Posted by Donald J. DaCosta on August 17, 2001 at 06:58:02:I've been successfully designing, building & installing custom cabinetry for 10 years. I use a $65 2D cad program, Generic CADD 6. While your laughing up your collective sleeves let me say that, for the price, this program has a lot of great features many of which I haven't tapped yet, but it is woefully inadequate for creating 3D renderings (by using polar cordinates to create a pseudo 3 dimensional coordinate system). This is time consuming, error prone & the end result is not in true perspective. But it's power, for me, is the wide variety of snaps (closest point, mid point, perpendicular, parallel, intersection), multi-trim and extension functions, all of the move and copy functions for objects, windows, etc., layering, and the ability to input, measure & position objects with extreme accuracy. The bottom line? I'm looking for a 3D program, short of a full blown (and expensive), 3D, architectural version, that will give me the ability to have all of the above features plus the ability to create true perspective, in situ drawings of the final design. Color & shading would be nice but black on white would suffice for my purposes. I'm interested in intuitive, straight forward ease of coordinate entry and coordinate to coordinate measurement in the 3D space.
I recently bought "Design Workshop Lite" from Artifice. I haven't been using it for very long but so far it's been a disappointment. But I won't criticize. My system is a Pentium mmx, 166 mhz processor with 32 mb of RAM running Windows 95a. DW Lite is supposedly compatible but is appareently designed to run on a Mac. I successfully went through their tutorial but have found the program to be extremely cumbersome, not very intuitive and their "help" function almost useless. Maybe the full blown version on a Win 98 or newer system might do much better but I would not invest the money based on my experience to date.
Anyone out there doing 3D kitchen/bath/home office cabinet design?