>> So, hi together. My name is Jurgen Riegel.
I'm from Daimler Protics
and I'm here together with Sebastian from NetAllied
to tell you a story about a tool,
a product, and the technology will change our way to work
with engineering and CAD data in a game engine.
So, first of all, what is Daimler Protics?
Daimler Protics is a 100% subsidiary of Daimler.
We are 700 people and four locations
and we do all kind of 3D solutions inside of Daimler.
You can think of us like we are kind of 3D company of Daimler.
So, what are the driving forces in R&D nowadays?
All of you maybe know, for sure know,
a lot of challenges come to the automotive industry.
Inside of Daimler, this is coined CASE:
connected, autonomous, shared, and electric,
which puts a lot of pressure on the R&D process.
Besides that, we work with millions of 3D assets.
We have thousands of engineers working on a car project,
which orchestrate hundreds of suppliers.
We have 700 production facilities all around the world
and the R&D happens on four continents.
So, this is still done today with email,
with telephone, and with Skype,
which are a very poor medium for 3D data,
so we need better 3D collaboration in the R&D field.
Also, we get very globally with the R&D process.
20 years ago, we had most of the R&D in Germany,
but nowadays we also have a lot of R&D in the key markets
and also in continents like India.
What kind of features such a new better collaboration system
would have to have?
First of all, we early settled on VR
because it's a very immersive, very natural way
to work with 3D data
and they have to be worldwide and easy to use.
For easy to use, we need one click import of engineering
and CAD data. That's very important.
No engineer has time to make a dataprep process
or use some tools to get its data in,
so it'd have to be one click and easy.
Also, if you hold a meeting, even a virtual one,
you need your slides, you need videos,
you need all kinds of presentation stuff
which have to be in the meeting.
Another very important point is create and export 3D annotation.
Not only drawing and make them, also save them to the PDM system
so that you can later access it in the development process.
Also, very important nowadays, simulation data.
You have to show simulation data
and all kind of other engineering data
in such a meeting.
Also, section and inspection of your CAD data.
So that's the reason why we started three years ago
the project Engineering Hub together with NetAllied.
Since this year, it is productive inside of Daimler
and we are here to show it off to you.
So just let's take a look.
So, the Engineering Hub, the main thing is just load data
without any data preparation
and then bring in your colleagues from wherever you are
and discuss about data and make changes.
You have a lot of tools like here for example,
the clipping plane to inspect your data
and get closer to the problem.
You can do annotations in different sizes and colors
and save them back.
For example, as a JT file to the PDM system
for later usage in the CAD data process.
You can take measurements,
discuss clearances with your colleagues,
and can do all kinds of inspection on the data.
Also, you can select all of the data,
move them, test stuff, or try just simply stuff out.
You can move your data and position
it wherever you want in the scene.
And also, you can work with volumetric drawings.
It's very important in the simulation space.
Also, you can create your own 3D libraries-
it's very easy- and import stuff
for testing or training for example.
Here you see the presentation screens
where you can show your animations,
your PowerPoint files, your movies, or whatever.
So that's the Engineering Hub.
So how did we do it?
Of course, we do it with the Unreal Engine
because Unreal brings nearly everything we need.
We use the networking game stuff
for the worldwide collaboration with the dedicated server.
The conversation is done by the TeamSpeak
in the online subsystem.
Unreal supports every hardware we can think of.
All HMDs, the Pixel Streaming allows us to go on smartphones
and to use devices like the Hololens 1 and 2.
Annotations, we can do with the dynamic mesh actor.
But there are two important things missing here.
The direct loading of the CAD data
and a save of the CAD data. And this kind of mesh
and how it's done will be told to you by Sebastian.
>>Sebastian: So, thank you, Jurgen.
I would like to give you a little bit more
of the technical details of that solution
and let me talk about how we made it possible
that such a great application,
like the Engineering Hub was possible at the end.
So, at NetAllied, we've been developing for the past decade
our own 3D CAD renderer.
So, it is a very ugly CAD renderer.
We don't concentrate on visual quality like we do with Unreal.
But at least it is a really fast rendering.
So, we fueled the support for our native CAD file format.
So, we developed native readers for JT
[inaudible]
and Juergen calls it a technical renderer.
So, when it comes to pure speed, to loading time,
to the size of the models that we are able to load,
I'm quite sure that we outperform
any other solution on the market.
