TUTORIAL: How to use ultra realistic Quixel Mixer materials with Fusion 360 [Part 2]

Welcome back! In Part 2, we’ll explore adding Quixel Materials to your designs in Fusion 360 and setting up a rendering scene. If you haven’t already, review Part 1 and install Quixel Mixer. You’ll want to create and export a mix for use in Fusion 360 prior to the steps in this tutorial, or download an example material set here.

First, let’s create a new project in Fusion 360:

1. Creating a new Fusion 360 Project

After you open Fusion 360, Click “Save” and give your project a name. In this example I used “QuixelMaterialDemo.”

After you save your project, we’ll want to create a new component and make it active.

2. Create a new Component

This is generally a good practice with Fusion 360, because we can more easily manage changes made to the design when the timeline is broken up by individual component histories. Name your component “Floor” and then make sure “Activate” is selected (should be by default), click “OK” to continue.

Next, we’ll want to create a sketch to define the floor’s dimensions. Click “Create” and make a Center Rectangle on the bottom plane.

3. Create a Floor

Make your sketch 3 meters x 3 meters in size, with the Origin at the center. Click “Finish Sketch” to continue. If you’ve done everything right, then you should have a sketch that is fully constrained (i.e., you’ll see black lines instead of blue lines for the outer dimensions of your sketch).

Next, we’ll extrude the sketch below the plain. This will create a new body, based on our sketch dimensions.

Click Create and then Extrude. Then, extrude the sketch -1mm below the plane and click “OK.”

Next, Save the design. You’ve created your first body and now would be a good time to save your progress.

Note the reason for your save and Click “OK.”

Next, we’ll want to change the Appearance of our floor. Click Modify Appearance to bring up the Appearance Window.

4. Add material

Here we can see the default material for the Floor body. We’ll want to replace that material with our Quixel Mix. To do that, let’s start by downloading a similar material.

Note: in general, you’ll find it is easier to add Quixel Mixer materials when you adapt an existing material in Fusion 360 with similar attributes. In this case, we can use the existing Asphalt Material.

After the download finishes, click and drag the Asphalt material into your design.

We can then replace the default material with the Asphalt.

5. Replace Fusion 360 Material with Quixel Mix

Next, we can begin modifying the Fusion 360 Asphalt material with the Quixel Mix.

As mentioned in Part I, the materials in Fusion 360 are made up of individual map image files:

Albedo/Diffusion/Color — the color a material reflects

Normal and/or Height Maps — the bumps and imperfections along a surface

Roughness — the smoothness of a surface (ranging from a sharp reflection to fuzzy/diffuse)

Reflectance/Specular/Metalness — the reflectiveness of a surface (ranging from mirror finish to a dull surface)

Anisotropy/Ambient Occlusion — the shadows along a surface

Refractive —how light bends through a surface

Emissive — how much light a surface emits (glow)

Translucency/Opacity — how transparent a surface is to light

If you’re using the included sample images, you’ll find some but not all of these maps. Depending on what materials you’re mixing, you’ll need different image maps. The sample image package includes:

Floor_Diffuse.png — Color (placed in Parameters)

Floor_Roughness.png — Roughness (placed in Parameters)

Floor_Specular.png — Reflectance (placed in Parameters)

Floor_Normal.png — Normal (placed in Relief Pattern (Bump))

Floor_AO.png — Anisotropy (placed in Advanced Highlight Controls)

By replacing and adding these map files to the Fusion 360 Asphalt material, you can transform it to the Quixel mix. To start this replacement process, open the Appearance window, double-click the Asphalt material and then click “Advanced…”

Rename the material to “Quixel_Asphalt” to distinguish the material from the original Fusion 360 Asphalt.

Under Parameters, we can add three (3) image maps. First, we’ll apply the diffusion/color map to the Image input in Fusion 360. Click on the Image filename 1_mats_surface_asphalt_color.jpg and navigate to your replacement images.

Select your Albedo/Color/Diffuse map file. If you’re using the sample images, it’s the file named Floor_Diffuse.png. Click Open to replace the default image file.

Next, we’ll repeat the process with the Reflectance and Roughness maps. By default, these two material attributes are set as Slider values, click the drop down arrow and then select Image to replace the slider value with an image map.

Next, select the Metallic/Specular image map if you’re using the sample images, select Floor_Specular.png and click Open.

Next, repeat the same steps for the Roughness value. Select Image and then select your Roughness Map. If you’re using the sample images, select the Floor_Roughness.png.

Now that we’ve completed the three Parameter maps, we can move on to the Relief Pattern (Bump) map. Once again, we’ll replace the default image file (1_mats_surface_asphalt_.jpg) associated with the material. Note: Fusion 360 supports both bump and normal maps. If you want to know more about these two approaches to texturing a 3D model, then click here.

