A few years ago I bought a couch and had it delivered. The store I bought it from used a huge moving truck to drive across town and deliver it to my place. The huge truck was empty other than my couch. This four week project required us to find a problem involving transportation and delivery in our home town and solve it. For me, it seemed as though there could be a much better way to deliver furniture.
Delivering furniture efficiency was the main goal for this vehicle. Costs for the furniture seller would be kept low if the vehicle delivered furniture as quickly as possible, using the least amount of energy and needed only one human to load, unload and drive the vehicle if possible. Another goal was to not only replace the moving truck, but also replace the forklift back in the warehouse with the same vehicle. The original concepts focused on eliminating the need for a forklift by including a sort of arm that would lift the furniture as well as hold it during transport. This concept was streamlined into the one shown below which used a movable cargo platform.
After making the initial concept sketches, this was a great project to bring into Gravity Sketch. The power of Gravity Sketch is working out a 3D form from 2D sketches very quickly. Using the 2D sketches as a reference, I started with a wireframe in Gravity Sketch as seen in the below screen shots.
After building the wireframe and being happy with a rough volume, the next step is to begin creating the surfaces. I use the sub-division surfaces in Gravity Sketch. Sub-D allows to quickly iterate. Another advantage of Gravity Sketch vs. modeling with clay or foam, is I can work on all parts at once, blocking them in without having to rely on any physical limitations of the structure.
A full 3D model can be created in a matter of hours. The next step is to get this into Keyshot for some renders and with very little time I can go from a sketch idea to a proportional fully resolved 3D model.
In this case, the vehicle exists in two states. One loading cargo and one in transportation mode. Leveraging the Gravity Sketch model can be used to quickly visualize both.
