| Q&A |
 OREALIA
Designer
David Biau, Onesia
jan. 2008
>French version |
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"From
importing CAO objects, Orealia solution offers several
effective tools for creating and using materials. Thus,
you can choose among several basic materials with different
specificities (glossy, flat, HDR…) and customize
their look by several intuitive and easy-to-use parameters.
For example, you can make the material transparent,
add textures to it, test its brilliance or even give
it depth."
<Orealia
Designer |
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| Q1 |
Can
you give us a brief overview of Onesia and its activities? |
| A1 |
Founded
in 2004, Onesia is a company that empowers companies to design,
present and market their products faster and more effectively,
using virtual prototypes.
To this effect, Onesia, in partnership with the research laboratories
of the CNRS (National Institute for Scientific Research) and
IRIT (Toulouse IT Research Institute), has been developing an
innovative software solution (Orealia) of real time photo-realistic
design and 3D visualization, which is aimed at professions where
visual excellence is essential: industrial design, advertising
& communication, sales support, architecture… |
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| Q2 |
Who
is the Orealia range intended for? Do you need to be a 3D professional
to use Orealia Designer? |
| A2 |
Orealia
solution is a technological quantum leap that allows you to
obtain very high image quality for a realistic visualization
of 3D models in real time. To this effect, Orealia toolset is
made up of three main modules designed for three different types
of users:
Orealia|DESIGNER is developed for designers, engineers
or computer graphics artists to create and manipulate 3D models
and environments in a simple and intuitive way, while visualizing
them naturally and rapidly with photo realistic rendering. Interacting
with contents in real time allows you to validate and tweak
your models and virtual mock-ups more effectively.
Orealia|VIEWER is designed for salespeople or communication
and marketing managers to interactively view and edit the 3D
content produced with the Designer module.
Orealia|SDK is designed for developers for building innovative
Orealia technologies right into third party applications by
using development libraries written in C++. |
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| Q3 |
Which
3D formats can Orealia Designer process? |
| A3 |
The
Designer module lets you import various native and neutral formats.
The standard version of the software offers conventional formats
such as OBJ, DXF, DWF, 3DS, FBX or Collada. Depending on the
user’s needs, several other CAO formats can be added to
the standard product such as CATIA V5, Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks,
AutoCAD, Rhino, Iges or Step.
Moreover, once the geometry is imported and in case it has evolved,
it is noteworthy that our geometrical updating tool allows you
to re-import the model while keeping your work designed with
our solution. This allows geometrical models to evolve independently
from the work being done on their design and scripting for example.
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| Q4 |
How
can you create and apply realistic materials to the objects? |
| A4 |
From
importing CAO objects, Orealia solution offers several effective
tools for creating and using materials. Thus, you can choose
among several basic materials with different specificities (glossy,
flat, HDR…) and customize their look by several intuitive
and easy-to-use parameters. For example, you can make the material
transparent, add textures to it, test its brilliance or even
give it depth. One of the main advantages of our solution is
that you can obtain the result of each modification instantly,
and during the whole work process on the mock-up. This radically
changes the user’s interaction with the software and enables
him to really concentrate fully on his design and analysis. |
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| Q5 |
How
many materials are provided in the standard version? Is it possible
to expand the library? |
| A5 |
Besides
creating materials from scratch, Orealia|DESIGNER in its standard
version comes with about one hundred predefined materials in
twenty categories within a specific library. The categories
are materials such as wood, brushed metal, ceramic, brick, paper,
leather, marble, etc… In order to import these materials,
all you need to do is to drag and drop it on the 3D object.
The standard library also offers 20 HDR environments, to allow
you to very easily and instantaneously test an object in different
atmospheres and lightings.
Finally, when a material has been created or modified, it is
possible to add it to the library for future use, for example
in a different scene. |
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| Q6 |
How
do you obtain 3D objects that are so realistic? What do you
call a BTF material? |
| A6 |
To
achieve this, in cooperation with the IRIT laboratory, we have
developed several techniques including a very innovative algorithm,
called BTF (Bi-directional Texture Functions). Through an optical
device, it allows you to capture the optical properties of a
sample of material under different lighting directions and different
conditions of observation. After being processed by our algorithms,
the physical data of this material can then be used in real
time like a traditional material. This is particularly suited
for materials such as velvet, silk, paper, etc…
Generally speaking, the solutions for interactive virtual reality
presently available on the market use only a simple photograph
to represent a material. This approach does not allow characterizing
precisely the reflections and the primary shades inherent to
its microstructure. Our innovative technique offers a much more
realistic result by modeling these phenomena. The designer can
thus validate the appearance of these real materials on his
digital mock-up. |
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| Q7 |
What
type of media can be generated from Orealia? Can you spread
3D contents on a wide range of materials? |
| A7 |
 One
of the goals of the Orealia solution is to allow as much as
possible the spreading and sharing of the scenes and contents
that have been designed and validated. With this objective in
mind, we offer several solutions that can be either dependent
or independent of other IT tools:
Outputting images (without any calculation time!) in various
formats and sizes (from small to very large) that can be printed
as you wish.
Outputting videos, either free style (each action performed
in the software is captured) or predefined by a scenario, using
Mpeg, Avi, QuickTime, or Flash as saving format, or a sequence
of images that can be integrated into a video editing software.
Generating autonomous executable applications that can be freely
distributed and shared. Because they are easily interchanged,
you can view the artwork without having to install any specific
software.
Spreading over to Orealia|VIEWER which, without requiring any
technical skills, offers, among other things, the possibility
to visualize the different versions of a product, to trigger
a scenario, to enjoy interactivity and to save view points in
order to reproduce and animate them. |
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| Q8 |
How
does Orealia compare with products such as Lumiscaphe® Patchwork
and Autodesk® Showcase? |
| A8 |
Our
products do not target exactly the same market. For the most
part, our competitors’ solutions are aimed at the industrial
sector (such as automobile and aeronautics). Orealia too works
well for this application but is also well-suited for small
and medium sized businesses involved in, for example, design
and/or manufacturing.
Consequently, the cost of our solution is lower while offering
performances at least as high as our competitors in terms of
rendering and ergonomics.
Moreover, the whole Orealia toolset works on all different existing
platforms: Windows, Linux and soon Mac.
Finally, our strategy is to offer tools that enable the user
to make use of the work designed with our tools as widely as
possible, well beyond the design office. |
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| Q9 |
What
are some of Orealia’s future developments? |
| A9 |
There
are two types of development features in the planning stages
that we can talk about today, both of which have already been
started:
First of all, transferring our software range onto Apple’s
Mac OS X platform, in addition to the ones already existing
(Windows and Linux). Next, we are developing the version 2 of
Orealia|DESIGNER which will include many new features, particularly
the ability to spread the performed work onto the WEB, with
the same visual quality, in order, for example, to facilitate
and improve our clients’ e-commerce activities. |
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