Next, we need to change the Relief Pattern from a Height Map to a Normal Map. To do this, we need to Edit the image.

Next, scroll down to Advanced and change Data Type to Normal Map.

Next, we need to ensure that all of our maps are using the same Sample Size. Be sure to repeat this step for all image maps. We also need to ensure that all of our Maps have Linked texture transforms. Check the Link texture transforms under the Transforms section of the Texture Editor. Be sure to repeat this step for all image maps.

These steps are important, because they ensure that all of the image map data are aligned equally to the material in Fusion 360. After you’ve verified these settings, you can click “OK” to finalize the changes to this material.

Now that the material has been updated you can Close the Appearances window.

To check and validate our new material, we need to switch to the Render Workspace in Fusion 360. Click on the Workspace button, and change it from DESIGN to RENDER.

6. Test render scene

Next, let’s save the design to capture the new material settings in your Fusion 360 Timeline. Click File and Save.

Fusion 360 will prompt you to describe your save point. Let’s name this save “Quixel Material Added” and click OK.

Before we can test our new material, we need to edit the SCENE SETTINGS from the SETUP Menu. Open the SCENE SETTING Window and Click+Drag “Dry lake bed” to the Current Environment and then Click Close.

We also need to change the IN-CANVAS RENDER settings to FAST, so that we can easily see the material’s performance during rendering. To do this, click on the IN-CANVAS RENDER SETTINGS icon and Click on the Fast tab. Then, Click OK to update the rendering method.

Next, we can preview the rendering, and see how the various maps work together under different lighting conditions. To do this, start the In-Canvas Rendering and then open Scene Settings, click on the Position Icon to bring up the Rotation and Scale Sliders. By changing the rotation, you can see how the surface of your floor object casts shadows at different angles, corresponding to the surface material.

Make sure to save your project to retain your rendering settings. If you’ve made it this far, then congratulations! You now have all of the information necessary to import Quixel Mixer materials in Fusion 360. In Part 3, we’ll explore some techniques for applying these materials to complex geometries, and how to post-process your images for additional realness. In Part 4, we’ll take these realistic models and generate Augmented Reality experiences for iOS.

Stay tuned!

TUTORIAL: How to use ultra realistic Quixel Mixer materials with Fusion 360 [Part 1]

Picatinny Rail set with US quarter dollar coin for scale, Quixel PBR materials rendered with Fusion 360

Want to bring your Fusion 360 designs to life? Then let’s take a look at a wonderful alternative to Autodesk’s built-in materials library. First, what does Fusion 360’s material library look like?

ANATOMY OF FUSION 360 PBR MATERIALS

Before we can explore alternatives to Fusion 360’s included materials, we need to understand what elements these materials are made from. PBR (Physically Based Rendering) materials are built from multiple images:

Albedo/Diffusion/Color — the color a material reflects

Normal and/or Height Maps — the bumps and imperfections along a surface

Roughness — the smoothness of a surface (ranging from a sharp reflection to fuzzy/diffuse)

Reflectance/Specular/Metalness — the reflectiveness of a surface (ranging from mirror finish to a dull surface)

Anisotropy/Ambient Occlusion — the shadows along a surface

Refractive —how light bends through a surface

Emissive — how much light a surface emits (glow)

Translucency/Opacity — how transparent a surface is to light

We can access these different elements through the Appearance window in Fusion:

Preview image for Part 2 of this tutorial, where we’ll go over importing materials to Fusion 360.

Fusion allows you to modify existing materials through two primary mechanisms: Sliders and Images.

Elements of material can be controlled with Slider values or Images (i.e., material maps)

Sliders apply a value to the entire surface, whereas images allow for a per-pixel value (maps). Quixel Mixer generates images for their materials, and this is what allows us to apply a Quixel material to a Fusion 360 model.

1. INSTALLING QUIXEL MIXER

Quixel Mixer is a free to use materials tool for use with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. Technically, their EULA limits using their materials for Unreal Engine only. However, there’s no reason why you could not import models from Fusion to Unreal (as an Autodesk .FBX file export), so it’s valid (in my opinion, and I’m not a lawyer) to preview materials in Fusion’s rendering engine prior to exporting to Unreal. Let’s install Quixel Mixer!

Go to quixel.com

Next, scroll down to “Download.”

After the download finishes, open the installer.

Click next, and you’ll see an option to install various material packs. Just like with Fusion 360’s material library, you can always install additional materials as needed. Click next to continue with the basic “Sample Mixes” pack.

