CAD - Computer Aided Dilemma?

[MikeK]

I think this is the best explanation of the differences between the two systems.

 

[Yojevol]

No, no, Droogs you've got it all wrong. They gave me one, well not exactly 'gave ', I actually paid money for it . I thought I had put that memory to rest. Now I've gotta process it all again. Another night of disturbed sleep.
Thanks a lot

 

[Bodone]

80's automotive, piston design, we were always 1st for iso/europe and 3rd for US/Japan. Moved to 3d, ME10/ME30/Calma/ProE/ etc and it didn't matter so much as it was all straight to CAM and inspection by co-ordinate measurement machines. Moved to prototype tools room and we always took our own sections/models.

For design reviews we’ll often use 3d prints, especially where we’ll have a none engineering audience. Never anything in wood though, or for aesthetics, which is why I find woods complex and what you lot do amazing.

 

[Neil S]

My Tec drawing teacher described the difference as:
3rd angle is you look at the object and draw what you see.
1st angle is you look at the object and you project what you see to the other side.

-Neil

 

[Harvey B Davison]

Hi, I keep trying my hand at cad drawing using autocad but find it very frustrating, probably because I don't use it that often. I also became semi proficient in using sketchup, which I really like, but again don't use it often. So I normally end up sketching/ drawing plans out because I find it quicker and easier. Plus I'm old fashioned and love using graph paper to make scaling things a lot easier. Cheers.

 

[J-G]

Hi, I keep trying my hand at cad drawing using autocad but find it very frustrating, probably because I don't use it that often. I also became semi proficient in using sketchup, which I really like, but again don't use it often. So I normally end up sketching/ drawing plans out because I find it quicker and easier. Plus I'm old fashioned and love using graph paper to make scaling things a lot easier. Cheers.

Similarly, I find AutoCAD frustrating and do all my 3D work in SketchUp, I suggest that you get a less than current version of CorelDRAW! via that well known 'Auction' site. Any version from 11 up would do - mine is X5 and it does all I need. I'm sure you'll find it much more to your liking than any of the 'CAD' programs.

 

[Sgian Dubh]

Reviving an old thread, but just an update on my exploration of drawing using Fusion 360. Basically, I'm getting better, but I'm quite some way shy of competent. One of the challenges I set myself was to try and execute a decent drawing of a cabriole leg. I still haven't worked out a really good and quick way of doing it, and it involves a mixture of techniques called lofting and extruding after having sketched the basic profile. Whatever I try to do it's always fiddly and time consuming, and I can draw cabriole legs by hand in almost no time compared, although I'm no great artist.

Anyway, my best effort up to this point at that particular challenge is this image below, one on which I even managed to include ears at the inner corners between the leg and the rail - I hadn't managed that before:

​

Close to forty years ago I made a set of twelve of the chairs shown below, and decided I'd try and draw a chair based on it in Fusion 360, with my results below the image of the real chair. I only chose to draw something like this chair because of the challenge, and not because I've any particular interest in building more of them.

In conclusion (at this stage anyway) I've always found computer generated presentation drawings technically accurate, assuming they're drawn accurately of course, but they're often a bit lifeless or come across as they're kidding on they're a photograph of the built item. Good hand drawn presentation drawings are, I generally find, visually more interesting and characterful reflecting to some extent the personality of the designer. Both presentation methods have their place - a pretty mild conclusion on my part, I think, ha ha. Slainte.

I got the rendering of the above image a bit wrong. As can be seen the chair seems to magically float in mid-air. Once rendered though, I couldn't be bothered going back, correcting the floating, and re-rendering. However, after cocking up the above image, I got the one below visually grounded pretty decently, or at least I think so.

