What's the most popular design tool?

[teef2]

If I could list them all, this would be a poll, but there's probably more than I know about.

What are you talking about, you ask? Well, I'm refrerring to the software tools of choice for people designing their own cabs. Is it Paint Shop Pro, Corel, Visio or some other?

I realise that in many cases it's down to personal preference or what people have to hand.

And why am I asking? Well, to replace the recently destroyed (by my own hand) upright cab (look, don;t ask!), I am going to build a cocktail cab. I'd prefer to do this from scratch with my own design. I have to say I'm heavily influenced by Crazy Canadians' cocktail design but I want to put my own twist on it. To do a proper job, a opposed to what I did before, I want to get this just right. Hence the question. I'm a programmer by trade, and, although I'm a data warehouse programmer, I pick up how to use software fairly quickly. Money is not a huge object but I wouldn't be looking at an outlay beyond, say,

[RayB]

ideally you need to use a CAD package.

[toolaa]

If you search you should be able to fine AutoCad lite for around 400 $US.  It's likely to be a version or two behind, but it's a fairly robust tool.  Maybe it's me but I found it easier to use than TurboCad.  However my memory of TurboCAD is from college 10 yrs ago, I'm sure it's better today. 

[Crazy Cooter]

What's wrong with graph paper?  If you start with a few measurements from an existing cabinet, you should be able to come up with something without having to lay out anything.  Which leaves more for the cabinet parts. 

[USSEnterprise]

3DS MAX. $3000, thank god for Bittorrent

[toolaa]

What's wrong with graph paper?

[elvis]

I personally use QCad on Linux, primarily because it's free + open source (and I don't agree with pirating commercial software when it is available for legal sale).

I use to be the IT manager for a very large architecture firm so I've used almost every CAD and design package (both 2D and 3D) you can think of.  Just before I left them they were trialling Skatchup 3D:

http://www.sketchup.com/

I have to say this is THE MOST intuitive 3D design package I've ever seen.  It beats AutoDesk Viz and 3DSMax by a mile for design speed.  It kicks AutoDesk Revit and Arcsoft ArchiCAD for ease of use and onscreen manipulation.  And it slaughters AutoCAD, Microstation and any of the large CAD packages for intuitive interface and visualisation abilities.  Even novice non-CAD users can pick this up and be designing complex things in no time.

Best of all, it comes with some fantastic training videos.  They show you how to quickly build objects onscreen, and manipulate them easily to change your design on the fly.  It has built in functions for swinging doors and moving parts, which makes those sorts of items easy to design, and more importantly you get instant visual feedback on whether or not it will fit into the object you are designing.

It's only downfall is its size.  You simply cannot use this for 100-man design projects.  This is a 1-man package, not a system designed for a large workgroup or project team.  But for cabinet design or 1-man design/architecture/engineering offices, it's brilliant.

Check out the gallery page to see what it can do.  They offer a trial download, as well as some simple training videos for free to get you started.  Give it a whirl and see for yourself.

Here's a video (flash player required) showing just how quickly you can design complex things with this tool:
http://download.sketchup.com/downloads/training/tutorials50/movies/Mkt_B5-watch_me_first.html

It also shows of the slice-view tools included to get quick internal views of the items you are building.

[Tahnok]

Personally, I designed by bartop with Visio. Bartops are quite a bit simpler than cocktails, but you could probably still pull it off.

And don't forget about CP Sketcher for the CP (www.CreditButton.net.tc) .

[Bones]

I don't have the drafting skills to design something down to the finest details. Everything I have done has been done in Illustrator and to quite basic plans and designs.

I did download a few CAD programs in the beginning but for somebody that hadn't used CAD software before the programs seemed a little intimidating.

In the big scheme of things, Illustrator for me was only fancy grid paper.

[CJK]

I used VectorWorks 11 from Nemetschek to design mine. Fabulous program, and it comes in a version for the Mac, which is my preferred computing platform.

http://www.nemetschek.net/

-- Chris

[teef2]

Thank you all for your time and efforts. Great review of sketchup by elvis and I think I'm going to have to look into that one further. It will be useful if I can version 3 or 4 of that as I'm sure I won't need all the funtionality of version 5.