Week 2 Computer-Aided Design

 

Intro to 2D and 3D design software

 

I am a complete beginner to 3D and 2D CAD and have made a start using Sketchup to draw my first Robot idea. See drawing below. The online tutorials have been very helpful though time consuming. I will continue to improve my skills on Sketch-up as it is open source and often used in schools. Other software I have tried are Inkscape and Rhino. I struggled with drawing in any detail in Inkscape and again have spent many hours following tutorials. I found Rhino  a steep learning curve but I can see it will be very useful for 3D modelling and as it is also used in our school will continue to use it.  Other software packages I will explore for drawing are Sketchup Express with a graphic tablet and I-draw on Ipad.


I drew this robot in Sketchup 

robot



and this simple ring in Rhino by following an online tutorial

ring


Rhino file for ring    -  ring

File Formats  

I am also learning about different formats for saving images and how to manage the size of images. I have saved the above image in different formats to check which is most suitable for my web page in the archive and downloaded Gimp for resizing images.

File types

Properties

JPG

Joint photographic experts group

Best for photos when you need to keep the file size small  giving up some quality in graphics

TIFF

Tag image file format

Gd for any type of bitmap(pixel based) images. Large files but no loss in quality preserves layers, max compatibility, gd for documents, multi page

PNG

Portable Network Graphics

For smaller file sizes with no loss of quality for web graphics, supports animation

Considered a replacement for TIFF

GIF

Graphic interchange format

Use for simple web graphics Limited colours so not so gd for photos, make fast loading graphics, charts, diagrams, banners headings, supports animation

Maximum compatibility across mac and pc

BMP

Bitmap image file

Use for bitmap (pixel based) huge files gd quality

 

A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. So which Graphics file format is best to use?

·       Images for the web or online use JPEG, PNEG, or GIF

·       Images for print use TIFF

·       If you want to keep a version that remains editable choose your software’s native format, eg PSD for photoshop