Technical Drawing and Computer Aided Design

[William Overington]

To what extent, if at all, is Affinity Designer designed for, or can be used for, technical drawing and computer aided design please.

William

 

 

[thomaso]

Affinity has quite limited measurement features only. This can make it unusable for CAD, respectively for specific output. But, for instance, it might work to layout your new kitchen furniture along the wall or sketch a floor plan of your living room in case you move. Also you can design a 2D shape for laser cut or to be used for 3D extrusion. Of cause it lacks in any 3-dimensional output.

The drawing tools don't fully support mathematically / geometrically precise shapes and/shape calculations, for instance by lacking in certain guides & snapping.

[Old Bruce]

7 hours ago, William Overington said:

To what extent, if at all, is Affinity Designer designed for, or can be used for, technical drawing and computer aided design please.

William

I would not use Designer at all in a CAD workflow. I would use Paper and Pencil over Designer.

[firstdefence]

What do you want to do CAD wise?

[William Overington]

Well, I was musing about something and I wondered what might be possible.

I have recently been using Affinity Designer to produce artwork and getting quality prints from a company that has a service of producing one-off greetings cards, some of which can include an uploaded photograph. With advice from the company I have been able to use artwork from jpg files that I have produced using Affinity Designer. I get frames (sold as photo frames and certificate frames) delivered with the grocery, and have enjoyed myself designing the artwork, receiving the cards and framing them. There are threads about all of this in the Share your work section of this forum.

So, having seen some posts on the web about 3D printing using metallic printing ink, I wondered if I could design, and maybe upload artwork to a site somewhere and receive a sculpture in bronze or similar, if there exists a business that does 3d printing of one-off items in a similar sort of way that the 2d prints on cards can be ordered.

I have seen various bronze sculptures, in real life and on the web, for example The Minotaur and The Hare in Cheltenham, 

https://www.visitcheltenham.com/things-to-do/the-hare-and-the-minotaur-p1596173

and Leonardo's Horse

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/leonardo-s-horse-il-cavallo-dello-sforza

There are various others, and I am on the mailing list for several sculpture gardens.

So, mixed in with watching various YouTube videos of railway modelling, I am musing on the idea of basically an OO scale model railway but without any railway, just some scenery items such as scale models of trees, readily available, to make a scale model sculpture garden, complete with an original bronze sculpture.

Maybe a character in one of my model will do that. Maybe I can include the artwork though, ready for use.

Yes, I look at opportunities, but I cannot do such things, so I just read about them and muse.

https://www.bronzecasting.org.uk/

http://poppy.nsms.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord/items/show/371

The following linked web page has a link to a view in Google street view. Moving in Google street view shows the environment of the sculpture.

https://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2479

William

[William Overington]

I remembered that this Windows 10 computer has the Microsoft 3D Builder program installed.

So I had a look, and loaded up the preset model of a bulldozer, then I hid the background grid.

I exported a 2d image to PDF using the Microsoft Print to PDF facility.

I then opened the PDF in Affinity Designer.

I managed to select the original image together with a large white background and expoort as a png with no background.

I then opened a recent .afdesign file, in fact one from the project described in the following thread.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/144236-some-language-independent-glyphs-for-museum-shops/

I saved a copy as bulldozer_scene.afdesign and cleared everything from the scene.

I then drew an ellipse and filled it so as to give a representation of a pond.

I then placed the png of the bulldozer into the document and moved it over the edge of the pond so as to show that there was no background.

I then exported a png 400 pixels wide which thus has a height of 553 pixels.

Here is the image.

3D Builder has the facility to save in what appear to be several 3d formats, but, as far as I know at present, no direct way to export a png image.

However, I am pleased with what I have managed to achieve.

William

 

 

 

[William Overington]

I found in 3D builder a model of a bare tree. I coloured it grey.

I exported a PDF.

I rotated the model by 50 degrees.

I exported a second PDF.

Then I used Affinity Designer.

I produced a png file without background from each PDF.

I added both of them to the scene and exported a png of the whole scene.

William

 

 

 

 

[William Overington]

Here is a sculpture added.

William

 

[William Overington]

There is now a thread in the Share your work section where I have added to the image.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/144383-a-serendipitous-artwork/

William