Freeride Ski Grips for K2

The Pillar Design team has been working diligently with K2 Ski for some time now and they just released the Freeride Ski Grip that we assisted in developing with them. This complex 3D form exhibits some mind-blowing surface modeling. It is a three piece over-molded grip with some very intense texture treatments and complex ergonomic surfaces. We built a few different versions of this model using SolidWorks 2013. The asymmetrical shaping on this product was a definite challenge, but the final product turned out great and closely resembled our initial concepts.

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It would be really cool to see the case study for the project.

Looks great! Were all the textures done in SW? It seems like you’d have to, but I can’t imagine it was easy. Could you tell us what method you used to wrap them in SW?

It would be really cool to see the case study for the project.

Yeah, otherwise it’s coming off as SPAM. Especially for a first-time post.
Look, the idea behind the “Projects” forum is for folks to present their projects in their entirety; ideation sketches, prototypes, materials investigations, etc…

Typical of many first-time posters, I’m sure you did not bother to read the Discussion Board Posting Standards,

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This appears to be primarily a surface design project. Typically this is a first or second year college assignment to explore 3D form. For a professional firm, based only on what’s shown, this is a 1/2 to 2 day project, maybe a 3rd day to clean up prototypes or presentation sketches.

Your work is fine but not mind blowing; Teague’s complete aircraft interior, Yo’s earbud’s, the Dyson award winner fish net light, those are mind blowing, this ski pole grip surface design would receive a fair to excellent mark in 2nd year design studio.

Please provide some process details, surface design can be infinite.

Rather harsh. Hitting the first time poster with questions about intentions (spam) and then a critique seems like it is not going to extend the conversation.

The ski grips are nice texture work, I’d also like to see the process and the technique of modeling and molding. I’m sure I’d learn something.

Bad day?

They didn’t say that the project is mind blowing - only that the surface modelling is. Now perhaps your work is finished when you do some cleaned up sketches, but they have shown a manufactured product. If you can do production-ready CAD for 3 pieces of 3K assymetric handles with custom non-uniform wrap-around texture, in 1/2 day - my mind would actually be blown.

Rather harsh. Hitting the first time poster with questions about intentions (spam)



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When new members do not read the posting standard before they make their first post, they need to be informed of what is considerate behavior. That’s all I’m saying.

Too harsh?

Pillardesign in their signature, absolutely acceptable.

Sorry if it came off as SPAM. We are simply excited about this and other projects and wanted to share them with people through as many mediums as possible. Thank you for informing us of this inappropriate behavior; we will be sure to be mindful of this in future posts.

Thanks for your comment.

After creating the basic form, we offset the surfaces. From there, we created numerous planes which we extruded the texture from. We then used the offset surface to do a surface cut and obtain a consistent thickness around the grip.

We would love to hear if anyone has another technique for this.



Ah, so nothing too fancy, just a lot of pain in the a$$ coordination of the shapes between planes. Sometimes brute force is the way to go.

Another way you might be able to do it is by creating a cylinder at the handle’s general angle with a diameter just inside the narrowest part and using the emboss mode of the wrap tool to create your shapes. Then use the offset surfaces to trim as you’ve done. The advantage of that is you’d have all the shapes in one sketch (or maybe two if you couldn’t get the overlap right on the backside), but you might get some unwanted distortion as the shape bends around the cylinder. Then again, you get distortion anyway so maybe it wouldn’t matter.