>> My name is Matthew Gueller. I work for Harley-Davidson.
I work in a group that sits in between
styling and engineering,
and we are responsible for all of the conceptual design
within the motor company.
So anything that has to do with surfacing, visualization,
laser scanning, conceptual development,
that comes through our team.
I've been at Harley-Davidson for over 18 years,
and I've worked on a lot of really, really cool motorcycles.
Just a little bit of background on Harley-Davidson.
We have been building motorcycles for over 115 years.
We are coming up on 120 years.
We have a global brand. We build premium products.
We feel very comfortable about our position in the market,
and part of that is we stay true to the original history,
the heritage, the look, the feel,
the sound of all these traditional products.
And it's more than just the products.
It's a lifestyle. People really love the brand.
People get into it.
They have friends that are into it.
It's a lifestyle product. Little bit more about what I do.
Our team consists of about eight people.
We are responsible for supporting styling.
Our styling team is basically just doing sketches
and conceptual clay models.
We do reverse engineering from scan.
We do class A surfacing in Alias and ICEM.
We do all of the conceptual modeling.
We have been doing polygon modeling and sub-D modeling
for over 10 years in our group, and we've just started
to get into a lot more of the visualization tools.
We are really the gatekeeper for the art-to-part process.
Just to go through that process a little bit,
just so people understand,
typically, we start with a sketch.
Everything starts with a sketch.
Our styling department will give us kind of a profile sketch,
and this is what we get to work with.
From there, sometimes we will go into clay.
We'll have a clay model that kind of shows the form
and shows the development.
Our team will then scan, laser scan, the model,
and from that, we will reverse engineer
and create typical high-end class A surfacing.
From that, we have in-house 3D printers
where we can build models.
We use a lot of existing technology to build models
and to build mock-ups
and to make the mock-ups look like a product
that you would see on a showroom floor.
Part of that is to get our leadership team
to buy into the design.
Part of it is to get feedback from customers,
and we do a lot of this work, part of this mock-up process.
Part of that process that makes it really difficult,
especially from a traditional standpoint,
is even though it's a well-established process,
even though we're using tools,
and we're using things from the industry
that people are familiar with,
we end up going through a lot of iterations.
On one particular project, recently,
I did over 130 iterations of a fuel tank
before I stopped counting.
So that iterative process can take a lot of time.
It can take a lot of resources.
Part of that too is, as we keep on doing these iterations,
it becomes more challenging for the team to stay focused
on what is really important on the design.
So we have started leveraging some of the other tools
out there to really make it interesting
in the design process. We started using
polygon modeling and subdivisional surface
modeling to keep the designs moving forward,
to keep them moving fresh,
to be able to iterate much quicker, much, much quicker.
Using the subdivisional tools,
we are able to iterate maybe 15 parts in a day
where normally it would take 15 days to iterate a part.
So it's been a real game changer for us.
Some of the tools that we're using ...
We do use Autodesk Alias products.
We are looking at VRED, but our main focus
is the Alias product line for conceptual surfacing.
There is a lot of motorcycle images up here.
I don't have permission to show
any of the conceptual models that we're doing in Alias
of any of our motorcycles at this point in time.
We are using 3D Studio Max,
which is more of a game-focused tool.
We're using it for the sub-D modeling.
We are using it for the rendering technology,
which really doesn't fit within a product development tool set.
You don't go to an engineering place,
and ask if you use 3D Studio Max.
It just doesn't happen. We've been using it a lot,
and we've been very successful with it,
and we've got some processes built around the sub-D
and the polygon modeling that really makes it fast.
Really, I can't stress enough how quick we can iterate
and build some of the models.
We also do use Autodesk Maya for some of these things
because it's another tool within our toolbox
that we have different people in our team
that have access to and have different skills within that.
We use Rhino, which is not necessarily a class A tool,
but we found some functionality there
that makes it really, really good.
We do use Rhino quite a bit for data prep
as we are going into some of the visualization tools
because it's one of the tools
that you can bring anything in and spit anything out.
I can work with polygons. I can work with curves.
I can work with nurbs, any of this kind of stuff.
