MCAD Tech News #208
2 May, 2007 By: Jeffrey RoweRESOURCES AND IDEAS ABOUND FOR REKINDLING THE CREATIVE SPARK IN ALL OF US. I grew up in a town just west of Detroit, Michigan, and needless to say, when I was a kid growing up (OK, in the 50s) I was around a lot of stuff being built. My father and most of my friends’ fathers worked directly or indirectly for an automotive company in some capacity or other, and just about everyone designed and made something. Back then there were literally thousands of tiny shops around the area that made everything imaginable for cars, whether it was manifold gaskets or little electric motors for cooling fans that sat on top of a dashboard. I feel fortunate to have grown up in such a creative environment because it instilled in me a lifelong desire to make things. It’s probably the reason, too, that I got college degrees in both mechanical engineering and industrial design. During the past few years, there has been a resurgence of the DIY (do it yourself) movement and a shift away from simply buying things to actually modifying or making things. We aren't all lucky enough to have started out with 3D solid modeling. Most of our products started on a drafting board or at least in 2D CAD. For the sake of discussion, I'll assume everyone has a 3D-modeling system now. What are we going to do about our legacy data? We have a huge amount of stuff that is at best 2D. What will we do when we have a component to incorporate into our design and we can't get a 3D model of it? Panic? Not yet. We have many choices for pulling data into our modeling software. Read more>> Mark Your Calendar: MCAD Events MasterGraphics' Autodesk 2008 Product Solutions Seminars For Cadalyst's full calendar of events, click here. 
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