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For Tait Towers, AutoCAD Rocks
17 Mar, 2011 By: David CohnComplex and spectacular concert sets emerge
from a 3D AutoCAD–based workflow.
People go to the show because they love the music, but audience members at today's rock concerts are equally blown away by the elaborate staging — moving video screens, rotating stage platforms, and as much pyrotechnics as a Fourth of July fireworks display. Choose any artist from U2 to Lady Gaga. Chances are that all of the staging was designed and built by the same small company — Tait Towers — and every element of those complex stages was designed using AutoCAD.
Tait Towers, the premier touring entertainment company in the world, has designed stages for almost every artist touring today, including rock band Bon Jovi's The Circle Tour. (Image courtesy of Tait Towers.)
Founded in 1978, the company gets its name from one of the first self-contained lighting towers used in the concert industry. Michael Tait, lighting engineer for the rock group Yes, designed the towers in the early 1970s, and everyone started calling them Tait Towers. The name stuck. Tait figured out that touring shows not only needed good lighting that could be assembled quickly; they also needed good roadworthy stages and sets. Today, the company designs and constructs entire concert productions from the most unassuming location imaginable, a small town nestled in the verdant Amish farmlands of eastern Pennsylvania. Yet for more than 30 years, rock superstars have come to Livitz, Pennsylvania, because Tait Towers is unquestionably the premier touring entertainment company in the world.
It All Starts in 3D in AutoCAD
According to Tyler Kicera, the company's director of design, a band typically hires a designer who is responsible for the concept: what a show is going to look like. "That designer will come to us with anything from a napkin sketch to models," Kicera said. A small team at Tait Towers will then help the designer develop that idea into a modular system that can be built and sent out on the road. "We'll take that designer's sketch, and step number one is to get it roughly drawn in AutoCAD in 3D," using generic versions of the company's standard components.
"From there, we continue to develop the ideas. We send drawings back and forth between the designer and ourselves. And the designer is showing those drawings to the artists and getting their approvals." Kicera says that the process can happen very quickly. For example, one of Tait Towers' recent projects was The Circle Tour for the rock band Bon Jovi. The band's production designer contacted Tait Towers with his initial ideas just a few months before the concert tour was scheduled to begin. Within a few days, the team at Tait Towers had a finished concept ready to go. Kicera and his team then moved the 3D AutoCAD model to Autodesk 3ds Max Design software and produced renderings that showed how the stage would look. Those renderings were then reviewed by the production designer as well as lead singer Jon Bon Jovi.
After designing the stage for The Circle Tour in 3D using AutoCAD, the team at Tait Towers produced renderings in 3ds Max Design to help Jon Bon Jovi and his production designer visualize the completed concept. (Image courtesy of Tait Towers.)
Tait Towers designers take advantage of the integration between AutoCAD and 3ds Max Design to create high-quality renderings almost seamlessly. Being able to share near-realistic renderings with the performing artists has reduced their review cycles to half the time it used to take.
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