2. Computer-Aided Design

Testing Grounds

For this week we had to try out both 2D and 3D design tools, but since I've had years of experience using 2D tools I decided to focus on trying out as many 3D tools for this project as I could. The following was my experience with them.

Shapr3d

As an aside I used this program which can be only used on an iPad pro with the Apple pencil, but it allowed me to get 90% of the way in a matter of minutes. This looks like a really fast way of modeling ( a lot faster than any other program that I used) but the free version only allows for a low quality export, so I didn't work further with it.

FreeCAD

I started my model with a flat "sketch" of a hexagon and worked to extrude my figure from there, I tried to use several types of constraints to have my model aligned and have it takes it's measures from a spreadsheet, but I ended up hitting a wall when trying to create a second row of buttons inside another, probably spending more time with the program would've allowed me to figure that out.

I found the UI a bit of a mess but it looks like it's super powerful in the tools and functions it has.

Antimony

I started my model similar to FreeCAD, creating a 2D hexagon and extruding from there, I also used a 2D hexagon with the shell module to create the separate rows and from there using the difference module with an extruded 2D triangle rotated several times and arranged to form the separate buttons. With antimony I managed to make a detailed model of my final project.

I found the UI super fast for creating things with lot of repetition and geometric stuff, but it was a bit buggy ( it crashed on me several times 😿 ).

Blender

I did a simpler version of my final project with blender but I didn't get to do a lot of in depth modeling with it. Instead I opted to export the detailed model from antimony and import it into Blender to render it with it. To do this I had to use the decimate function on the resulting models from antimony since they had a really big polygon count. Once I had the model separated into parts I created several materials for the different surfaces ( I created a translucent and emissive silicon material from scratch to use on the buttons), I created a plane to use as a table and added some texture to it, and also added a cable made with a cilinder using the curve modifier. After creating the model I setup the lights ( 2 point lights ) and tweaked the camera to make it more realistic rendering ( added depth of field, changed the contrast ).

Final Render