And findind a free and "user friendly" photo-realistic one isn't simple. There are so many renderers nowaday that it's impossible to test them all. All you have to do is launch the installer and follow the pocedure.Īt first I started by watching and reproducing each of the videos provided on the CAD Schedule page, then by following these tutorials. The install process on Windows OS is very simple. I only use it from time to time, and especially when I need to see or convert a CAD file (STEP/IGES) into a polygonal mesh (tesselation process).įreeCAD is a parametric CAD application while SketchUp isn't. I have tested FreeCAD many years ago but at that time I wasn't convinced by its ergonomy. This way it will involve more electronics which is what I really need to learn. Why not implement some extra manual (physical) controls? I don't know if it will work and tests will have to be made on a smaller scale beforehand just to make sure. The door will be made out of 3mm wood with partially cutted lines allowing it to retract and bend back in the groove. I decided to make it a bit more complex by adding sliding doors to the card drawers: But there are some plugins to export data to external renderers. I use it everyday in our Fablab, either forīut it's not a parametric nor solid modeler as it only deals with polygons (meshes).Īnd it also lack rendering capabilities. without a name.įrom all the 3D modelers I've used, SketchUp became my favorite for its very fast workflow. My initial project is a quiet simple 3D model that shouldn't be very difficult with any package.Īfter all it's just a box. Most of the images on my Fabacademy website that have green annotations are done like this. It's the very first 2D drawing software I've been using when I got my 1st PC something like 35 years ago. It can quickly be launch by just pressing Windows+R (execute) then typing "mspaint" + Enter which is very efficient because it opens very fast when you only need to do some small and very simple tasks. I mainly use Paintbrush that is a native Windows drawing app since OS first relase. When it comes to do very simple image manipulation like adding text, cropping, size reduction, etc. I mainly uses it to give vectors the color needed to manage my laser cutting and engraving jobs on the Trotec laser cutter. I also use Coreldraw to manage my jobs for laser cutting. It has a great community support and it's free to use and open-source. It uses a layer approach, has layer fusion modes, alpha channel for masking, bezier path support, many brushes and selection tools, filters, and supports a large variety of image file formats to name just a few of its features.Ĭoncerning vector drawing I mainly use Inkscape for tracing bitmaps (raster to vector conversion), convert between vectorial file formats, and uses it to produce files either for the vinyl cutter or the laser cutter. Gimp has pretty much all the features you could find on Photoshop6 which is plenty enough for most of the tasks. I use it for most all of my 2D projects but also 3D ones (making textures, masks, post-processing renders, etc.). Some of my modeling projects are shared here.Ĭoncerning 2D CAD I intensively used Adobe Photoshop for raster images during about 10 years before switching to Gimp because it's free and open-source. I've used some of them extensively during many years. I've followed the progress made by 3D packages and have tried most of them during these last 25 years (about 150 CAD softwares). I first discovered 3D modeling in 1996 and have been modeling nearly every day since. This week I worked on modeling my project in 2 versions with SketchUp and tested 5 different renderers. I have started a new project for this year and its related new CAD is here. This page reflects my past year work for the CAD week.
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