Computer Assisted Design : 03 February

The introductory lecture gave some ideas on the design philosopies we follow conventioanlly in our design tables. Being a product designer all my life, i was quite comfortable with the tools shared except Antimony. The idea of interfacing CSG with Graph engine is super useful to follow an ordely visual language by keeping a fine line between f-rep and b-rep functionalities.

The idea of this week is to experiment with a rapid software prototyping tool for your designs. This will help us to draw or code our designs in multiple ways.

My Objective

  • Experiment with different CAD tools.
  • Find an end to end design package for 3d models, probably with scripting support.
  • Design a nested pattern.
  • Design and model draft of final project.

My Experience

There is a wide range of tools available in the syllabus to explore. Check out here : http://academy.cba.mit.edu/classes/computer_design/index.html

The tools include both 2D and 3D content creation, manipulation built with different philosophical foundations.

I started from Antimony perspective. Played a bit with the mac version. This is a great tool to learn, teach and draw physical objects using mathematical modelling techniques. I am sure, if i got a chance to interact with this in my school days, my understanding on mathematical modelling would have been much much better. But more or less, i am enjoying it. I decided to play with few of my artistic thoughts and design some jewellery.

I started with an idea of a ring. Used few of the tools and made the progress. Its so playful using its graph engine, so that the entry barrier for artists would be much lesser than conventional CAD tools.

I first made a torus and then added a single text to it. I added my first letter p and made this. You can download the script and edit the letter to yours and make your own personal customised ring.

Design Files can be downloaded from here.

Antimony script of this ring : Ring Script

Stl for 3D printing : Ring STL

Cura GCode : Cura Gcode

I was happy that i could finish the ring with a decent design. I am planning to make it refined for my personal use cases.

Final Project : I used Fusion 360 to do the basic cad modelling of final project. Fusion 360 is an end to end solution pack to sketch, design, simulate, render and make in with a machine. I like the ease of use and cloud connectivity option. I was totally stranger when it comes to use a 3d software. I have designed many products, customised different product ideas etc interacting with Product Design/Industrial Design guys. When I started to draw 3D model of my design, a different sense of challenge was forming up internally. Still i guess, i made a quite a good streak.

I started with drawing a sketch of how my design should look. The 2D sketch was drawn freestyle and then extruded for further design changes. Later i found this approach may not give best results in first time. So I switched back to the conventional approach of building on top of primitives. You can look at the way how i did the final assembly.

Model

The files are listed here :

Handy_draft_V1 : Iges | Handy_draft_V1 : F360 | Handy_2d : Iges

My project is a dual arm robot platform to be our personal assistant in our repetetive tasks. I decided to make a conceptual model which gives a close call to the idea i have. Fusion 360 is effective for a quick design prototyping. But getting use to the tools will take some time for a newbie user.

Creo is a great tool for optimising industrial manufacturing designs. I am exploring more of this to understand and optimize the workflow in CAD-CAM in a single package. Did few simple designs and assemblies to get familiar to the concepts in traditional CAD package. Will explore more and share.

OpenSCAD is a great tool for parametric designing. I am exploring this also to teach artists and other creative enthusiasts. Did few designs for pattern ripping and pattern embedding in utitlity designs andartifacts.

Unreal is a great platform for Game design. What i found more interesting is the use case for VR development. I installed in Mac, downloaded 5.3 GB file and it suggests to have 8GB ram minimum. I think the push VR lies in optimum design package within affordable computing power. I am bullish on AR/VR as the next significant user based computational tools after personal computer and mobile.

I tried to write something in unreal, but i should say not an easy way to learn it. iwill continue my experiments in unity also in a while.

My Insights

Create a mental blueprint of your design before sketching it in any software.

Convert them into a combination of primitives like circles, cubes, cones etc to begin the designing.

Setup a windows machine as your personal designing system. It helps yoou from switching between linux, windows and mac for different packages. It reduces the time management activities.