Category: 3D CAD Fundamental

Ok so back for week 5! Three more to go!

This week we are deforming objects to (create fancy of irregular objects). Starting with the ‘scale’ tool, we look at how to scale 3d objects, and how holding ‘shift’ ensures that objects are scaled with reference to the center point. If only one side is selected the center point is the center of the 2d side, but we can also triple client with the select tool to select the entire 3d object and scale with reference to the central point of the 3d shape by holding the ctrl key.

Duplication can be achieved with the move tool, ctrl + move, place the new copy where desired then type ‘5x’ for 5 copies. We make some curtains by stringing together curves, making a 2d shape then using the push/pull tool. Duplications, scales and mirrors using scale are all then needed for the curtains. Next we learn the the flip along is more useful than the scale tool for mirroring…

Internal copy arrays were covered next – enabling the duplication of an object to x distance away then using type /4, 3 new object are created at equal spacing between the original and the first copy.

Finally faces and planes were examined. Face have 2 sides, one light (front), one dark (back). Entity information indicates the colors of the front and back faces. Note that light reflection varies with the camera perspective. Change orientation of the plane enables reversing of the orientation of the faces (so that dark and bright effect is controllable). Using right click and ‘orient faces’ can force all faces of an object to be uniform.

The assignment this week was a re-creation of taipei 101.

Unfortunately, as is common with these online course, I go distracted and was late on week 4. Luckily it was a pretty light week, working through:

• Follow me tool
• Rotation tool
• Working with spheres

The assignment was creating a bike wheel with tread on the tyre. Getting the tread right was a bit finicky and since I created a circle with ‘too many sides’ rendering was very slow on my dell xps 15 9560.

Will work on getting back ahead of the schedule for week 5…

I want to make a model for a landscaping project in my garden. After testing a few different tools (sketchup, autocad, fusion 360 and LibreCAD) I realised that using these tools is not intuitive for me… So onto Corsera to do some learning!

My chosen initial course, 3D CAD Fundamental, is for complete novices to 3D modelling/Computer Aided Designed. There are follow up courses with some more extensive examples:

1. 3D CAD fundamental
2. 3D CAD Application
3. BIM Fundamentals for Engineers
4. BIM Application for Engineers

This, fundamental CAD course uses SketchUp Make 2017 as the CAD software. We are using ‘Construction Documentation – Meters’ template.

Week 1 is just set up of software and takes about 5 minutes.

Week 2 has a few worked through examples to get you using tools. I started this yesterday and it took my 30 minutes to draw a simple cube with some steps. The lesson introduced the following tools:

• Line tool
• Rectangle tool
• Push/Pull tool
• Tape measure tool + Guidlines

Also critical were some tidbits on what mouse icons mean, how to draw lines based on x,y,z axes (wow, axes is the plural of axis ?!), midpoints and typing numbers while drawing to be exact.

Magic Cube module, using line select line tool (click once, move to draw line, stick to axis to make it straight and type on the keypad the distance desired). Then using divide lines to build a stepped cube. Guidelines were also introduced along with the rectangle, pull and push tool.

From how difficult the Magic Cube module was, I saw the week 2 assignment and thought there was no way I could do it in less than 2 hours… but after failing for about 30 minutes, things become a lot easier. I guess getting used to perspective and managing the camera view helps a lot. Anyway I was very happy to complete my first 3D model!

The ongoing pop quiz and extensive quiz/test at the end of each lesson seems to be a very effective method for holding attention and retaining more information from the lesson, surely more effective that a non-interactive lecture!