Leave the default directory names suggested and click next until you reach the download screen. Depending on your internet connection and disk read/write speed, this will take quite some time. Get yourself a coffee or a beer, maybe take a walk if you’ve opted to download the rest of the material packs.

After the download finishes, Launch Quixel Mixer!

You’ll be presented with some sample mixes, feel free to explore these, and when you’re ready to proceed, let’s make your first mix.

2. CREATING A NEW QUIXEL MIX

Create a new project.

Create a new mix.

Click “All Types” and then select “Surface” from the drop-down menu.

For this tutorial, I’m downloading the “Damaged Asphalt” material. Feel free to select something else if that material doesn’t inspire you.

After downloading the material, you’ll see a green checkmark next to it.

Click and drag the material to add it to your mix.

In the viewport, you can view this material as a preview.

There is a reason why this tool is called Quixel Mixer — it allows you to quickly and easily mix several PBRs into a new material. Let’s add another asphalt layer to this mix.

Once again, select a new material (e.g, “Cracked Asphalt”) and download it.

After the download finishes, and you see the confirmed green checkmark, simply drag the new material into your Layers column.

This will add the new material to the existing mix.

Try playing with the sliders on the right. You’ll see the changes to the material mix in realtime in the Viewport.

Once you’ve created your desired appearance, you’re ready to export it.

3. EXPORTING QUIXEL MIXER MATERIAL MAPS

Select “Open folder after export” and then deselect “Gloss” and “Displacement” (we won’t be using these elements with Fusion 360), then select 4096 px from the dropdown menu (to export a 4k resolution mix), and finally — EXPORT TO DISK.

After the export finishes, you’ll see a window (Finder on macOS, Explorer on Windows) with your material maps. Notice that the file sizes are huge. That’s because these are high quality PNG files with an alpha layer. We’ll need to optimize these before bringing them into Fusion 360.

4. OPTIMIZING MATERIAL MAPS FOR USE IN FUSION 360

(optional, but recommended)

We can do this with Photoshop. Make a new folder for your optimized material files.

Open the material map images and create a new Action (open the “Actions” window and click the “+” sign) and name it something like “Fusion Material Export” and then click “Record” to begin capturing your actions.

From the “Image” menu, click “Mode” and select “Indexed Color.” Set the color convert to “Local Perceptual” and set the color limit to 64. Click OK, and then go to “File” and “Close.” Select “Smallest File Size” and Click OK.

Stop the Recording by clicking the Stop icon (a gray square).

For the next image, we can now repeat the action by clicking play.

As you can see, we shrunk the file over 3x smaller and with virtually no loss to quality. Not bad!

If you want to shrink further, we can also easily export lower resolution images. In this example, I selected 1024x1024 (1K resolution), and reduce the color count to 8-bit (256 color limit). This is a good option, especially if you want to create Augmented Reality versions of your design.

As you can see, the low resolution exports shrink down to less than 3MB. You’ll lose some image quality, but the file size is reduced by over 97%.

In Part 2 of this tutorial, we’ll go over how to bring these materials into Fusion 360.

Week 3 and 4 Update: 3D content migration woes

This update is coming in late, as I’ve been trying to come up with some way to explain the difficulties I’m facing with this project, while also respecting the privacy and IP. I’m leaning heavy on metaphor, but…

Imagine there are three people sitting at a bar. One of them speaks Dutch, English, and German (but only okay German, not great). Another speaks Spanish, some English (okay-ish grammar, few nouns), and fluent German. The last person at the table is a little bit unusual. They’re a rapper from Japan, they speak fluent Japanese and a little English. As a child they were an exchange student in Germany, but they’ve forgotten most of what they learned. The rapper also insists on speaking-as-quickly-as-their-mouth-can-run. They never slow down. Speed is everything.

They all have some overlap, however imperfect, in their spoken languages, but none can understand each other perfectly. This is what it feels like to develop assets for a still-in-beta realtime engine, while leveraging a parametric modeler, an open source 3D creator tool, and adhering to standards from a professional VFX and CGI-specific 3D tool.

This week my primary focus has been on getting Blender and Unreal Engine to talk to each other. Unreal prefers FBX file format (Autodesk Maya Native). Blender can export most data in this format, but there are a few catches:

• No shape keys

• Subdivision data is limited to a single iteration

• Dynamic animation can only be exported with baked physics, and is limited to vertices and face transformations (kind of, depending on what you’re doing).

Additionally, Unreal doesn’t quite understand Blender’s material system. It will still export textures and UV map data, but you’ll need to build the material blueprint to recreate whatever you have in Blender. It is far from being a 1:1 exchange.

