The Trike from Australia’s Strike Motors will turn heads when it comes to market next year. Design+Industry made visualization a key part of the design pipeline.

Australian designers Design+Industry (D+I) have picked up on Modo 501 as a design tool. The company says they tried out Modo when their clients asked them for features they couldn’t do with the tools they had, says industrial designer Ben Carroll.  D+I use Modo in the conceptual stage of projects. They’ll use sketches to come up with several concepts and use Modo to create quick 3D surface models to produce rendered images for their clients to review. As the design moves through the process D+I is able to work back and forth with SolidWorks, importing native files when needed, and if 3D models are desired, they can be created from Modo as well. Modo also comes into play at the end of the process when D+I is ready to create marketing images and animations. They also rely on Modo for marketing presentations and product packaging.

Strike Motors hired Design+Industry to develop a manufacturable design for a three-wheeled high performance vehicle. The Trike design D+I came up with is decidedly cool. It’s half-car and half-motorcycle and seats two people. Design+Industry developed the conceptualization of the car in Modo using the specs provided by Trike. For the Trike design, D+I used Modo as a conceptualization tool with SolidWorks and they also used Luxology’s modules, the Product Auto Design Kit (PAD) and the Studio Environment Kit (SES 1) to create visualizations.

You can see a video of the Trike in action here.

Carroll says the 3D modeling and rendering tools in Modo 501 make it easy to make changes and tweak design ideas on the fly. “Clients can iteratively review our designs and make decisions on the direction of the final product early on in the process, saving us both time and money.”

The Trike will be ready for production in 2012.