So today there are many companies here in the room
that have already licensed that technique.
It's called UberEngine by the way.
It's a silly name, but has nothing to do with a car.
So, Airboats, Audi, Porsche are all licensees.
But upon these the guys at Daimler
have been the very first to find out
that there is a possibility to bring in a technical renderer
and a full featured renderer like Unreal into one solution.
So, some more numbers about UberEngine,
12 years of development. It's been a while.
We really developed it from scratch.
So, we don't use any third-party libraries.
We don't rely on open source libraries.
It is really our own baby.
Until now we support up to 31 different
CAD file formats from various areas, be it CATIA,
be it HDD for simulation purpose, for example.
And it only takes us two seconds to load
a fully configured hundred percent S-class.
So, there is no trick behind it.
It's really fast and we load it from native CAD assets.
We support more than 10 million of scene-nodes.
That's a realistic number.
Imagine you have an airplane for example.
So, 10 million scene-nodes is not a really huge number
for an airplane that is fully configured
and we already have about 150,000 users per month
that are using that software in their daily business.
And I'm not sure if you can see it,
but we really try to squeeze out the maximum performance
out of your precious hardware.
So, this is what your task manager's looking like
when you start the UberEngine.
So more about the technical details.
How did we integrate UberEngine into the Unreal Engine?
First of all, been using a client server architecture.
That is the UberEngine is running
as a separate process in the background
and we are pushing the fully rendered textures
with all the high poly details into Unreal.
We are concentrating on our lightweight scenegraph
and on all that fancy details.
And we do it with G-buffer texture sharing.
So, the full lighting and stuff like that
is being done on Unreal's side
and we support deferred shading and forward shading.
So, feel free to use it in VR or on desktop applications.
That's the trick.
So even then Unreal is doing all the rest.
So, we are a technical renderer,
that is, when it comes to lighting, textures, shaders,
everything that has to do with UI presentation,
business logic, blueprints, or network replication
is all being handled fully by Unreal.
Now, it fits into a vanilla 4.24 Unreal Engine.
It's just a plugin.
You can use your complete workflow
as you're used to it and get things running,
and it even makes UberEngine shine.
So Jurgen was showing us how to use it in game.
I will try to concentrate
on some more features in the Editor,
first of all, we have to insert an UberAnchor.
That's the bridge between Uber and Unreal;
UberEngine and Unreal. Then we load that CAD file.
In this case it's an S-class with all details.
I can move around while it's still loading
and I can pick various aspects of my client model.
So, we are communicating with the back end scenegraph
that is handled by UberEngine
and I try to rotate a little bit of the door,
move it around,
and we have advanced functionality
to search and filter for specific attributes.
So, let me toggle a nice color,
nice red and search for something
that has to do with the side of the car.
So, enter the term seitenband or side
and you get that very nice red, more or less nice red color
with all the elements that have been found
and include the term seitenband.
So furthermore, we do clipping.
Clipping and cutting planes are useful
if you want to see the details of the car
and it's a full featured car
so you can see every detail here,
you can move it around.
It's defined as an Actor, so it's quite simple to use it.
You can see it in your World Outliner,
everything's available from here.
And next are your ideas.
So, pick up the plugin, try to use it,
try to build your own workflow using your native CAD assets.
You no longer need to convert stuff upfront.
So that's the whole idea behind the UberEngine.
Okay. So, this is what it looks like.
As you can see, you have
a few red feature lines included too.
If you want to have advanced review functionality,
take a look at our booth.
And what we've seen today is a revolutionary new workflow,
how to handle and bring in CAD data
with the full-featured Unreal Engine here.
So, it's not upon converting data upfront and prepping it.
It's just loaded directly from your CATIA,
directly from your JT file from wherever you want to have it,
you do no longer need conversion.
It does not look as good
as handcrafted geometries, obviously.
Yeah, there are no textures available,
but we are very, very happy and proud to announce
that we make that available for a broader audience today.
We will bring it into a public beta starting now,
and we have two different websites set up for you.
The first one is the engineeringhub.net website.
On that side, you get a full featured collaboration tool,
the Engineering Hub has been developed by Daimler,
and on our side, we have the uberengine.com,
that's the plugin,
if you're more interested in the technical stuff
and want to do your own hands on,
create whatever you want to.
Thanks a lot for listening.