There are also a many weird quirks:

In Blender, the default units are meters. In Unreal, the default unit is centimeters. Before exporting from Blender, you need to set Unit Scale to 0.01. If you switch units in Blender to centimeters and leave the Unit Scale at the default of 1.0, then you’ll experience strange anomalies for things like collider bodies, skeleton mesh, etc..

In naming the rigging elements (IK skeletons, etc.), you DO NOT name any bones “root,” because Unreal will assume a hierarchy which may differ from your hierarchy (parenting) in Blender. However, you may rename the Armature container to “root” to conform to Unreal’s hierarchy.

Lastly, the only rigging data that reliably translates between Blender and Unreal Engine are deform bones and baked animations/transformations.

I’ve reached a stumbling block with my current 3D character. I can rig the character to animate, and even output that data in a manner which Unreal Engine can interpret. This comes at the expense of a vital visual element that was procedurally generated. What comes next is a difficult choice:

I can either integrate procedurally generated elements into a single mesh geometry (potentially compromising some rendering performance and visual fidelity) but without having to rework existing animation and rigging, or I can attempt to recreate the procedural mesh instancing I developed inside Blender but natively within Unreal. The former will be labor intensive, but I understand the tools well enough to work consistently toward a known output. The latter involves many unknowns, but I will also gain a deeper understanding of workflows within Unreal Engine. I’m attracted to this latter option, but I don’t know if it is best for the client and their expectations.

Week 2 mini-update: outputting video from Unreal Engine 5

Usually, I only update my blog on Sunday nights — I like to reflect after the week is done and I’ve had a full dose of daylight to consider what matters.

I’m breaking that rule because I’ve learned something that I think might be useful to others. Last week, Epic Games released a preview of Unreal Engine 5. If you haven’t looked at this tech, it’s worth your attention. We’re rapidly approaching a point where individual creatives (equipped with modern hardware) will be capable of producing photorealistic graphics in realtime. This is due to a convergence of procedurally-generated content, open libraries providing physically based materials, templates, and raytracing technology.

I’m a huge advocate for 3D technology. Being able to show something instead of telling it is huge. Consider all of the times in your life that you had an idea, something that you could clearly, vividly see inside your mind, but you felt was difficult or impossible to describe? What if you had the tools to quickly take your idea and represent it visually, with no limits to fidelity or realism? These tools exist, and they are getting better every day. Additionally, many of these tools are free and have a wealth of community-led learning and support.

Today I was asked to come up with a way to capture video from unreal, and I discovered a great way to do it in Unreal 5 Engine. Here’s how!

Geigertron’s Very Practical Guide to Exporting Video From Unreal Engine 5

For this example, I’m using a sample project based on MetaHuman Creator, you can download UE5 preview, it’s all free!

1) After opening the sample project, click on the clapperboard icon (“Cinematics”).

2) In this example, there’s already a sequence (MetaHumanSample_Sequence), so we’ll select that. To learn more about creating a cinematic sequence, click here.

3) Within the sequencer window, there is another clapperboard icon on the top row menu. Click this to open the “Render Movie Settings” window.

4) From the Render Movie Settings window, you can select, output format for image and audio, resolution, compression, and output file location. After setting up, click the “Capture Movie” button on the lower right and wait for UE5 to finish rendering and saving your output file.

This operation completed in near realtime and the output is pristine. If your scene contains audio, then you’ll need to merge/combine it with the video output. I did this in After Effects, but other programs would probably work equally well.

Week 1: Summer internship

This week I kicked off an internship with Astrea Media. We began with a general meeting via zoom, with each intern and staff member introducing themselves. I’ll be generating some 3D content for an exciting new project and so far the work is going well. This is not my first experience working with a realtime engine. I’ve done some work in Unity, but never to a polished degree. Our team is working with similar technologies, and I’m eager to learn more about this process.

This week I began optimizations for an existing 3D model. I discovered several hindrances to efficient rendering: absurdly high poly-count, textures in needlessly large image format, non-solid mesh geometry, etc. Rather attempting to rework this model, I instead decided to explore a new design. Due to the organic shapes for this asset, I decided to use Fusion 360’s Sculpt workspace. The sculpt workspace enables designers to create complex shapes with smooth surfaces (e.g., car bodies). There are a few trade-offs to this approach:

• Non-parametric design

  • Sculpt bodies are based on t-splines (I’ll say more about this later), and do not offer design history/timeline functions

• Symmetry functions

• Rapid mesh generation

• Efficient generation organic shapes

• T-splines

  • 3D modeling is achieved through a variety of mathematical models for defining shapes. T-splines allow for the creation of freeform surfaces that are defined by a matrix of control points. While meshes tend to be defined by triangles, t-splines work best when all faces are defined by 4 vertices (T-shapes and rectangles).

