Smart Proposal for The Foundry: Deep Image Visualisation for Industrial Design (DIVIDE)

DIVIDE is an eighteen-month project to develop new ways of creating extremely realistic
visualisations of digital designs from CAD model input, with appearances that can be changed
simply, intuitively and with real-time interaction. It will do this by applying novel imageprocessing
techniques emerging from the digital media visual effects (VFX) industry to
visualisation for product and interior design.
Designers, manufacturers, marketing departments and advertisers all want to see how a design
looks with different colours, materials or lighting. They need high quality visualisations that
provide realistic lighting, colour and surface appearances. All CAD packages contain
renderers, but the processes of photorealistic lighting and rendering are slow and complex.
The VFX industry has developed ways of combining 3D CGI and 2D image processing to
create photo-realistic ‘Deep Images.’ DIVIDE will extend the concept to make it possible to
change appearances interactively and simply in the 2D image space, while still conforming to
the underlying 3D model. This will provide photo-realistic views that can be changed instantly
by simple slider controls. The result will be better visualisation, faster and at a lower cost,
with a significant increase in the efficiency and reduced time to market.
The project will result in a shrink-wrapped visualisation software package, together with a
Cloud-based data storage and rendering service, and web-based ‘configurator’ that will allow
collaborators to view, discuss and interactively alter lighting, materials, colours and surfaces
in real-time without having to rebuild or re-render the model. The Foundry will exploit the
results by direct software sales, subscription income from Render as a Service (RaaS) and
technology licensing to OEM. The Foundry is a world-leading provider of VFX software and
is entering the design visualisation market following its 2012 merger with Luxology.