Design Case Studies

Jocelyn Barsi - Transportation By Design

Jocelyn Barsi is a product designer, transport designer, interior designer, as well as all-round graphics artist, and his work involves conceiving all types of objects and bringing them to life, starting with his client's specifications.

"I must take into account ergonomics (the relation of the object to the person), feasibility, as well as cost of production, and of course aesthetics. All this goes into the visual identity of the product, into the image that we want to give to the product."

Jocelyn models the project in detail, taking into account design sketches and often importing those from CAD applications and similar, and then using trueSpace to adjust the perspective, lighting, etc in order to give a more interesting image than is possible in a regular CAD application.

The resulting image is then rendered several times with different settings, and further adjusted in 2D image software like Photoshop.

"It is a wonderful way of obtaining something concrete from something while it exists only in the imagination, thanks to the modeling and excellent rendering."

The image above shows a transport design project that Jocelyn created during his studies in 2001 (back then he was using trueSpace5.0). The project is a partnership with the French automobile manufacturer Renault, and the subject was the creation of a 2-wheel "publicity cycle" designed for us in a city environment.

"My choice after observing existing cycles was oriented towards a pizza delivery cycle. I studied and separated the principal functions in order to obtain a pictogram that would serve as a graphic basis for the realization of the new publicity cycle."

In the image above (click for a larger version to see the details), Jocelyn has mixed several renders from trueSpace with real photographs and a variety of 2D processing techniques to give a colorful, dynamic and eye-catching result.

One of the extraordinary things about Jocelyn is the range of looks and styles he can create, exploiting the advantages of working in 3D in many different ways. Sometimes he uses a photo-realistic look for images or parts of images, a style that is 'expected' from 3D imagery.

But that is not the only thing that can be done with 3D, as Jocelyn knows. Often he will recreate a more painted or hand-drawn look, or something more like a cartoon or sketch.

Whichever route Jocelyn takes with his images, the end result is usually something that could not be achieved using only 3D or only 2D alone!

Contact Jocelyn Barsi at Jocelyn.barsi@wanadoo.fr