This last point is important.

This sphere seems like a perfectly logical shape. Indeed, if you click “FINISH FORM” in the upper right corner, Fusion will compute this body and create a solid. Seems simple, right? There’s just one problem: the top of that sphere contains faces with only 3 vertices. As mentioned earlier, t-splines work best when faces are made of 4 vertices. The sphere computes just fine, but as soon as you begin to manipulate this shape, there’s a very good chance that all of those converging 3-point faces at the top and bottom will begin overlapping each other. For example, see what happens when I attempt to apply symmetry to this shape:

Instead of maintaining the converging vertices, the solver calculated something like the iris on a camera.

To avoid problems like this, there’s another option: quadballs.

As you can see, this sphere doesn’t have the same aggressive converging vertices as the other model. The advantage here is that each face can also be split diagonally, efficiently creating triangle mesh faces with minimal distortion.

When exporting this geometry for use in a realtime engine, the mesh conversion produces a high-fidelity representation of the t-spline body, preserving shape details.

Kinetic-friendly spoon project Mega Post

That’s a wrap! It’s certainly been an interesting semester, but now I am ready to put it behind me. Reflecting on the spoon project, I have some final thoughts and observations. First, I want to thank the fine folks at CMU School of Design. From the amazing and hardworking faculty and graduate student cohort, I have had nothing less than inspiration and encouragement throughout this entire process, despite the obvious challenges of working remotely.

Rendering of sixth and final (?) spoon design. I pulled the kitchen design (Pierre Gilles) and bowl (Damogran Labs) from GrabCad.com. The spoon and coffee mug are mine.

This project was divided into two parts: the first part focused on exploring different ways of prototyping and making. This was described to me as an informal way of A/B Testing for methods. The second part involved the deliberate iteration of prototypes through user testing — a challenge in the context of a global pandemic and social distancing. To make the most meaningful design choices possible given limited resources, I decided to leverage the power of physical simulation to supplement the making of physical prototypes.

There are a variety of 3D software tools that offer some degree of physical simulation. For this project, I selected Maxon Cinema 4D R20 (Educational License) and Blender as my two ways of making. I chose these because I already am familiar with Cinema 4D and understand know how to manage a workflow in that context, because Blender is open source and free for anyone to use, and both programs work under MacOS and Windows environments (my rendering workstation is a Hackintosh with multiple operating systems, which grants the flexibility to overcome certain technical limitations). My initial experiments with Cinema 4D were… not great.

My very first (and failed) attempt to simulate fluids in Cinema 4D. Carnegie Mellon University School of Design Prototyping for Interaction Spring 2020

As you can see, there are “physics” happening here, but they are not anything close to the physics of the real world. This is not “real world” physics, this is Asshole Physics:

Zachary "Spokker Jones" Gutierrez and I came up with the term "Asshole Physics" when we were discussing the game and the physics models it employed. Basically there's a lot of crap you can knock over and kick around, including dead bodies, buckets, cans, and little sections of drywall which are standing around in the middle of rooms for no obvious reason. Zachary casually mentioned, "I have made it a point to knock over every fucking thing in that game. I am living out my fantasies of being a giant asshole," and I responded by stealing his "asshole" comment and claiming that I made it up. Thus "Asshole Physics" was born.

Without more sophisticated plugins to simulate fluid, Cinema 4D R20 is only “out of the box” capable of non-newtonian semisolids. I can make stuff bump around and “squish.” I can have a 3D character micturating on the side of a building. I can create the appearance and illusion of something like a fluid, but with such restrictions, I could not realistically evaluate my spoon designs. I explored my options and found that Next Limit’s RealFlow plugin would meet my basic needs. Best of all, they offer a free 30-day trial! My initial excitement quickly waned after the plugin failed to install and activate on my system…

(This email chain is long and covers a week of back and forth with customer service. I am including the entire conversation as a way to recreate my experience. While this may not directly relate to the scope of this project, I still believe that there is value in documenting the unexpected problems that crop up when trying to do something new.)

It took a week to finally get everything sorted with the demo. During that time, I began to explore option B: Blender.

Blender is a free, powerful, open source 3D creation tool. Best of all, it includes the mantaflow fluid simulation engine (since version 2.8). I have worked with Cinema 4D on other projects, and have become fairly comfortable with the interface. Given my experience with Fusion 360, Inventor, and C4D, I knew that I would need to overcome a learning curve before I could use this software to meet my needs for this project. Fortunately, I was able to find a spectacular tutorial series for beginners.

If you want to read more about my experience with the tutorial, click here.

