Draw first, then build – seems simple enough in theory. Drawing is best informed, I would suggest, by how the item is to be made, and this is where a person who makes as well as builds has a inherent advantage over those who only design. That said, one caveat is that sometimes new and original designs come about from those who do not labor under preconceptions and strictures imposed by best practices in a given field’s fabrication practices. It is all too easy though to design things which are impractical or even impossible to build, and these sorts of designs generally emanate from those who do not get their hands busy with actually making.
Division of labor of course has it’s benefits, but it is not without drawbacks.
The means by which one draws is itself a controlling factor in regards to design. I thought it might be relevant to some readers if I recapped my own approach to drawing over the years, providing some explanation for how/why the process has evolved in the direction in which it has, and why I have made some recent changes.
A long time ago I drew on sheets of paper or door skin, either to a scale or 1:1, using the conventional tools of ruler, compass, pencil, etc.. Those methods remain valuable to this day, as sometimes the most straightforward approach, especially in regards to larger architectural items, is to produce full-size templates on door skin and use those to transfer lines directly to the wood.
With furniture-scale pieces though, I’ve found in recent years that I save a chunk of time by having relevant portions of my CAD work exported to a large plotter which makes full size paper templates, which are then cut out, applied to door skin or thicker substrates, and used for layout or as a cutting template.
And my switch to using the computer to draw was prompted by a study I did a long while back in how to manually draw an item in perspective, using station points, and so forth. I found that the sheer number of traces required was leading to problems on the paper with lines which were really close together and thus in pencil or pen resulting in a big fat mess by the time one was halfway along.
These problems have been solved in the past by folks of course, yet one cannot deny the astounding amount of time it takes to prepare complete perspective views, especially of more complex objects. It’s time measured in hours and even days.
Drawing in perspective though is more or less essential when it comes to communicating with clients about what you propose to make for them. I’ve had experiences where I have presented the usual plan and elevation drawings to a client and had them nod and look like they were comprehending what they were seeing, but later found, through client comments when the work was well along, “oh, now I see what you had shown in the drawing”. A lot of people, it turns out, do not relate especially well to standard plan and elevation drawings, let alone more involved stuff.
And even from the point of view of being the designer, the standard views connote a limited amount of information. It’s hard to really get a sense of what the piece will look like when you are standing there next to it, or looking at it from across the room, say, without some sort of perspective rendering.
Also, drawing on paper or other physical surfaces tends to engender a ‘one-shot’ approach, especially for those sketches which take a while to complete. While lines can be erased and redrawn, if one has to do too much of this then things get messy. The more invested one gets into a sketch on paper, the more one tends to cling to progress realized and to loathe making significant changes. And of course this severely limits exploration on the design front.
Funny enough, a similar kind of thing happens with drawing software too, as hours spent invested in learning one type tend to disincline one from starting the process over with another software.
After encountering problems with drawing in perspective on paper, I decided to give Computer Aided Drawing (CAD) a try. The first one I opted for was called MacDraft by Microspot, a 2D drafting program. It is still on the market in fact. One of the first things I tackled was to employ the traditional means of station points to produce a perspective view of a heptagonal splayed stool. Here’s the finished product, with all the drawing traces removed from the view:
I don’t think I could have accurately drawn that piece like that were it not for the formal method, and CAD in 2D made it happen for me. It was immediately apparent that 2D CAD helped me do things that were difficult to realize with pencil and paper. It’s easy to modify digital drawings in most cases, Still, it took a long time to put all of the traces in there so as to be able to produce a perspective sketch.
A few years later after taking an introductory class in French Carpentry drawing from Boris Noel, I was engaged in a detailed study-draw-build for the 19th century Mazerolle treteau. That piece was rather complex, and my study was hampered by having neither a teacher nor a physical example of the completed piece which I could examine and learn from, and oh yeah, no fluency in 19th century French. Most of the traces required to draw all the parts are absent from the sketch, by necessity, in the Mazerolle book Traité Théorique Et Pratique De Charpente. The backside of the drawing of the piece in perspective was not visible, so I was left unsure of how the connections between parts looked when brought together on that side. I went as far as I could go in 2D before the doubts and uncertainties about what I was drawing, in other words how well I was understanding the method and whether it would actually produce the required parts correctly. It seemed like folly to try and construct the piece until I was sure that I had a handle on whether things were working out correctly in the drawing.
