ROBRADY design stresses a comprehensive speed-to-market plan by collaborating to identify the greatest areas of opportunity and producing profitable product solutions.

ROBRADY delivers design, production, and capital solutions to its clients in support of their research-to-reality philosophy.Chaos Group provides state of the art rendering solutions for architectural, VFX, film, media and entertainment, automotive design, television and other industries.

What more can you tell us about the ROBRADY work environment? Do you work as a team or individually? Do you work in a big open space or in separate offices ? Is ROBRADY a fun place to work?
ROBRADY is an incredible place to work, and a lot of that comes from the open environment. There are no walls between the departments, industrial designers work across the aisle from the mechanical designers, which promotes the collaborative process. All projects are worked on as a team, with industrial and mechanical designers contributing at all design stages.

THE INSPIRATION
Who worked on the DBO Electric Folding Bicycle project and what is their experience in both the industry and with ROBRADY?
The concept work was a collaboration between the Design Director Rob Brady, Senior Industrial Designer Erik Holmen, Industrial Designers Andre Minoli and Antonio Molinari, and Senior Mechanical Designer David Poirier. Each designer has extensive experience in the transportation and power sports industries and has been with ROBRADY for several years. While ROBRADY has been active in this market space for decades, this was the first complete bicycle project for the team. Once the concept level 3D models were completed, they were handed off to partner DK City’s team of production engineers for the next phase.

How did the DBO Electric Folding Bicycle idea originate ? Why was it chosen as a project for ROBRADY? And how/why did DK City and ROBRADY team up for this project?
The relationship between DK City and ROBRADY was put together by an expert in the electric bicycle field – he believed that the two companies would make a great team. The DBO bike project simply started out as an exercise to design a new folding electric bicycle DK’s expanding lineup of products.

From idea to physical product, how long did this project take to create?
The industrial design phase for ROBRADY starting in May 2009, and completed in August of 2009. There were some production design modifications that took place through January 2010.

THE BACKSTAGE EXPERIENCE
How did ROBRADY use V-Ray for Rhino in this project? Why did you choose V-Ray to visualize this project? And how did V-Ray help in the production?
ROBRADY uses V-Ray for Rhino in all rendering animation applications. The quality level of the renderings is a huge asset when communicating a design to the client. Once of the nicest features of V-Ray is the ability to launch DRSpawner on multiple networked machines in the studio, drastically cutting down on render time.

What was the biggest challenge in creating the DBO Electric Folding Bicycle?
The biggest challenge centered around the folding aspect of the folding bicycle. We wanted to make a design that, at a distance, looked like a folding bike. But you have to work very carefully to make the design function and articulate correctly. It took close collaboration between ID and MD to make sure the concept was groundbreaking but feasible for production.

How long has the team at ROBRADY been using V-Ray for Rhino?
The V-Ray software has been the sole render engine at ROBRADY for about 4 years.

CUSTOMER BENEFITS
Will you share some of the V-Ray settings you used in the DBO Electric Folding Bicycle studio images?
Absolutely, the settings we use are actually very simple. We start with the standard high quality setting, and set the lighting and reflection maps to a studio HDRI environment. This is the regular setup for most renderings the studio does. We will sometimes change the lighting/reflection map depending on the subject matter, but when rendering products and vehicles, I rarely have to change the core settings.

What V-Ray features did you find most useful when rendering the DBO Electric Folding Bicycle?
The ability to map reflections and lighting is extremely useful, but the distributed rendering has to be the best feature as it has saved us countless hours of render time. The ability to use the engine with the Bongo animation plug-in was huge in communicating the folding qualities of the bike.

What are some upcoming projects in which you will rely on V-Ray for rendering?
Every project that enters the studio requiring a 3D model will be rendered with V-Ray.

As seen on the Chaos Group website. Chaos Group provides state of the art rendering solutions for architectural, VFX, film, media and entertainment, automotive design, television and other industries.

ROBRADY was represented by Michael Spieckermann and Claus Fischer of Innovative Bikes (db0 distributors) located in Ludenscheid, Germany. Innovative Bikes distributes the db0 throughout Germany and neighboring countries. Their website is http://www.innovativebikes.de.

The Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany is the country‘s highest distinction in the field of design. It is known as the “Prize of Prizes”. This year, the organizers of the Design Award of the Federal Republic of announced a record number of entries – over 1,500 products were submitted for the competition. 25 winners in the product design category and 24 winners in the communication design category received the Design Award.

ROBRADY is well known for their design prowess in the electric scooter and super bike world, but this is their first foray into the electric bicycle market. Fritz Maffry of the Dynamo Group, who is currently reviewing the db0 3.0 for North American distribution, sees the bike as a breakthrough, with the “same caliber of design DNA as products from Apple or Sony”. Maffry has been reviewing the bike and commented that “a crowd gathered when we were on our test drives” and feels that ROBRADY and DK City succeeded in elevating the design game in electric bicycle market. The Dynamo Group, which specializes in commercializing breakthrough light electric products, is keeping an eye out for future collaborations of ROBRADY and DK City – as Maffry states: “Can’t wait to see what they have coming next”.

ROBRADY has several interactive displays planned for their booth this year. In addition to the db0 folding bicycle, they will be featuring their XTools floating fishing equipment, Identity Stronghold Secure Sleeves, and the Vectrix VX-1 Maxi Scooter. They will be reaching out to technology companies to offer design, production and capital solutions. Dickie Herbst, Director of New Ventures for ROBRADY, will be available Friday morning at the booth and is looking forward to meeting with technology groups in the Tampa Bay area. Matt Leiter, Director of ROBRADY capital, will be available Friday afternoon as well.

CoolTECH, hosted by the Tampa Bay Technology Forum, is annual event featuring a display of interactive experiences designed to showcase the coolest technology coming out of the Tampa Bay region and beyond. Attendees check out cutting edge technology, gain insight from industry leaders and take part in interactive voting for the coolTECH Awards. The event attracts hundreds of attendees from the technology and business community and has something for everyone including industry leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and students. CoolTECH 2010 will take place June 4 at MOSI in Tampa.

ROBRADY design is a multi-disciplined product design and development studio that offers its multinational client base—including General Electric, Mercedes-Benz, Dell Computers, Parker Hannifin, AT&T, Merial and Volvo Penta—progressive industrial design, mechanical design and engineering, graphics /packaging / GUI / web and eCommerce design, market research, brand and retail development, complete rapid prototyping and production program management. ROBRADY design stresses comprehensive speed-to-market product solutions by collaborating to identify the greatest areas of opportunity and producing innovative designs to deliver profitable product solutions. ROBRADY delivers design, production and capital solutions to their clients in support of their research to reality philosophy.

While ROBRADY is well known for their design prowess in the electric scooter and super bike world, this is their first foray into the electric bicycle market. ROBRADY’s CEO / Design Director Robert Brady said his team “took a white page look” at the opportunity and set out to design a series of bikes that would be instantly recognized as the next generation in folding bikes:

“The three new db0 bikes embody our mission to design a series of clean, bold, and innovatively simple folding bikes. Our design work promotes the folding mechanism as an integrated piece of the design- a ‘focal point’ that adds visual value to the bike design unlike it has ever been done before. We don’t hide the fact that these bikes fold- we have made it a distinguished characteristic of the series”

Several features of the bike are currently in patent process. DK City, who will be the exclusive manufacturers of the bicycle series, is also taking a fresh approach to the build, incorporating unique manufacturing processes that will deliver a bicycle of superior craftsmanship. The partnership is planning several future projects beyond this series of bicycles.

DK City Corporation was founded in 1987 and is headquartered in Taichung, Taiwan with an additional facility in Shanghai, China.  They employ 1500 people and have an annual sales volume of US $400 million. They are committed to innovating, designing and manufacturing technologically advanced and environmentally friendly products. Known for their sophisticated fitness equipment, massage chairs, and recreational electric scooters and golf carts, DK City has recently expanded into the pollution-free electrical bicycle and motorcycle market. This expansion is driven by their desire to protect and preserve the planet for future generations.