This tutorial was ideal because it involved exercises that helped me learn how to use the interface, and covered several different workflows. I was really impressed with Blender’s node-based material system and procedural textures. You can work strictly with parametric modeling, or you can discretely modify mesh geometry to create highly organic and imperfect forms. I’m excited to work with Blender on future projects. It’s a very exciting time to be working in 3D.

While working through these tutorials, I began sketching and working in Fusion 360 to craft my first spoon designs for part 2 of this project. You can read more about this experience here.

Takeaways from Part 1

I really appreciated the responsiveness from the team at Next Limit. Clearly there are problems with the software’s implementation of their product’s copy protection. This is an all-too-common problem in the world of software. Programmers gotta eat just like everybody else, and we certainly should make sure that the talented and hardworking folks behind the code are able to put food on their table at the end of the day. Piracy can deprive a small business of the necessary revenue to keep the lights on, so I am absolutely sympathetic to this reality and what risks are involved when you release your software for demo purposes. Getting people to pay for something that they can easily get for free is a challenging proposition. At the same time, you cannot realistically expect to get customers to pay for software if they cannot try it first. Ultimately, this one week of back and forth with customer support was a critical loss. I never completed a side-by-side comparison of fluid simulations. While I did eventually succeed at installing and using RealFlow to do fluid simulations, (and was honestly impressed with how easy it was) I did not, however, have enough time to setup a comparable simulation to evaluate spoon designs. My trial expired about a week ago, and I see this aspect of the project as a lost opportunity. If Next Limit applied similar licensing practices as Maxon (verify it through .edu email address), they could offer an educational package of their RealFlow plugin.

Blender really came through for me. The learning curve was aggressive, but not impossible. While I found mantaflow to be a respectable and entirely capable fluid simulator, it was not without its own share of issues. I spent a lot of time making granular tweaks to improve the fidelity of my simulations, while also using the observations from my simulations to inform design decisions for my spoons in part 2 of this project.

Part 2: Design Iterations Based on User Testing

While this project required user testing and design iterations based on feedback, I decided to limit the user evaluations to address handle shape and the spoon’s overall dimensions. This was not an arbitrary decision or an excuse to focus on physical simulation of fluid dynamics (with user testing as an aside). No, this decision was based on the nature of the course from which it was assigned: Prototyping for Interaction Design. This semester I have have been focusing on designing for interaction (arguably, all designers do, at some point in their process, focus on this aspect). When thinking about the tools we use (to eat food) as a system, it is important to consider the touchpoints involved. The handle of a spoon is a non-trivial component. It can take on many forms, and naturally includes affordances. How someone holds a spoon, and how easy it is for them to use it are central to the evaluation of the design.

The iterations of design were highly generative in nature, inspired by both user evaluations and physical simulations, I maintained a homeomorphic continuity: treating the initial shape as an elastic form to be molded and reshaped to maximize performance. Knowing how a concave shape might be optimized to perform under rapid movement — I wanted to create something that would be useful, and the physical simulation of fluids facilitated a means of evaluation — is only one aspect of a more complicated interaction, and this test alone could not fully address human needs. When physical form is designed and directed to improve user interaction (and physical properties are given equal consideration), it is possible to create a truly useful tool. I realize that this is a very technical description, but it is easier to understand when properly visualized. I have rendered a compilation sequence to show how this spoon shape evolved to its final(?) form (I am still considering a physical prototyping stage for this project over the summer).

A sequence of fluid dynamics tests designed to evaluate fluid retention of concave forms. Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design, Prototyping for Interaction, Spring 2020.

Toward the latter half of this sequence, you will notice a change in colors (for both the liquids and spoons). I decided to differentiate the final rendering sequences as these were based on user evaluations. The colors chose for these final sequences are based on the color tags used for the user test:

These printouts are derived from DXF vector images exported from Fusion 360. The designs shown are oldest (top) to newest (bottom). The fifth design (blue) is rendered with a blue body and green liquid.

I printed and mailed the paper prototype to a potential user suffering from ongoing hand tremors (my partner’s mother). I sent this without written instructions. Instead, I only provided different color tags to facilitate feedback. My user let me know that the red spoon handle was in the “Goldilocks” zone in terms of size and shape: not too big, not too small, not too curvy, not too straight. Using this feedback I constructed the sixth and final (?) form — see the first image of this post.

The user test included a direct side-by-side comparison with existing dinnerware.

Before developing these simplified paper prototypes, I also experimented with ways of making more three-dimensional forms that could be sent in the mail. While this novel approach showed some potential, I was concerned with how user error might complicate or (even worse) bias feedback. Still, these paper prototypes helped me to better understand and interpret the scale of my 3D models.

