Today's digital prototyping technology has helped manufacturers streamline their design processes and dramatically reduce the number of physical prototypes they produce, resulting in reduced costs, decreased time-to-market, and increased creativity in their designs. Until now, the automotive surface design community has been unable to take full advantage of digital prototyping because of the difficulty in reproducing realistic reflective painted surfaces. The lack of realism hindered important design decisions and inevitably reduced the quality of such decisions.

With the introduction of ClearCoat™360 and the existing capabilities of Silicon Graphics® Onyx2™, the ability to produce models with exceptional realism while maintaining the required interactivity is finally here. Further, by leveraging digital prototyping technology in this way, surface design engineers will be able to more freely explore additional design concepts.

In addition, ClearCoat360 benefits the entire decision-making process by providing design teams and executives with digital prototypes that exhibit photo-realistic images during the interactive exploration and review of the design. The technology will be particularly valuable when viewing models on a 1:1 scale in SGI® Reality Center® immersive environments.