Picture the Perfect Package

Not just for the movies

CPCs tend to be conservative about the adoption of new technologies, explains Robert Ziegler, president of Brandimation, LLC, developers of the Formview Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) system. “You saw 3D CAD emerge primarily for aircraft and automotive applications in the mid-1980s, with companies like Mercedes spending millions of dollars for 3D CAD systems. In that context, it was used primarily for part assembly visualization where you could see the structures—how and where one thing fit into another thing—but you weren’t worried about photorealistic or material qualities.” During the 90s, the same technology began to be applied to Hollywood special effects in the wholly visual world of movies like The Terminator, “where they don’t care whether the structure corresponds to any physical reality,” Ziegler says. “So now we have this engineering world, where we develop structures, and this Hollywood world, and along comes the desktop publishing revolution with the graphics people in the middle. Nobody has really tied all three things together.”