Final Thoughts

This project still feels somewhat incomplete. Perhaps this is because the generative design process itself can always demand further iteration, or maybe it is because I have not yet created a physical prototype that can actually be tested as an eating instrument. Maybe it is only because there were still a few “rogue droplets” (grrrrrr) that I simply could not keep contained with the completion of my sixth iteration. Whatever the net effect might be from these various shortcomings, I am pleased with the learning opportunities that were presented throughout this exploration of design.

Were I to continue with this process, the next steps would be to 3D print the latest shape using a food-safe material (there are a few third-party vendors that offer this service). I would then ship that latest design for further user evaluation. I believe that there are still many additional iterations necessary before I could defend having created something that satisfies the criteria I set out with this project (i.e., a spoon that overcomes the challenges of involuntary muscle movements and essential tremors).

If I were to collaborate with others, I would also want to evaluate the ecological and economic impact of such a device. How might we go about manufacturing to appropriate scale? How might additional user tests with a wider audience influence the existing form? There remains many unanswered questions and a newfound respect for the power of generative design.

Bugs in the Blender

I have continued to have luck exploring the Fluid simulations in Blender, but this process has not been without its quirks. I recently encountered a strange issue related to Particle Radius settings

Particle Radius

The radius of one liquid particle in grid cells units. This value describes how much area is covered by a particle and thus determines how much area around it can be considered as liquid. A greater radius will let particles cover more area. This will result in more grids cell being tagged as liquid instead of just being empty.

Whenever the simulation appears to leak or gain volume in an undesired, non physically accurate way it is a good idea to adjust this value. That is, when liquid seems to disappear this value needs to be increased. The inverse applies when too much liquid is being produced.

What does this look like in practice? My most recent simulation actually seems to produce fluid as the scene progresses.

Nevertheless, I was able to gain critical insights into this form and will continue to iterate new designs. This is being done in conjunction with paper prototyping. These forms are less sophisticated, but still provide valuable information about how users will experience and interact with this flatware.

Spoonfuls of updates

This week was packed full of progress on multiple projects. I received feedback for my group’s birth control information app “MyGallery.” Our work was even featured on CMU’s Design page.

Crafting an iconographic representation for the withdrawal method was my proudest moment.

I’ve continued to explore fluid simulations with Blender. I’ve ran into some technical hurdles: Blender 2.82 uses a variety of protocols to leverage GPUs for rendering and computation. It offers an AI-driven denoiser (Optix), CUDA path tracing, and OpenCL. My MacBook Pro has an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M GPU as well as the option to plug in a Radeon Frontier Edition (first generation Vega) eGPU on Thunderbolt 3. Plenty of GPU compute power in either configuration, but there is a snag: MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) has deprecated OpenCL in favor of Metal 2+. CUDA and Optix are proprietary to nVidia GPUs. Apple hasn’t shipped a Mac with nVidia GPUs since Kepler launched (GeForce 700 series). Blender supports AMD ProRender, but I found it was terribly unstable.

I could easily slip into a tangent about how unfortunate the breakup between Apple and nVidia truly is, but I will spare you.

My current workflow involves queuing some tasks to my desktop, running Windows 10. The GPUs are dual Radeon VIIs. Unfortunately, I found that rendering on Blender is unstable when both GPUs render in parallel. No problem, since I can free up the other GPU for Folding@Home (a hobby of mine that has exploded in response to COVID-19). Who would have guessed that a global pandemic would boost a distributed computing project to exascale?

Despite these obstacles of platform compatibility, I have made significant progress on my simulation-based research. It is difficult to understate how exciting this project has been for me. For some context: the ASCI Red supercomputer (at the Sandia National Laboratories) was built in 1996, and was the fastest supercomputer in the world until 2000. It was the first computer to achieve true terascale computing (one trillion floating point operations per second). I built my first terascale computer in 2013. This was shortly after leaving my job at Intel. There was something very gratifying about building a computer with a CPU I helped manufacture. GLaDOS G4 (you can see the project here, scroll down to “Everything Else”) was built with a GeForce GTX 780 GPU and Intel Core i7 4770k overclocked to 4.5 GHz. It ran nearly silent and fit inside an up cycled Apple Power Mac G4 (microATX equivalent) case.

The ASCI Red supercomputer was designed to simulate nuclear weapons tests. Today, I am using a system roughly ten times more powerful to simulate soup spilling out of a spoon. I was inspired to approach this problem by two projects. The first was a 2013 project from Portland State University (my alma mater) to make a coffee cup for zero-gravity environments. they used drop cages and 3D printing to iterate several designs until they had a shape that held liquid. “It wasn’t needed, but it was requested.”