 

[mr rusty]

I use turbocad, and have done since V1 on DOS back in about 1992. I'm not a CAD professional, but do still use it occasionally in the day job. I draw all my larger home projects in 3D. I find it invaluable to work out how stuff will fit together - not so interested in how it looks. I find it really helps to work out dimensions and cutting lists. Recently, for a sash window project, I drew the basic construction, and then reduced it to just the 4 corners. By positioning the corners into the required final window dimensions, I could read off all the cutting dimensions without recalculating for each different sized window. Use of layers is a huge benefit - draw different elements on different layers and turn them on and off as required to visualise specific components.

 

[Droogs]

Looks like yo have learned a heall of a lot more than me Richard, well done. Image is really good

 

[Sgian Dubh]

Looks like yo have learned a heall of a lot more than me Richard, well done. Image is really good

I'm definitely improving Droogs, I have to agree with that, but I'm a long way from really competent though. There are masses of commands and techniques I've hardly explored at all, but I keep giving things a go, primarily simply because I'm interested. I do enjoy playing around with computer programmes, and I've long held the belief that digital design capabilities allied to CNC equipment offers fantastic opportunities for incredible creativity with aesthetically pleasing results. The truth is though that I'm probably too old to be able to properly explore that side of woodworking ... and I'm also probably too wedded to the mix of traditional machine and hand woodworking that I began back in the 1960s as a kid to fully and properly embrace all the contemporary methods of woodworking.

Still, it's all enjoyable (computerised drafting) and I don't see much point in being a Luddite when it comes to advances in technology as it relates to furniture design and making.

Here's something else I knocked out some time back for a buyer, and then used the piece as a model to create a Fusion 360 'afterthought' presentation drawing below the photograph. I did the original 2D orthographic projections in AutoCAD, which was all I needed to build the piece, and created hand drawn presentation drawings prior to that. Slainte.

 

[Sgian Dubh]

Reviving this old thread to show more adventures in Fusion 360 is prompted by some of my learning and an observation or two on my part. The ability to create pretty good perspective drawings in the programme is quite impressive. Set against that is the time it takes to create the basic drawing as compared to being able to rattle something out much quicker with paper, drafting pens, pencil, rubber and magic markers, plus drawing aids such as rules, compass, etc. The latter method doesn't provide the ability to go directly from presentation type drawing to orthographic projections which Fusion 360 does, so there's perhaps some time saving there, because after hand drawing a presentation drawing the designer still usually needs to work up orthographic drawings (working drawings) of some sort for a maker to follow - a doodle on the back of an envelope probably doesn't cut the mustard.

An irritation I find with Fusion 360 is that it's sometimes rather difficult to get wood grain orientation (as found in the programmes library of materials) to work realistically. It's also tricky trying to get the wood colour and grain pattern just so. For example, regarding grain direction challenges in the rendering of the square corner cabinet below I couldn't find a way to persuade the wood oak grain to properly follow the curved front rails and plinth of the cabinet. The rails and plinth are laminated to form a straight, then curve around the corner forming a 90º bend and then straight again. Fusion 360 doesn't seem to be able to be persuaded that the long grain needs to follow all along the horizontal direction of these parts. It will follow one straight arm of the rail, but then it shows end grain on the other arm. A similar problem is evident in the circular elements of the table in the previous post.

Anyway, below is a photograph of the original completed piece in English oak and sycamore, which was done sometime around 1982 or 83, then the new presentation drawing/rendering. The reasons I chose to draw this piece were because I knew it would be challenging to get the programme to do what I wanted it to do, but at the same time I didn't need to spend time considering sizes and proportions because I could get all that information (material, height, width, cabinet sizes, door frame parts, etc) from my historical records. And I did leave a couple of rails out of the drawing just to save a bit of time - basically, I couldn't be bothered repeating something fiddly I'd spent long enough doing already, ha, ha. Slainte.

Below. The piece of furniture.

New Drawing.

 

[Yojevol]

Well done. Your comments on the difficulties of getting a realistic wood rendering reflect my experience in TurboCad. Talking of reflections, have you tried putting the 'glass' into the model? Another question, can you influence the lighting in Fusion. In TC it's easy to do but needs a lot of trial and error - at least at my level it does!
Brian

 

[Droogs]

Look pretty amazing Richard, though the oak looks a bit like ash on my monitor

 

[Peri]

If you can afford it, or have access to it, a program called "Keyshot" is a stunning piece of software for taking data from a cad/modelling program and rendering it out.

