Interview with aircraft manufacturer - how to prepare?

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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Hey all,

I am hoping to get some advice on how to impress a potential employer in an interview scheduled this Friday with a large aircraft manufacturer.
The position is called: Engineering Specialist - Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in Research & Technology.

Now I am very comfortable in Unreal and VR dev but I do not have any experience using game engines in any engineering or design contexts. The first qualification listed is: You have 3-5 years of experience in managing data for complex product lifecycle, in particular CAD data.

My plan is to start with two Unreal Online Learning courses: Preparing Engineering Data and Getting Started With Datasmith.

Beyond that I can’t find any example projects to play around with. The best I have are a few Youtube webinars like this: VR and AR for Design Review | Webinar | Unreal Engine - YouTube

Any engineers in here that could tell me how to practice with CAD data in Unreal? I have all week to prepare.

Thanks

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Hello,

the way I understand the first line is having experience on how big manufacturing firms manage their data in-house. Those companies needs to store engineering data about several planes family, with different variants, and updates over the years. It is about:

  • PLM systems
  • how data is produced, stored, updated, shared, ingested, synchronised, pass through the different teams of the company

They are different PLM tools on the market as well as different tools for CAD data creation both in engineering and design.
=> I would try to get familiar with what set of tools is used at the company you apply for. How they are used and by which teams.

3D and VR are end of line for these companies, so it is a lot about how these new tools integrate themselves in the existing PLM without causing too many disruptions.
You are correct with the links you are listing, a lot of work on the UE side is:

  • ingesting the data
  • optimizing data for your usage: high frame rate VR, high tessellation for design shape reviews, simple geometry in large scene for factory reviews
    => any resources you can find on data preparation and datasmith

Regarding integration with existing PLM, UE gives tools to ingest CAD data in an easy and automated fashion. However, a dedicated integration in a PLM system is not available as different systems exist and even companies using the same tool will organise their data in a different way.

You can download some CAD files on some online website to practise CAD ingestion in datasmith, however you will not find dataset that are similar to what manufacturing companies are producing.

For culture on UE in manufacturing industry, you can read some of this document that looks at usage at high level. It is automotive focused but some thoughts or descriptions applies to the aircraft industry: engineering, production lines, design, project reviews, use of AR/VR.

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Thanks for this!! Appreciate it.