computer aided design
2D
inkscape
Tried inkscape. I found it to work not to disimilarly from AI (Adobe Illustrator), which I know quite well. We use Inkscape at Fablab Reykjavík, so it is important for me to get a handle of it. For me it was quite straight forward. I really like the clone function, I don´t remember ever using such a function in AI. So I played around with it for a little bit, but decided to concentrate on the 3D, as I´m less efficient in that.
3D
I thought I would be a natural...
sketch up
Jóhann, a fellow student, gave a lecture on SketchUp. It was really helpful and we learned a lot. I found sketch up fun, but a little bit difficult to control. My house that I started with wen totally out of control. It felt a little bit easier and simple than Rhino.
On the pictures above you can see the sketches I did during Johann´s lecture. I didn´t didn´t fell like I had much control of my drawings.
I decided to continue working with SketchUp, during the weekend. I started drawing up my current idea for the final project. My current idea is a picture-lightbox. The drawing went fine, but I had some problems. When trying to insert the picture into the box it dissapeared, and I could not find it again. Also I had problems with putting a light into the box. Also I found positioning difficult. In the end I decided to export my drawings and improt them into Rhino. On the picture below, you can see me trying to insert the picture again into the frame.
rhino
Bas gave a lecture on Rhino. He showed us the basics and then we had a play around with it. I found it a little bit hard to control, for example when trying to rotate, it would never rotate like I wanted it to. Also movement control. I guess this will become more easy with practise. Here is a picture from the scetches I made during Bas´lecture.
After importing my lightbox project from SketchUp it looked like this:
It looked quite different in Rhino than in SketchUp. I also ran into quite a few problems in this program. My nerves were seriously tested this day. I could not apply a texture, after a lot of googling and getting help from Bas, we finally found out that the objects were "blocks", and it is impossible to apply a texture to blocks. Then I also had (or still have) a problem of how to display the picture with the light behind it in the frame. I have tried to apply the picture as a texture and as a transperancy, and neither give me anywhere near the look I want:
blender
Blender is also a program I would like to get the handle on. As I have a background in 2d animation, I found the animation options of Blender interesting. I started with doing the beginners tutorials from the Blender webpage. After doing 3 of them and using half the day to do them, and the only thing that was in my workspace was a simple cilinder, my impatience ran out. It was way to slow for me. Linda recomended to me to do the Coffee Cup tutorial from the Little Web Hut. That was much more fast pace and hands on. Here is my not so perfect result (but you learn much more from making mistakes ;) ):
other tutorials i would like to do
other things to check out
An interesting sofware to make humans 3D. it is suppose to be quite easy to handle make human. Gimpshop might be a good program to use when subscription to Adobe runs out.
open source furniture and design
Bas introduced us to the Layer Chair. It really inspired me. I googled it a bit, and here are some interesting looking things I found.