OT: Autodesk Inventor

Inventor was too expensive for us, we use Alibre

which according to the forum users of it has a lot of the same functionality of inventor, some better functionality, and only costs 800 quid for ever. My top end version includes FEA as well as a nice photorender, and CAE tools for our CNCs

Steve

The kids here have trouble with 2D design! good luck :)

I think google sketchup is the only 3D stuff they can cope with.

Git'cher self at least a play on Inventor or Alibre - have a play on ours next time you come over.

Alibre Express is free though.

Steve

Yeah, i saw you were using alibre and ive been having a play with the express one :)

On or around Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:36:29 +0000, Steve Taylor enlightened us thusly:

*perk*

I've never really got into 3D stuff. I did somewhere have an edition of one or another of the "industry standard" products like autocad (probably out of date) and for what I wanted it was way too clever.

for doing plain 2D drawings, I rather like a little shareware prog called CadSTD.

There are loads of tutorials for it on the website too which are quite good. didnt take me long to work out how to use it!

On or around Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:52:39 +0000, Tom Woods enlightened us thusly:

aha. there's a point here that's just occurred to me: I've gotten into the BVE train simulator thing recently-ish. Now, one of the delights of BVE is the ability to create yer own trains, and one of the clever bits is animated controls. most train controls are levers that rotate, on an axis which is not perpendicular to the screen. Making these seem to rotate is a matter of having several different images of the control which are overlayed on a base image, but that's beyond the ability of photoshop et al to do credibly.

It might be possible in a 3D cad program, though - although mostly, what you're dealing with is a photograph of the cab layout. Can you import things into CAD and make them do stuff, or would you need to create the control as a 3D object? the latter would be harder, as it'd be more difficult to get shade and lighting right. Once having got the object, I imagine you should be able to set it up to rotate about the appropriate axis, and then take 2D snapshots of it?

Do you want a full 3D version of a cab, with working controls ? Or a snapshot into the cab with your controls on top, if the latter, you could drop working controls from Delphi components into the page, rotate them to suit the perspective and write an activeX export from them.

Steve

On or around Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:44:22 +0000, Steve Taylor enlightened us thusly:

Basically, it works with multi-layer bitmap images. You have a base layer image which is the cab minus any animated things, then overlays with (e.g.) the brake control, which is a thing that rotates, this is drawn on a plain blue (or other predefined colour) background, which the program makes transparent, so only the control shows. The control might have anything up to 9 positions, but they're discrete, not continuous movement. The brake image will be a big tall image with (say) 6 different pictures, at defined intervals, the program then looks for the nth repeat on that image file for the bit to display.

here's an example bit of code:

[DigitalNumber] Subject = power Location = 755,890 DaytimeImage = bve4/power_mod.bmp NighttimeImage = bve4/power_Mod_n.bmp TransparentColor = #0000FF Layer = 4 Interval = 134

The image file is probably 512 tall, and what the program does for position

1 is to read the first 133 bits down, and display that image in the position stated. For position 2, it'll start at 134 and count 133 from there.

The image file will look something like

o--

/ o

| o \ o

--o

etc.

Screen captures of the thing in different positions would be quite OK. The main problem as I see it would be importing an image of a control and converting it to a 3-D cad object. Obviously, you could draw the 3D cad object form scratch, but then you have to colour it to look right, which is more tricky. I image terms, it's quite easy to cut out the control and paste it onto a blue background, but very difficult to rotate it credibly.

The best way of doing it requires access to the real train: then you take a series of images with the controls in appropriate places, and all you have to do is cut them out and paste them. The problem is working from a single image.

Tried any of the ray tracing programs? It's a very long time since I played with anything like that mainly 'cause at the time a 386 took ages to render anything. Define the control and light sources then wait, maybe not to long with a modern machine. B-)

On or around Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:13:04 +0000 (GMT), "Dave Liquorice" enlightened us thusly:

Hmmm. that's a thought. However, can't beat photos for realism. Raytracing is an option for things that don't actually exist in the metal any more or which it's not possible to get permission to photograph.