Can CAD?

CAD Modelling This weeks task was to visualise a potential version of our final project through cad. The design is all but guaranteed to change but the objective was to encourage us to play with a number of different programs available to get a sense of what the strengths of each were.

I chose to try out the following: Illustrator, Rhino, OpenSCAD, SketchUp and Inventor.

After a few hours of playing around with each my initial thoughts were:

  • Illustrator - Sweet vector biased fun times. Fairly quick and easy to get into, Layer management becomes more important with more complex designs to help keep everything organised nicely.
  • Rhino - Immensely powerful NURBS biased modelling, Ben gave us a great three part tutorial over the weekend to get the ball rolling.
  • OpenSCAD - Modelling with code makes its easy to have parametric designs straight off the bat.
    OpenSCAD
  • Sketchup - Fairly quick and easy to get into but has a bit of a glass ceiling, construction geometry can become a pain when exporting if not managed. SketchUp
  • Inventor - A fun parametic modeling tool with an amazing suite of features. Supports the importing of size and scale data from other programs to quickly modify paramatric designs.
    Inventor

For my final project I need to create a set of peices that can clip into oneanother. This form will be developed further as part of my final project.

Maybe they will look something like this?

I was really hoping to use Fab Academy as an opportunity to learn solidworks after it was announced at Fab 10 that Dassault Systèmes would be supporting labs running Fab Academy this year. But unfortunately the Dassault guys havnt been able to deliver most of the 53+ labs actually running Fab Academy.

Still keen to try:

Files produced this week
Archived files

Update:

Dassault got solidworks destributed out to the rest of the labs running Fab Academy so im really looking forward to having a play around with it.

I got inkscape setup on my ubuntu install and used it to do some vinyl cutting check out my week 3 post for more details.


Feeling constrained???? :D