Computer-aided design

The purpose of the week is to test and make a choice about 2D / 3D software

2D

Which editor? : I tested Photoshop, Gimp under Ubuntu, then finally I decided to use InkSkape because we need vector graphics support.

InkScape

Inkscape is professional quality vector graphics software which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is used by design professionals and hobbyists worldwide, for creating a wide variety of graphics such as illustrations, icons, logos, diagrams, maps and web graphics. Inkscape uses the W3C open standard SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) as its native format, and is free and open-source software. Inkscape has sophisticated drawing tools with capabilities comparable to Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW and Xara Xtreme. It can import and export various file formats, including SVG, AI, EPS, PDF, PS and PNG. It has a comprehensive feature set, a simple interface, multi-lingual support and is designed to be extensible; users can customize Inkscape's functionality with add-ons. The Inkscape project has a growing international user community, and many learning materials exist to help get you started with your creations. Help and support is provided by the community, and there are lots of ways for you to get involved if you want to help improve the Inkscape project.

3D

Which editor? : I tested SketchUp, antimony,123D, Blender, then finally I decided to use Rhino on My Mac which is more simple than Blender on Windows.

Rhino

The world's most robust 3‑D development platform for specialty modeling, rendering, analysis, and fabrication tools across a wide variety of disciplines. The other advantage is that Rhino5 is still under development on Mac and will be free for the whole duration of the fab academy.

My First project with Rhino was to create a Climbing Hold :

Climbing Hold with Rhino

you can find the Rhino 3dm file and stl file on my github repository :github

You can see the result in 3D

It seems you are using an outdated browser that does not support canvas :-(

The fact is that for my climbing hold, it's really hard to obtain a 'natural' shaPe using digital fabrication, so for my project I will create manually the molds shapes.