When European Space Agency (ESA) experts wanted to see what the ion engine designed for the SMART-1 mission to the Moon would finally look like, they turned to a French start-up company: News’UProduction.
The result was an image of an engine still at the drawing board stage that united accuracy with texture and colour to give a very realistic impression of the engine’s final appearance.
Jean-Luc Atteleyn, photographer and CEO of News’UProduction says: “We managed to produce high quality and realistic images and animations of the engine based upon classical 3D design drawings. This was carried out in close collaboration with the design studio at SNECMA, the company responsible for producing the ion engine.”
In addition to using the 3D drawings, Atteleyn and his partner Patrick Callet, a teacher at Ecole Centrale in
The database stores the optical behaviour and visual appearance of materials together with other characteristics and physical properties. The visual appearance is described using the standards defined by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE), making it easier to compare different materials as the descriptions are objective and not subjective.
“Our database allows the user to visualise the optical behaviour of a material in normal pre-defined conditions and modify the visual appearance of an object by modifying the composition of the material,” explains Callet.
“In the future it could be possible to create new materials by mixing existing materials, each with its own known properties. New materials could be identified by criteria such as lighting, colour and iridescence, or on mechanical properties such as water and thermal resistance, hardness and durability. This ‘material composer’ could meet industrial needs to combine several end-product requirements with final appearance.”
Marc Van Eesbeek, head of ESA’s Materials Physics and Chemistry Section, foresees more possible uses for the News’UProduction technique once it is fully matured: “We could, for example, define the thermal-optical properties of materials in the UV and infrared frequency band.”