You’re driving through town. You hit something. You look back. Fortunately, it wasn’t old Miss Martin and her dog. You’ve hit a Sentinel Linsign 300 Visibol. What’s that? Only one of Leafield Environmental’s highly sustainable, 100% recyclable Polyethylene sign bollards. Leafield Highway division, based out of Corsham, Wiltshire, UK, designs and manufactures passive safety products, barriers and storage bins used in highway applications. They have a huge range of colour and customization options, and best of all they’re showing off those options using KeyShot. Simon Wilson with the Leafield Environmental Design Department fills us in on how they’re using it to bring in the orders before manufacturing has even begun.
We use Solid Edge for all our 3D modeling and technical drawing here. Before KeySshot came along we would use the Solid Edge virtual studio rendering and Alias Image Studio.
I think one of the main benefits of using KeyShot for our marketing is we are able to produce literature while we’re still having tooling made for the new product. So we don’t have to wait for a first real moulded sample to photograph – we can get a rendering done quickly and use this to show the new product and start getting orders in for when the tooling is ready.
Another major benefit as a made-to-order manufacturer – we can show variants of our products very easily where as before we would have to mould something specially and then photograph it. The highways brochure shows examples of this – different sign faces and banding options are shown to give an idea of how we can customize the product to suit. Very often we get requests from our customers to create a visual of one of our products with custom labels and colours and this can now be achieved with KeyShot.
We have used rendering software in the past, but these were time consuming to produce and you wouldn’t know how good the rendering would be until you hit “render” and waited a couple of hours! With KeyShot we can see how good the rendering is going to look in real time, and the easy learning curve has meant we have quickly been able to introduce the software to both design and marketing departments.
Here’s an example of how Leafield is using KeyShot in their marketing material. With the range of materials and options provided in KeyShot, they’re able to show more variation and customization for their entire product line. Solid Applications are the Siemens PLM Velocity series resellers that assist Leafield with Solid Edge.
