Designing and Drawing Furniture

[Izzy Charo]

Hello,
Apparently I was absent the day they taught "drawing" in class... and my ability to draw anything more complex than a box is pretty much at the 1st grade level... never really bothered me much in the past, but does now when I try to "design" simple furniture pieces. I've played around with sketch-up..even taken a brief class...and it recalled my struggles with Fortran IV back in college in the 60s. Anyway, a long winded introduction to the question: does anyone know if there is a simple tablet based program that would let one draw an image in 2D...and then have the program add perspective and 3D views of what it might look like. (assuming the user added things like dimensions...).. Basically, a way to go from a rough sketch to useful dimensioned, perspective drawing, while being able to input the initial rough sketch free-hand....
Thanks,
Izzy

[Mark e Kessler]

If you are using Ipad check out Shapr3d, best thing going right now. It uses the Siemens engine (same as SolidWorks as well, i think) and is super easy and lots of tutorials. The 2d drawing function is new and pretty good but lacking as far as customization of the title block but they are releasing updates on a regular basis. I think now it can be used on mac and windows.

I for one was never able to utilize sketchup, totally unintuitive for me. Could be because I learned Solidworks, Inventor in school and use UG (now NX) at work. I don’t want to date myself but in high school i learned at the drawing table and they had an extended program as they were feeding kids that didn’t want to go to college to work at GE Aviation, I also did drawings by hand at furniture school, i guess where I am going with this is you can learn 3d modeling no matter the age and I really feel that shapr3d will get you there faster as the learning curve isn’t as steep.

Since I am on the computer most of the day at my day job the last thing I want to do is sit in front of a computer when I get home so I mostly use shapr3d to work out details, design concepts never fully detailed - below are a few screen shots… maybe 45 min to 1hr to do the model and like 5 min for the 2d drawing (not necessarily how I would do it, just showing its flexibility…)

ECB94116-8914-4C21-9383-8009B00F846A.jpg4A3025EF-77D2-462B-9AA9-44866E5E84D6.jpg

[Izzy Charo]

Thank you Mark! I will check that program out!

[Eric Arnsdorff]

OnShape is a very good free option.
It was developed by some SolidWorks developers and has some of the intuitive development aspects.

I have a lot of experience with SolidWorks, Inventor and AutoCAD. When I tried Sketchup I found it to be difficult. This is likely due to the differences of how you go about creating the models and I didn’t want a steep learning curve.

If you’ve not learned any package before it may be that most packages will be similar in going through the learning curve. I did find SolidWorks and Inventor to be fairly easy to learn which translated into getting going quickly in OnShape.