The concept of Quality appeared in the beginning of the 90's. Quality procedures.
Quality meeting. Quality control. Quality expert...Before, we just used to try to do the job well.
Anyway. In surfacing, Quality is not just words, it has an actual meaning.
In fact, it's the major requirement with the deadline.
In the begining, our main focus was avoiding any gap and break beetwen patches and keeping the distance between our surfaces and the points cloud below 0.2mm.
The global control of shape continuity beetwen patches and main surface quality was done visually with plotted sections.
In 1996, our client PSA introduced a new quality requirement : CURVATURE.
According to this criteria, all our precedent jobs would have been rejected!
We first regarded it as an excess of theoretical quality asked by people who just
look at numbers without really knowing the job. But we had to comply with.
When I arrived at Renault in 1997, I believed I had the good level
of quality for the job...But no! Curvature was not enough. I was told about
CURVATURE TANGENCY.
Just having the same curvature value at the connexion beetwen 2 curves
or patches is not enough. The way these values evolves afterward is also important.
Accordingly and smoothly.