Almost every objective you can dream up will relate to performance, cost, safety or aesthetics. Regardless of how important you believe an objective to be, it should be included for your consideration as it is in the details that a good design becomes great. Sanctioning Body Regulations Rhino is a free-form modeling tool that supports a variety of techniques, including NURBs (non-uniform rational basis spline). This is an extremely precise technique that allows you to model using mathematical representations, so it’s well suited to working on complex shapes like car designs. The majority of car modification software and design programs do offer free trials, so this is definitely something you should take advantage of before paying for expensive software. What software do car designers use?

The design approach briefly described here is the result of my previous experience in Baja SAE design team, my internship in the engineering design department of a company that builds racing cars to the largest motorsport category and some minor categories in Brazil, and from some excellent books, which I will recommend in the end of the article. Drawing, computer-aided 3D modeling, and clay modeling are three key skills required for car design. How to design a car body kit in software? Not only can you model any product using CATIA, regardless of how complex, but you can also simulate each step in the production process, from design and engineering to construction, in real-life conditions. This is one of the main factors that makes CATIA such a useful automotive design software for leading companies like Tesla. Finally, while both engineering knowledge and practical observations can provide reasonable confidence in component designs or selections, physically or virtually testing the component can be the final way of assessing if your component works. Mechanical testing has been around for a very long time, and modern software has evolved over the years to enable amateurs to run basic simulations of structures (FEA or Finite Element Analysis) and airflows (CFD or Computational Fluid Dynamics or the “virtual wind tunnel”).For the design of the components, stress analyses through finite elements should always be conducted, especially to assess fatigue strength of components. For this, a good knowledge of experienced loads is crucial. The computational simulations should precede the building of prototypes to validate the results obtained. Some components will be design for stiffness rather than strength. If you are planning to participate in a sanctioned race series, the regulations published by the sanctioning body will also form part of the vision for the race vehicle. Although regulations are often seen as limitations, they should also be seen as opportunities, assuming there is leeway in the interpretation of them. Example Objectives/Vision Statements CW) Finding the available brands/models of components and assessing their performance value and cost is next. The goal here is to find “candidates” that would perform as needed and fall within budget. At this stage, the design team should look at the constraints imposed on the vehicle. The constraints are the practical limits within which the team should work on. The primary constraints should be the category technical and sports regulations. The designer must be completely aware of these rules and the limitations imposed by them. Also, it might be the case that costs and work force restrictions are imposed either by regulations, or by a limited budget. One good example is the 2-week shutdown that occurs in Formula 1, due to an agreement done by Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) intended to reduce the costs of running a competitive team. Blender stands out for being one of the highest quality car 3D modeling software – despite being completely free and open source.

The design options available can cater anywhere from just a 'Side' view, all the way up to a complete all round design that includes both sides, front, rear and plan views to cover all possible perspectives of the vehicle livery design. In addition to NURBs, Rhino 3D supports point clouds, polygon meshes, and subdivision geometry. The latest version of the software, Rhino 7, allows you to create organic shapes with a range of SubD tools. Tests are also run on free practice sessions of a race weekend, but in this case, the amount of time available to test is much reduced. During these sessions, the car must comply entirely with the rules, and this restricts the testing of any radical components. Generally the test of new components and evaluation work is done during the Friday morning session, as in most cases, teams will be concentrating on car set-up and race strategy work during the afternoon session and Saturday morning session. At this point, individual parts will begin to be designed. The first step is to incorporate a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) to the component design. In this analysis, several failure modes for a part (or system) are listed, and the design team should arbitrate values to quantify the probability of a specific failure mode to occur, the chance of it being detected and the severity of that particular failure mode (failure consequences). These three parameters will be reflected in a score that represents how relevant a particular failure mode will be, helping to identify in which failures the design team should expend more energy.CW) Using the list of components to be custom fabricated, begin laying out specifications/requirements for those components so that when they are being designed, the specifications are available. CW) Depending on the nature of the racing, having a custom fabricated part instead of one which is off-the-shelf can be a performance advantage. The performance gained needs to be weighed against the additional costs of custom fabrication. A reminder should be made to take into account driver’s seat, feet, knees, sight line and steering wheel position while working out the basic layout of the car. This can always change as the design progresses, but by now, it is possible to have a pretty good idea of the general layout of the chassis, in the form of a series of bulkheads.

The first semester of the first academic year is common with the other 4 curricula of the AAE Master’s Degree (Advanced Powertrain, High Performance Car Design, Advanced Motorcycle Engineering, Advanced Sportscar Manufacturing).Then there’s CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) CAE (computer-aided engineering), such as Autodesk Alias, Solidworks, and CATIA. These are built for creating manufacturable, industrial-grade car designs. These are the most expensive and complex type of car design software and are used by companies like Tesla and Aston Martin. Car design is iterative (that is, requiring repeated re-designs) because with the exception of a few parts on a car, all parts attach to another in some way.

The Design of a vehicle is an iterative process where you attempt to meet all objectives you have defined. In practice, you usually won’t meet all of them, but hopefully most.

Key considerations for this type of design are the restrictions and opportunities created by the regulations and your budget constraints. Rhino 3D isn’t the simplest software to learn, but it does have a very active user community and plenty of learning resources. Finally, as Blender is open source, it also means that coders can customize the program and add new features, which is something you don’t get with other automotive rendering software.