But the real sweet spot on the design side
is being able to model in sub-divisional surfaces.
Alias has just recently started
adding some of the subdivisional tools in there,
and if you haven't seen that workflow,
if you haven't experienced that workflow,
it is a game changer for the design industry.
It really, really is.
We kind of think about it as our secret sauce
because we have workflows where we can go
from the sub-D tools directly into our engineering tools
and still keep a fully modifiable model.
This is another one that's kind of fun.
We have started using ZBrush,
which is a very non-traditional engineering tool,
within our design process.
It gives our designers the ability to sculpt,
to work with a Wacom tablet and to build models
that typically would take a lot longer
for them to sketch and develop.
So some of these are really interesting tools
within our tool set,
and this is part of what our group has been supporting.
Along with that, we've moved into visualization.
The same way that an engineering team would use FEA or analysis
to validate an engineering design,
we are using visualization with styling
to validate the visual aspects,
the character, the concept of the design.
We've been looking very, very hard
at ways to iterate quicker, to visualize quicker,
to show more realistic materials and to basically flesh out
and create this digital mock-up process.
Instead of building a physical bike, if we can get styling,
if we can get our leadership teams
to look at images or look at something in VR
and make decisions based on that,
it saves us a lot of time.
It saves us a lot of money on mock-ups.
When we build a physical mock-up from one of our bikes,
it can be anywhere from $60,000 to well over $100,000.
If we can do that digitally, we can cut the time way down,
and we can save that cost. Some of the tools we use:
We have been using KeyShot for a while.
KeyShot 9 just came out.
That supports the GPU-based rendering,
and it is really, really fast.
KeyShot is a really, really simple tool
that's really easy to use.
It's one of the tools that we have in our toolbox
where we can iterate quickly.
We can get other people that don't know
a lot about the visualization to jump in
and use some of these tools.
For the really high-end visualization stuff,
we do us V-Ray.
V-Ray provides very, very good quality,
very rich materials, very rich data sets,
and produces very photorealistic images.
Within the process of trying to develop quicker,
faster, more realistic,
we ran into a really interesting kind of a ...
Not really a challenge, but an interesting situation
where we started working with Epic Games and Unreal Engine.
As Unreal Engine had started to develop and grow
with its tool set, with its materials,
with its ability to produce high-quality images
in real-time, we got involved.
We got involved early with the Datasmith project,
and Epic helped us put together some of these images,
and it was an eye-opener for our engineering team
because they were like,
"Maybe we should kind of look at this.
This is really cool. This is really fast.
This is really neat."
In addition, we did a project a while back with the team
from Algorithmic
where we started leveraging some of the Algorithmic materials,
some of the Substance Designer materials,
to produce really rich finishes.
All of these materials fit within our existing pipeline,
all the way from 3D Studio Max
and V-Ray all the way up through Unreal Engine,
all the way through the tools that we are using.
And so being able to produce one bike
and show a lot of different
finishes that represent real-world
finishes has been very, very, very cool for us.
So one of the things that happened recently
that was pretty interesting
is I got tasked with putting together a demo,
a public VR demo, for a concept motorcycle
that we were going to show at X-Games.
And I was still kind of green, still learning Unreal Engine,
and it was thrown kind of in my lap as,
"Hey, can you guys do this?" Of course we said yes.
We didn't have a full motorcycle at the time.
We didn't have all the assets put together,
and I was still very, very new at learning Unreal Engine.
So the idea, the concept, was, if you took
one of the Harley-Davidson electric LiveWire bikes,
and you took one of the flat track race bikes
and you kind of mashed them together, what would you get?
For that whole X-Games crowd,
this was kind of what we were developing.
In addition to that, we didn't really know
where we were going to be presenting
or how we were going to be presenting
or exactly how much space we had.
So these are a couple of pictures of the booth
that we had set up,
and you could see, back up in the corner,
that was the space that we had. We ended up having enough space
to run two virtual reality headsets.
We didn't know how many people we were going to get through,
so we wanted to keep the demo small.
We wanted to keep the footprint small and give a lot of impact
but also get people through as quickly as possible.