This is about as far as I got with 2D in MacDraft:
This drawing work took place around 2008. The nagging questions about whether the drawing method in the book which I was trying to emulate was producing the right parts or not led me to my first 3D drawing program, SketchUp (by Google). The program was free, and users could submit their drawn models to a warehouse where others could make us of the files. Things in the warehouse like appliances, fasteners, etc, which otherwise would soak up crazy amounts of drawing time, were most valuable to me at times.
SketchUp was fairly intuitive to learn, pushing and pulling shapes around for the most part. I’d looked at a few other programs, including Autocad Lite, but as far as dipping my toes into the pool, Sketchup was easy to go with, and free does help make the move risk-free.
And the program allowed me to construct the traditional sort of 2D sketch on the virtual floor, and then erect the parts directly above, using plumb lines off of the developed views – hopefully this sketch gives the idea:
I remember a rush of excitement the first time I drew in the scissor braces in 3D and found that the 2D geometry was producing the correct parts so that I knew I was on the right path. Later I was able to identify more than a dozen errors of various sorts in the original illustration, and I’m not sure I would have caught those otherwise. The shift to 3D allowed me to leverage uncertain 2D developed drawing work into something that I was sure worked, and this lead later to actually constructing the piece.
SketchUp came out later with a paid version called Sketchup Pro. While I continued on with the free version for several years, I eventually opted to obtain SketchUp Pro, for $500, for a job in which construction blueprints were required. SketchUp Pro includes ‘Layout’ which enables the production of various size formal construction documents, like this page out of a blueprint set I produced for another contractor for some standard kitchen cabinetry.
In order to communicate with the architects upon whose drawing the above work is based, I had to get SketchUp Pro. Since then I have barely used Layout, and for most users I would not have recommended they pay for the Pro version since you really don’t get much more than Layout for your money.
I found that even with my new paid-for SketchUp Pro, all was not ideal. For one thing, it is supposed to provide the ability to both upload and export drawing files in AutoCad format, the standard by which most other programs on the market are measured. File formats that autoCad works with are .dwg and .dxf.
I found that if I import an item into SketchUp which is in an AutoCad format, it will import and look fine, except it will often not be defined into different planes and discrete parts. What I mean is, if you click on the drawing, click the containing box open, and the ‘select all’, the entire part is highlighted:
This means that, unlike separate parts in the real world, like the fixing bolt and handle casting in the above sketch, are not separate but form a continuous surface with each other. It’s not exactly easy or quick to extract out the parts from one another in the drawing either. So if you have to modify one of these type of sketches in SketchUp, well, you learn it is best to avoid such tasks if at all possible.
That’s an issue with importing in SketchUp from AutoCad files. I’ve also had to export .dwg and/or .dxf files from SketchUp to a cnc fabrication place in the past, and they found that while the files I sent out of Sketchup (in the .dwg/.dxf file formats) could be uploaded, they also required hours of work to make usable for their machines.
It seems to me that SketchUp’s capabilities in terms of handling AutoCad format material is at best imperfect.
SketchUp’s less than scintillating performance continued with how it deals with files that grow in size to the point where there is a high count of polygons. I’ve encountered this a few times with different drawings. When a given sketch gets to a certain level of complexity, then SketchUp gets sluggish and even crashes. Crashes where I need to restart my computer. Later they introduced ‘Bugsplat Report’ to deal with sending info about the crash to the company – SketchUp now acquired by Trimble. It seems the company anticipates that program crashes are going to be sufficiently frequent to merit a special reporting application.
Trimble initially continued with the set up of there being a free version of SketchUp and a Pro One. However, when new versions were released, they charged for the update. Then they came up with the wondrous ‘Maintenance and Support Subscription’, and every year there would now be an annual fee to keep current. If your account was current, then you were eligible to receive any new versions of the software. if you let things lapse for a few years and then found yourself needing the current version, you would have to pay for all the updates that had occurred in the interim, if I am not mistaken.
If you didn’t keep up with the new versions, saving your cash – and why would you since the upgrades between versions,
via Tumblr https://davidpires578.tumblr.com/post/182943530304
