Case Study: Nikon cuts design time by two-thirds and achieves photorealistic renders with Dassault Systèmes' CATIA

CATIA enables Nikon to speed through the design process

Nikon faced a bottleneck: its 2D camera design workflow made it difficult for designers to communicate and refine complex free‑form surfaces and provide tooling-ready 3D data to the Mold Tool department. To give designers an intuitive, self‑service 3D CAD tool, Nikon adopted CATIA V5 from Dassault Systemes so designers could model, evaluate and modify shapes directly.

Dassault Systemes’ CATIA V5 delivered powerful surface and solid modeling, real‑time rendering and feature‑based editing so Nikon designers could make fine adjustments down to 0.1 mm and generate tooling‑ready data. The result: elimination of mold rework, mock‑ups reduced to 3–4 iterations, and design lead time cut to one‑third (a two‑thirds time reduction), improving product quality and competitiveness while enabling future use of 3D data in marketing.

Nikon

Akira Nojima

Executive Staff, Industrial Design Department, Imaging Company