And we have a beautiful side view. We know which direction we want to go in, but we can't make that front view, top view, back view meeting the way that feels appropriate.

So we have intent. We've got good ideas. We just need to start conveying that to AI in a way. And so it felt like we were starting the project all over again.

So we go back to the sketching. Does this match? We're going back and forth, like, all right, these are getting closer. Can we cook them in a similar way? Out of all these iterations, which one feels most appropriate? And can we align that in a way that it feels like a similar paint job? It feels like it's done by one person, one designer.

And so our front, back, top views were really more challenging because the very beginning, we were open to many ideas. But when we start narrowing it down our focus, and we have a certain design aspect we're trying to achieve, trying to communicate that and build that into a prompt becomes more time consuming. Eventually, we got to the point where we had good top, front, right side views, but our dependency on Vizcom made it a bit more challenging in the state.

All right, so we've got basically finished drawings. We're going to pull those back into our graduates for them to put them together and make a three dimensional model, right? Easy. We got this.

Well, these vehicles are slightly more complex than the Fiat 500. And that complexity is going to take time. And it's going to slow down the process because we need to learn things we didn't learn previously.

Also, the different views aren't 100% reconciled. And so the grads have to make judgment. There's back and forth. There's emails. There's conversation. But sometimes a faint line turns into a body line or a highlight or a crease, which is geometrically impossible. And that would be a next theme for the next-- or a pungent theme for the next three to four weeks.

We're also asking the partner like, well, how do you think this transition should work? How should we model it? What would you do in this situation? And in turned into a process of making and remaking and making and remaking, which is not too different.

Man, once again, partner saves the day. We email him the files. And he honestly has a cook on it. If he's going to give it a good effort, he can go do this. It's more like he understands that there's multiple routes you can take. There's preferential ones and successful ones. And so he's talking through his approaches on how he would deal with that form transition.

And like, I love this commentary because I can't offer that to the students, not at this point. And I feel like I'm on internship. I'm learning CAD from someone who's done it for so many years. And I don't have to be the person who's barely grasping at tutorials.

And so this is what academia needs. Check my ego at the door and be teachable. Where it's more work, yes, but everyone from the students, everybody walking by to myself, I can see that this partnership is producing outputs that are beyond any previous computer modeling class. And so this is just it's amazing. And I'm loving it.

Had to tell you the story about Brad's commitment is he's two hours-- he's on San Diego time. And so I'm going to meet a buddy at 5:15 at Waffle House. And I'll pull up my phone while I'm waiting for him to arrive. And Brad just sent me an email.

He has been working on this file for a while. And here's some video. Here's some approach. And I really admired and was very thankful for his dedication to give consistent but like thorough, holistic feedback to my students. I'm just super impressed.

So as we're getting close to finishing the 3D models, we go into brute force mode. It's like I don't know how this little transition is going to work. And so we're going to go in. We're going to redraw a curve. We're going to make it more simple, build it. How do be more simple? Rebuild it. Lots of snapping, lots of adjustments, lots of smoothing, but that's part of the process.

And then we get into time to render. And this time was a lot more wise. I found a very reputable, very deep resource of VRED tutorials. I think our favorite part of the program or that offering was the material editing. Just candy paint, looked beautiful, loved it. The backgrounds, making sure the perspective and the lighting work together was a bit more challenging. I really enjoyed this lighting video from the VRED tutorial or VRED Pro. Adjusting and building out your HD-RI light environments.

And really, this became like a back and forth. We get into the rendering environment. We'd get to a photogenic aspect of the car, and then we go, oh, this doesn't work. And you got to make a judgment call. Do we like just mend this little area in Photoshop, which we can do? We're not going to push this out to class A modeling. We're not going to put this on a 3D printer quite yet.

We could be completely finished with Alias portion. We should be completely finished, but we need to go back and re-tweak those surfaces and make sure that form transition's more beautiful. I should have played this more in towards the planning of my curriculum. Once again, you don't know what you know until you need to know it.

Also, it's understanding the intersections is this back and forth and understanding that some things that can be made in AI or can be done visually, it's going to be a lot more challenging to translate into a three dimensional model. So this is more of a learning curve that I need to get better at. That way, I can set my students up for success.

We do another round of tutorials with Brad from Nissan. And this is where we're pitching. Yes, completed vehicles, but also how do you stage them? How do you be emotional? How do you make them the most photogenic? And so he's giving us feedback on opportunities for improvement.

And I do want to say, it's challenging to compete with the Vizcom images. These were so easy in comparison. We just put in prompts, and it outputs the vehicle.

But I can tell you, we do not totally comprehend this vehicle. It looks good. But when you get into modeling, you start thinking about every square inch of that vehicle. So is the quickness good? It's fun. But once you sit down and you really study, the form transitions for hours, you get a better feel of what's appropriate with the concept and how it develops.

Towards the end of the project or toward the end of semester, there's just challenging priorities. I have students who are trying to put as much time on the CAD aspect because they need to go rework a surface or get the CVs to lay flat. They're trying to go back and render, but they're also trying to graduate. And so they're working on their thesis and getting that approved by their committee. And so we have multiple tension points pulling at different directions.

And towards the very end, I always do this with any rendering software is that we're going to finish it in Photoshop just to make sure we are dotting on the I's and crossing on the T's. So this is really a new procedure. I ask students to introduce the idea of lighting, and that might have worked for better or for worse. It does add an element of liveliness to the vehicles and potentially motion. But does it take away from the surfaces and the transitions that we worked really hard to develop?

So looking at these, I'm very pleased with the outcomes. I definitely see opportunities for improvement. But to go from no sub-D, no hybrid modeling to these vehicles. This one is the Dyson. This one is the Sea-Doo, the one where the back and the importance of doing windshields in the very beginning is of paramount importance.

And then we have our PlayStation. I really do appreciate the button pad integration and the subtle details they dropped into this concept. Triangle button. And also, Montblanc, making something that looks kind of mean, but also sumptuous.

And time's up. There's opportunities that I wish I'd gone back. I needed I feel like at least another week and a half, part of that losing it to not having the software at the time. Another one from maybe not the best tutorials. And then another aspect of the back and forth. A lot of that rests on me.

And other ones, like you just got to prepare for the students that as they get closer to graduation, they're going to start-- their minds are going to go that direction as well. So making sure that they are continually invested into the project. I mean, I'm incredibly impressed with the amount of effort of my students. They did more in this semester to take on a new software and develop it out than any before. So much of that's due to incredible guidance from our partner.

And I feel like working with him and getting to just sit under him put me years ahead of if I had to do this all by myself. So are we going to do it again next year? Absolutely I felt like I've taken up bumps and bruises. I want to keep on developing this out and see where it can go. So that's what I got. Thanks a bunch.