Camira chats with CAD agency owner, Diane Butterworth

Your company, Diane Butterworth, now supports a number of key suppliers and manufacturers in the office industry, could you tell us a little bit about how you got involved in the world of CAD? What drew you to specialise in this increasingly important part of design? 

I was first introduced to CAD over 10 years ago in my first year of university. I studied product design and, as a form of communicating my ideas, it was fantastic. I can’t draw by hand, so the pragmatic approach of a computer fits my style really well.

I became a space planner in 2011. Back then, I felt designs often lacked individuality as it was rare that a manufacturer had their products available as a digital file, meaning generic models were used and slightly altered in space to ensure the footprint was correct. As for 3D, it was rare, to say the least. 

With the BIM level 2 government mandate coming into focus in 2016, specific models became more of a requirement than a luxury. This gap in the market was the spark I needed to start my own business, designed to offer manufacturers support in creating digital versions of their products.

You've created tileable images of Camira textiles for a number of years, allowing customers to realistically depict furniture upholstery within their 3D renders. Could you tell us a little bit about what it means for a fabric to be 'tileable'? How do you go about creating these images?

If an image is tileable, it means you cannot see a seam between repeats of the image. Say you wanted to see what an entire chair would look like covered in a certain textile; using a small textile sample risks low image quality resulting in distortion, at worst even missing the full repeat of the pattern on the sample. We create the majority of Camira samples at 13.5 cm, meaning the image is easy to duplicate across the surface without risking distortion or cutting off the pattern.

To transform a physical sample into a digital version, it is either scanned or photographed under controlled lighting. The image is then edited to remove shadowing, amend distorting, fix anomalies in the weave and colour correct. To ensure the image is truly seamless, we then load it into CAD and wrap it around both a screen and sofa. 

3D visualisation has become an expectation within the industry, so having access to high-quality tileable images is incredibly important. It’s the final asset that can take a design from a concept to real life.