Alimak

Alimak builds industrial construction hoists. They wanted an interactive 360 product tour of their Scando 650A for marketing, sales and e-learning, with hotspots and animations highlighting specific parts. The starting point was raw CAD from the manufacturer, and every measurement had to match the real machine.

I did all the 3D work in both phases, and a colleague built the tour in Pano2VR. The CAD files held thousands of components, many of them internal parts the camera would never see. I went through the files carefully, removing what would never be seen without leaving gaps in what would. No textures came with the files, so I built every material from scratch in Blender, from the metal finishes to the rubber seals and painted panels. The panoramas were heavy to render, so I turned the office PCs into a small render farm to bring turnaround times down.

The project produced two tours. Phase 1, the Scando 650A shown here, is public on Alimak's website. Phase 2 covers six models in one shared environment I adapted for each machine, and is used internally for sales and e-learning.

The client was impressed by the realism and detail, which is what brought them back for phase 2. For me, the main takeaway was learning how to work with industrial CAD data. Knowing what to keep and what to strip out is something you only really learn by doing it.