Done for various projects/competitions.

A few more of mine a griff701.com

 

[Droogs]

@Peri The Davey lamp looks fantastic as does the #4 but the tattie masher has a little softness to it that kinda gives the game away about being rendered. I thought the amp and banjos were real tho

 

[billw]

That lamp is rendered? Bloody hell, I'd not have guessed that in a hundred years.

 

[Droogs]

Maybe you should do a WIP Peri show us how its done. Would be a great skill to have

 

[Peri]

Droogs - the tattie masher was an experiment in using some of Keyshots more advanced layered textures - didn't quite nail it

Billw - Modeled in Solidworks

 

[Sgian Dubh]

Well done. Your comments on the difficulties of getting a realistic wood rendering reflect my experience in TurboCad. Talking of reflections, have you tried putting the 'glass' into the model? Another question, can you influence the lighting in Fusion. In TC it's easy to do but needs a lot of trial and error - at least at my level it does! Brian

Hi Brian, the glass was included in the drawing as a material. In the Fusion 360 library of materials it is illustrated as having something of a blue cast, so I thought it would be more evident when rendered. It isn't because it simply appears as if it's not there. I've rendered again, but this time I adjusted the glass properties to give it a hint of grey/blue to try and make it seem a bit more obvious that there's glass within the four door frames, but perhaps I could have gone further with adjusting the colour, see below. I could have also chosen a different scene setting, e.g., a 'beach' which would then have caused reflections in the glass (which, in the earlier rendering that you can't see very well, if at all). I also tinkered with the oak colour and texture properties, making it more brown. As droogs says, the earlier rendering had more of the appearance of ash than oak.

What I find tricky is that in the pre-rendering set up phase, where colours, materials, texture, and so on can be played around with I can get what seems like a pretty good approximation of all those elements in the way they appear on my monitor. But when you send what you've got to render, what comes out is significantly different in appearance to how it looks pre-rendering. It's very hard to pre-judge how a render will come out. It might get easier with practice and experience to make those pre-rendering judgements. Typically, for example, it seems to be that what shows as a quite dark brown in the pre-rendering set up phase renders as much paler.

Anyway, the result from my most recent tinkering are below. On a side note, for a bit of fun I started doing a hand drawn sketch of the cabinet. After twenty minutes I had the bare bones sketched out in pencil. I reckon that if can be bothered to get the energy together and finish it I'd need to spend perhaps another hour doing my own 'rendering' with drafting pens and magic markers, with the result being a bit wonky perspective wise, and perhaps proportion a bit off, but good enough to get the general idea across and, crucially, very personal because I was in control of the whole procedure, unlike computer generated drawings which always look a bit clone like to me, i.e., someone else (the programme) largely controls the somewhat impersonalised output. Doing it all in Fusion 360 took maybe twenty or twenty five hours which seems way too long to me, but that's perhaps because I'm not yet all that proficient with the programme.

On a side note , I'm very impressed with the rendering that Peri's shown - but are they photographs(?), or are they a representation of what was in someone's mind which he or she then expressed through intimately connecting the mind and its vision with the body to make marks somewhere using their fingers and tools? I'm not making a judgement of superiority of one method for creating presentation drawings over another. They surely both have their place, but I do like to see something of the designer's human characteristics and foibles in a drawing, which I think is rather lost in computer generated versions. Slainte.

 

[Peri]

Those renderings were entries into a monthly competition at 3dtotal.com, where each week a mod would give an item, and the test was to come up with a model and a render that was as lifelike as possible.

It helps that for a few years in my early twenties I made a living painting guitars, petrol tanks and leather jackets etc etc by hand, and selling black+white ink works - I like to think that 'got my eye in'