Furniture Design Software – Manipulate those Assemblies
Achieving design flexibility while saving time
With sketch list 3-D furniture design software you can create designs that meet your customers needs. The flexibility provided by manipulating a virtual boards on the screen, along with the instant visual feedback of the shape and proportion of your the design allow you to explore many alternative approaches for your design. Because it is quick to design using this virtual board concept you can accomplish a lot in the minimum amount of time.
One powerful addition to the SketchList 3D toolbox is the clone and mirror function. What it does is to make an exact copy of an assembly with one exception. That exception being that everything in the assembly is changed left to right. Take a look at the reception desk in the image beginning of this post. The reception desk started as one unit – that towards the left-hand side – that was curved and shaped as a bit of a quarter circle desk. Cloning and mirroring the first assembly allowed the design to go from a quarter circle to a semi-circle in two mouse clicks – literally taking a second or two.
A commonly used application of clone and mirror is an entertainment or bookshelf unit. You may create one assembly with, for example, doors to the left and shelves to the right. For the second assembly you want to put the doors on the right and the shells to the left. You have three choices.
- You can completely rebuild the entire assembly.
- You can clone the us existing assembly and manually move the doors and shelves.
- Or you can choose clone and mirror. after the clone and mirror of course you need to slide the assembly to the right or left to locate it where desired.
This video shows how I cloned and mirrored the quarter circle reception desk turning it into a semi circular unit. One of the key advantages of using software for your furniture design efforts the ability to save time while exploring many alternative designs to achieve the best solution for your customer.
Take a look….
David Rozewski
My woodworking love started in 6th grade in school shop class. I have a BS in Industrial Technology and an MBA. At my first job, I computerized a production accounting system – the results were positive, and I loved the challenges. I left the corporate world to begin woodworking full time and one of my first decisions was to use CAD for my designs. I found that CAD did not meet all my needs. I wrote a specification of what I wanted and turned it into a prototype. SketchList 3D incorporated in 2007. We completed programming and launched. Today thousands of woodworkers use SketchList 3D.
