Art
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is just a tool. Or is it?
It used to be just a tool that utilized a computer to aid the design process. That used to mean helping to cleanly edit drawings originally created with paper and pencil. But CAD is now much more than that. Sure it still does drawings - in 2d. But it is much more feature rich that that.
You can draw in 3d. You can virtually move, smash, and stretch the parts. Your CAD tool can analyse the results, and optimize these results. It can check work for you and do many things automatically for you, freeing you from the rote double-checking to focus on the creative aspects and the actual design. It lets you rebuild and reorganize the parts, slice parts up and combine many parts into a single one. It lets you share your designs with others in different disciplines. It is collaborative and complex.
It is also a tool for storing knowledge and history. Unlike a black box, modern parametric systems allow you to maintain, retrieve and investigate the whole history of a design, whether it is your own or somebody else's. That helps with reuse and redesign, as well as communication. It allows others to step in when you're not able and allows you to learn from others and share your knowledge with them. It also exposes your technique, your successes and blemishes, for all the world to see. The devil is in the details, they say. So is the Art.
In this section I collect a few techniques to help you get from a competent user to somebody who understands the tool intuitively and can go beyond the manual. Going beyond is much more than just doing the daily work. This is not about the good enough, the collection of tips and tricks, or the polishing cannonballs. There is an Art to CAD. This is my attempt to get at it.
Enjoy. And Good Luck.
Click on the specific entries to the left to jump in. And please send me some feedback if any of this proves useful to you.