Recommedations for furniture design software?
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Hello.
I am learning Furniture Design on my own: hopefully I can learn by doing. What are some of the recommended software packages for furniture design?
From google search I came across the following:
google sketchup.
sketchlist (sketchlist.com)
pro100 / ecrusoftware (en.ecrusoftware.com)
gamma 3d (gamma3d.net)
I would really appreciate any suggestions and pros / cons of using one vs the other. My key considerations are:
- Ease of use: I am not a design professional.
- Ability to model load bearing ability / moisture resistance / wear and tear over time.
- How the characteristics in #2 will change if I change the material (say from solid wood to commercial ply to metal).
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Hi Vijay,
From my experience alone, I'd probably recommend SketchUp to you. I'm not familiar with the other programs you listed, but from a little research that I did quickly on them, it looks like SketchUp is likely the easiest to learn, as well as having an extremely large community behind it that is more than happy to help when you need advice.
It's quite a bit more open to you as a user as well. You'd be able to look into installing plugins that help model more quickly and easily, especially for furniture design (see end of this post). You're able to add materials and object to SketchUp's libraries, where as the other softwares you mentioned seem to have limited or completely sealed libraries, which would limit what you can do with your designs.
As far as your #2 requirement, that's out of my area of expertise. There might be a plugin or two that can do structural calcs (or at least help, again, see below), but my guess would be they're mostly for estimation. The gurus of SketchUcation, feel free to weigh in here. I'm guessing you'd need to get into some pretty high end, specialty software like SolidWorks, Autodesk Inventor, or something like that. Either way, for accurate stress/deformation/wear calculation, you're likely looking at classes and seriously expensive software.
Links:
- Dale Martens' (aka 'Whaat') Profile Builder Plugin
- Alex Schreyers' Face Centroid & Area Properties
Hope that helps!
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From your list of programs Sketchup is surely the more powerful, easy and free!
And if you want to modelise something different than kitchen you can add this crazy one plugin Artisan by Dale Martens ( seems now 29 $
) who transform the sketchup "Box modeling" in "Subdivision modeling" and with that you can make some sofas, curtains etc...
Sufficient for a lot of things!
See this guy Ginchius
A Sketchup master!
If you want more acurate geometry (a circle is a real circle) try nurbs modeler like the crazzy Moment of Inspiration!
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