Everyone expects and demands top-level menus that are activated with a left click, context menus that are activated with a right-click, and so on. GUI paradigms have now evolved to be nearly universal, to the point where humans can transition from one program to another with very little effort. It used to be that ‘bad’ GUIs abounded, with weird menu modalities and nonsensical procedural rules, but these evolutionary dead-ends have been mostly driven extinct. The very first mouse-driven user interface was created back in the late 1960s by Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute, and ever since then the GUI has been evolving. Whoever was in charge of implementing the GUI (Graphical User Interface) for 123d Design gets my vote for Evil of the Century. Maybe Autodesk should consider fixing some of the more egregious problems with 123D Design (see below) so more of us would move off Tinkercad and onto 123D Design -).Īnd along comes AutoDesk 123d Design… I swear this app represents Yin and Yang, Good and Evil, Blissful Marriage and Ugly Divorce, Superman and Kryptonite, Batman and The Joker and all the other polar opposites you can think of, wrapped into one super-powered but fatally flawed 3D design program And last, but not necessarily least – Tinkercad is apparently a victim of its own success, as the Tinkercad server(s) have been unreliable of late due (I think) to extremely high activity levels.I have over 150 designs now, but many of them are early versions that I no longer need it would be pretty nice if I could multi-select designs for deletion. Along the same lines, there is apparently no way to copy or delete multiple designs at once.This means that if you happen to edit, or god forbid delete the ‘All Designs’ design, the ‘Project’ design gets deleted too – ouch! The ‘Project’ idea is nice, but it is basically useless unless designs are copied to Project folders rather than just linked. although Tinkercad offers the ability to assign collections of designs to a ‘Project’ folder, all Tinkercad does is create a soft link from the corresponding design in the ‘All Design’ collection to the Project view.There are a couple of other frustrations with Tinkercad that have more to do with the way designs are stored and managed I’m a complete neat-freak when it comes to project file organization, so this is a big deal for me. With added work and persistence you can go a LONG ways with Tinkercad, but eventually the law of diminishing returns will get to you and you’ll be looking for something else with more horsepower. Every tool does what it is supposed to, but the combination doesn’t allow an infinite pallet of options. This is what I refer to as a ‘Linearly Frustrating’ in that the problem isn’t so much a failure of the package as much as a limitation on how much you can do with the limited suite of primitives and manipulation tools offered. Unfortunately, Tinkercad runs out of gas fairly quickly when designs require sophisticated treatment like morphing from one shape to another (an ellipse to a rounded rectangle in my case), or when reshaping objects after rotation. This makes it child’s play to construct fairly complex objects in rotated and/or displaced local coordinate systems. The Workplane concept is particularly powerful in that it allows you to quickly define the plane on which the next primitive will be placed and manipulated. It has a very intuitive GUI, and it takes almost no time to become proficient and productive with its very simple set of primitives along with a robust set of manipulation features (WorkPlane, Group/Ungroup, Adjust/Align, and Solid/Hole). Tinkercad is an absolutely amazing 3D design application. I have decided to coin the phrases ‘linear frustration’ and ‘Nonlinear frustration’ to describe the differences between 123d Design and Tinkercad. MeshMixer is such a different program than either 123d Design or Tinkercad that I don’t plan to discuss it in this post – maybe later. Unfortunately, it can also be very frustrating to discover that after many hours trying to incorporate some specific feature into your 3D design, ‘you can’t get there from here’ and you are left high and dry with nowhere to go. These are all free applications that purport to make it easy and intuitive to create 3D designs for 3D printing, and all three offer some amazing capabilities and features for free apps. In the process I have learned a LOT about AutoDesk’s Tinkercad, 123d Design, and MeshMixer applications. Since then I have spent countless hours with the printer and several different 3D CAD applications to design and instantiate various 3D designs. I started into the 3D Printing world just a few months ago with a PrintrBot Metal 3D printer, a strong commitment to learn, and and very little else.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |