3 Quirky Novice CAD Softwares
December 5th, 2006 by Ben Jim
If you’re neither an engineer, industrial designer or interior designer that uses professional CAD softwares and the like, then I’ve three softwares that’s all in for unproductivity (at least for me) that’s fun as hell meant for novices or people (like me) with nothing better to do and would like to kill some time.
1. IKEA Planning Tools
IKEA Planner Tools is IKEA’s field marketing tool that enables you to become your own interior designer. It seems to be the same application available at the stores on public terminals used by shoppers. Simple to install and quite intuitive with a drag-and-drop-from-list interface that details the furniture models offerings at IKEA. You’d be able to choose furniture to fit the exact measurements of the rooms in your home and experiment with different combinations and style by swap things around until you’re satisfied with the result. A much more high tech method to would-be home planners than the usual cutting out papers in furniture shapes and moving it around the room, visualizing how thing would look like. The downside? There are 4 different tools for 4 different parts of your home - kitchen, office, bathroom and bedroom - so if you’re remaking your whole house you’re suppose to download all four and install all four respectively.
download from here.
2. BoConcept’s Furnish
If you’re not keen on IKEA furniture or their interior design software then maybe you could give Furnish from BoConcept a try. In the same vein as IKEA’s Planner Tools, Furnish is an interior decorating software which lets you plan the perfect interior for your home. Furnish is much more customizable than IKEA’s Planner Tools allowing you to give color to your walls, ceiling, etc. Furnish also gives you more control by letting you create pieces of virtual furniture with whatever fronts, arm rests, leg designs or veneer types you like. Simply enter the dimensions of your room and start drawing or select from pre-existing furniture i assume belongs to the models offered at BoDesign.
Download from here.
3. Michael Lachmann MLCAD
Not into interior design? Well you could try MLCAD which is an acronym for Mike’s LEGO Computer Aided Design. Written by Michael Lachmann it’s an easy to use virtual modeling program aimed at LEGO enthusiast specifically for use with LEGO parts. MLCad uses the LDraw official parts libary of virtual bricks and/or the tools like LDView or LPub which are bricks currently under developement to enable you to build almost any LEGO model virtually with an unlimited amount of bricks.
Here is a quick tutorial to get you started and downloadable from here. Libarary files are from here. Extract and dump into the same directory.
