Grab your mallets, it time to get wacky with the makers of Whac-A-Mole!
SolidBox recently completed a sale to Bob’s Space Racers Inc. of Daytona Beach, FL. If you’ve been to any Chuck-E-Cheese, Dave & Busters, or pretty much ANY amusement park, then you’ve seen their stuff in action. They manufacture a ton of amusement games such as the aforementioned Whac-A-Mole, Water Blast, as well as some interesting new products designed in SolidWorks.
Tony Amos, the Product Development Engineer, tells us a little bit more about how they’re using 3D CAD to help their company develop products, and how SolidBox is helping their company’s bottom line:
SB – How long have you been using SolidWorks?
Tony – “Since 2006. Before that we used 2D systems.”
SB – What’s one of the biggest challenges you face in designing games? How has using 3D CAD helped?
Tony – “One of the biggest challenges in designing games is the amount of change that you have to accomodate from the revisions. 3D CAD helps this by making it easy to make the changes and subsequently implementing them into production. 3D helps in that we can go from Solidworks directly to our CNC equipment using Feature Recognition and Feature CAM. This ability alone helped us to eliminate one person of head count and about three steps in the manufacturing process. [It also] helps in that it’s easier to show management the game concepts in 3D than to just use a picture from Photoshop. A lot of time the games start out as a 2D Photoshop picture. Then once it’s rendered in 3D you can add dimension and depth to those photos and quickly generate detailed drawings.”
SB – Why did you decide to go with SolidBox?
Tony – “It was a best buy and it saved worked on the installation of the program. In addition it was a setup that we knew would work with Solidworks.”
Here was the system we hooked them up with:
- Creative Desktop L1
- Dell Precision T3500
- Quad-Core Extreme 2.13GHz Processor
- 4GB RAM
- 320GB Hard Drive
- 512MB Quadro FX 580 Graphics Card
- 3-Year Parts & Labor Warranty Included
- MS Office Small Business 2007
- Windows 7 Pro 64bit Downgrade to XP Pro 64bit
- SolidWorks 2008 x64 Client Installation with Latest Service Pack including configuration
Be sure to check out more of what Bob’s Space Racers has to offer.