BVM Butterfly

BVM manufacture high-performance butterfly valves for demanding flow control applications — oil and gas, chemical processing, marine systems. Their engineering team had a new valve design with a novel disc geometry that outperformed the previous generation in both flow coefficient and seal longevity. The problem was that the performance advantage was entirely internal. No photograph of the exterior casing communicated why this valve was better. They needed an animation that showed the inside.

We ingested the SolidWorks assembly and rebuilt the disc, stem, and seat geometry in Houdini. The hero sequence is a cross-section cut through the valve body that follows the disc rotation from fully closed through to fully open, showing the flow path evolving as the disc moves. A secondary sequence shows the seat seal under pressure — a fluid simulation at the contact zone that communicates sealing performance without requiring the viewer to read a tolerance table.

The animation became BVM's primary exhibition asset, running on their stand at the offshore energy trade show in Hamburg and subsequently embedded in their product datasheet suite. Their sales director told us it was the first time they had been able to demonstrate the internal geometry to a client without bringing a physical cut-away sample.