Car Styling: A CAD Approach to Identify, Extract and Interpret Characteristic Lines

Abstract

To create a winning brand, the stylist, aesthetic designer, and company managers should continuously innovate without straying from the brand's car history, and they should use the country's culture as a value system and as background inspiration. In this context, the proposed approach assumes that aesthetic judgments related to the country identity of the car, rely on the car's important (primitive) characteristics lines, which have been considered foundational and necessary to make this determination. The issue is then to identify, extract and to interpret these characteristic lines. The proposed approach is based on two important hypotheses. The first hypothesis, called the singularities hypothesis, stipulates that the singularities can be used to identify the characteristic lines in cars’ style. The second hypothesis, called primitives hypothesis, stipulates that cars of different brands, with their specific style, can be used in order to identify and extract characteristic styling primitives. Three spaces have been defined: the stylist space, the CAD space and the interpretation-emotional space. The CAD approach for identification and extraction of characteristic lines has been implemented in CAD environment. The approach has been applied to the identification, extraction and characterization of characteristic lines of French cars as well as the German cars. The application has shown a geometrical difference between the French characteristic lines and the German characteristic lines.