In addition, we had a couple other things set up at the site.
We had a jump-start with LiveWire.
We had a bike builder.
So you can see the tables up there
where other bikes were going to be around,
so it was going to be a very congested area,
and we were a little bit nervous about setting this up
and being able to get enough people through it.
Here are a couple more interesting pictures.
My daughter is in the audience. She is just shaking her head.
These are a couple more images from the actual event,
the LiveWire jump-start.
So we actually had a bike on a roller
that were getting people on to test drive.
We had product placement within the X-Games stadium.
We were showing off some of our LiveWire stuff
which recently just launched.
And I got to wear the Miss Minnesota's tiara
while she wore the VR headset
while we were running the demo, so it was a win-win.
Let me show you this.
So we have been talking about this demo quite a bit.
So we have been talking about this demo for quite a bit.
How do I play it?
So this is basically just a live capture.
It was set up to be really simple.
This is my son, actually, with the headset on,
and I am kind of telling him how to run it.
So we put together this concept motorcycle.
It's based on an electric EV platform
kind of along the lines of LiveWire,
maybe a little bit smaller,
and all the materials were created
either in Substance Designer
or scanned materials with the X-Rite scanner.
Used Substance Painter to create some of the materials
on the wheels to give it a little bit more of a realistic
kind of dirty feel, but it's truly a concept bike.
This is one of the first times we've ever shown off,
number one, a VR demo and, number two, a concept bike
that is kind of at this point of development.
So this was really, really fun for us.
We got to show this off. We got to tell people about it.
When we put this demo together, like 3 days before
we were supposed to deliver it to the X-Games event,
we showed a couple of our leadership people.
They showed their bosses.
By the end of the day, I had the president of engineering,
I had the president of our facility, in my cubicle
putting on the headset going, "Oh, this is so cool.
We got to do this for everything."
This kicked off a firestorm within our company,
and we are doing VR demos or VR reviews
for all of our new products using Unreal Engine.
It has been a game changer.
We recently had a VR review with one of the new bikes
that we are developing where styling was able
to actually make decisions based on what they saw in VR
and save us a whole bunch of time
going through more and more iterations.
It was phenomenal. It was a huge success.
So this is fun. This was meant for X-Games.
This was meant to be simple, not really super interactive,
just let people walk around.
But this was a game changer for us,
and this let us kind of keep on going with this.
If anybody is interested in seeing this, please let me know.
I've got the demo on a flash drive.
We can make arrangements
so that you guys can take a look at this.
A couple of the things that we learned:
With that demo, we took that demo to X-Games.
We put about 1,200 people through it at X-Games,
running two headsets over the course of 2 1/2 days.
We also took this to our investors board meeting.
We showed the investors.
We took it to Milwaukee School of Engineering for an event,
and we showed it off at the launch of the NVIDIA
supercomputer that is at Milwaukee School of Engineering.
So even though we put this demo together
just for one specific thing,
it's been used for quite a lot.
We got great feedback from the customers.
Nobody got sick. Everybody loved the demo.
Everybody loved that whole experience.
Our engineering team is looking at more applications
and more ways to be able to use this technology.
Initially, it was a little bit of a steep learning curve.
Learning Unreal Engine is a lot different
than learning a traditional CAD tool,
but once we got past that, everything just seemed to work,
and we found that our workflows fit really,
really well with what Unreal was doing.
In addition, we found that we had full support
for our material scanning,
for FBX, for Substance Designer, for Datasmith,
where we could move data. We can have one data
set that we used across our whole pipeline,
not just for VR, but also for visualization.
We could use it in KeyShot. We could use it in V-Ray.
And it really made it awesome because we had one data
set that we could use in multiple different applications.
So, going forward, we have a lot of new bikes in development.
Some of this stuff that we've teased,
some of this stuff that we've talked about,
but we are using VR,
and we are using these tools for all of our future development.
We've had a lot of success
and a lot of support from our leadership
to be able to do that,
and so it makes me feel really good
to be part of this whole experience
and be able to showcase some of the things
that we've worked on. Thank you very much.