The other project hit me right in the heart.

The S’up Spoon is the embodiment of good design. The design was inspired by deep empathy for a user’s problem, and the solution involves as little design as possible. There are few technologies in this world that we trust enough to put in our mouths. If you can make it in this space, you can make it (almost) anywhere. During the fall semester, Moira and I visited the Carnegie Museum of Art. They had an exhibition on accessibility design, and I was brought to tears by stories of innovation and vibrant improvements to quality of life for people with disabilities. Technology, at its very best empowers people to realize their fullest potential. We can easily get lost in the exhilaration of the complex, but this impulse must not dampen our ability to appreciate the elegance of simplicity. Some problems are best solved by form. I saw many incredible solutions in that exhibition, but this spoon has really stuck with me.

My goal is not to make something better, but perhaps a little bit different. The shape of the S’up spoon is intuitive, and if we had never seen a spoon before, we might conclude that it is the better design over more traditional forms. It is however, under our current cultural context, a strange thing to behold. It looks more like a wizard’s pipe or a warrior’s horn. It is beautiful and ergonomic. I do not intend to elevate those specifications. Instead, my goal is to make a spoon that is inconspicuous while still achieving similar results for users who suffer from motor movement difficulties.

How has my first design faired under simulation?

While I can certainly see the appeal of a long hollow channel, I’ve become increasingly concerned with how this shape my be difficult to keep clean. I can imagine objects getting wedged toward the back depending on what is being consumed. I have began to work on a second iteration with a more shallow channel. Still, this first iteration does fairly well. It is managing to retain most of the 15ml (i.e., 1 tablespoon) of fluid under rapid movement.

I enjoyed this simulation so much that decided to make a rendering:

I have not yet gotten back into Cinema 4D to evaluate RealFlow. Despite the challenges regarding compatibility, I am truly impressed with how powerful this open source software has become with this latest release.

Now that I have established this workflow, I can easily switch out revised designs to test under identical conditions. I’m still not sold on the current handle shape, and I think I can improve liquid retention by tweaking the angle of the lips. The flat bottom (Chinese style spoon) does fairly well, with it’s obtuse angle walls. Next, I will try a concave structure with a wider base for the handle and a more aggressive descending angle.

Prototyping – Part 2

Working with Blender has continued to go well.

I have also been looking at some of the existing solutions in this space:

KFS Easy Eat

http://www.eating-help.com

Liftware, by verily

https://www.liftware.com

EliSpoon

https://elispoon.com

Ornamin - Supportive Cutlery (Parkinson’s)

https://www.ornamin.co.uk/shop/cutlery-set?number=SW24

S’up Spoon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8nNlWw6KbA

Apex Medicine Spoon

https://www.riteaid.com/shop/apex-medicine-spoon-0233706

I have been sketching and studying these forms in consideration for my own designs.

Some shapes are unappealing because of their associations. These still deserve consideration, as they function well in this space.

This week I will begin iterating designs in Fusion 360. Hopefully, I will finally be able to make use of my RealFlow trial license. I’m curious to see how the “out of the box” settings function with these geometries.

Fluid Simulation in Blender

“Throw off your fears let your heart beat freely at the sign that a new time is born.” — Minnie Riperton

I’ve completed my workflow design for fluid dynamics testing in Blender. Here’s a proof of concept:

Now I just need to figure out RealFlow in C4D…

Blender: Time To Make The Donuts

I’m very happy with the results of my first project in Blender.

White Frosting

Classic Pink

And Nekkid!

After struggling with Cinema 4D, I decided to use a plugin rather than trying to cludge together some handcrafted fluid simulation. Unfortunately, I ran into a licensing problem with Next Limit’s RealFlow plugin. I’ve been emailing back and forth all week, and they finally got a fix for me — SUCCESS! While I waited to sort that out, I decided to give Blender a try. I began following this tutorial, but quickly found myself getting lost. I needed to become more familiar with the software and interface. I decided to follow a beginner’s tutorial to get my feet wet. I choose this particular video series because it employs procedurally generated elements, and covers all the basic modeling commands, node handling, and the complete stack of scene construction. And also: donuts are delicious. The world is terrifying, and we could all use something sweet.

I am honestly shocked that Blender is a free program. Many 3D programs are horrifically expensive; without student licensing, I could never afford to touch most of the 3D tools I’ve been learning over the years. Yet Blender seems to be very capable as a 3D program. I have only scratched the surface, but it is very impressive. Now that I have familiarized myself with Blender, and have a working fluid simulator plugin for C4D, I am in good shape to begin A/B testing.