Seven Unexpected Ways Rendering Can Be a Secret Weapon for Your Product Development Team

A picture is worth a thousand words. You’ve heard that a thousand times. Yet most of the time, renderings created from CAD models are relegated to marketing use.

There are several other ways that product development companies can use rendering to improve their sales, PLM processes and even design reviews.

Selling Your Products

One of rendering’s greatest values is to create a photorealistic representation of a part that does not yet exist. That’s like traveling to the future — a future where your product has been created and can be presented to a customer.

A rendered image allows design teams to begin selling their product the moment a final design has been agreed upon. For small businesses, that can be a major advantage.

Earlier this week, I spoke with John Ulaszek, the founder of II Much, an aftermarket auto parts manufacturer. Rendering has been a critical tool for getting John’s clients to adopt his products before he commits to the expense of manufacturing.

”Rendering is absolutely important for my sales,” said John. “II Much is, pretty much, just me. If I can take a rendering to a client and show them how a product will look and how it’ll work, I can get an order right there.”

John has also been impressed at the ease with which he’s able to create renderings using Autodesk’s Fusion 360 software. Using out-of-the-box presets, John has been able to create compelling, photo-realistic, aesthetically pleasing renders and exploded views that give deeper insight into a product’s components and function.

Internal Reviews

Renderings are also a gateway to better collaboration between people who need to be looped into a product design cycle. In many companies, not all of the employees that interact with product designs will have a mechanical bent. Whether it be Steve in marketing or Angela in the executive suite, renderings can help explain things that would be otherwise difficult to understand, such as:

Complex mechanical behavior
Complex details
How parts can be used in assemblies (such as on the factory floor)
How one assembly works within a whole.

Rendering can also convince a skeptical audience to adopt a novel project. For example, a rendering of a new product could be key in securing a budget for ideas that weren’t initially in a project roadmap. Decision makers can use visual information to provide better direction during product reviews. Marketing pros can use product renderings to help brainstorm future campaigns and the placement of a product within its given market.

In addition, the benefits that rendering provides to those in the office can also be valuable to those working on the factory floor. If detailed animations can be created from a series of renderings, the assembly of complex components can be made much easier to understand.

Finally, rendering has also become much less expensive in terms of compute time as cloud-based rendering solutions can offload the local workstation.

In summary, the seven unexpected ways that rendering can be your secret weapon are:

Rendering allows sales to happen in parallel with earlier design phases, providing better insight into the key features for a product’s success.
Rendering helps factory workers understand the products they’re assembling by giving animated assembly instructions that can’t be misconstrued.
Cloud-based rendering can free up workstation resources for other computationally intensive projects like simulations or CAD assembly work.
Rendering strengthens internal design reviews by giving every member of a team imagery that facilitates better communication.
Rendering helps non-engineers and C-team members quickly grasp how a part or assembly fits in with an overall product portfolio.
Rendering can be key to securing a budget for product ideas that weren’t on a company’s product roadmap.
Rendering is an essential tool for cross-discipline communications across marketing and engineering.

Rendering is one of the more powerful tools available to design teams. With its ability to make complex ideas simple and to demonstrate products earlier, rendering is a tool that should be leveraged by all product development teams.

This article is part of a series sponsored by Autodesk.