Oh man, oh man. When we started to use IronCAD, I felt pretty confident that I could figure it out fairly quickly… oh how wrong I was. Don’t get me wrong, I think CADing in general is pretty cool; really cool in fact. Still, I couldn’t really wrap my mind around some of the program’s functions. I was rather frustrated with the entire thing, and the fact that I had a long weekend at the local anime convention planned did not help either.
Enter the tri-ball.
With [a lot of] Helen’s help, I started to get a feel for what to do. Maybe it was an easier way for me to understand it, but simply using the tri-ball as a guide to line up pieces helped me see how shapes and edges were aligned with each other. With that, I decided to CAD Haku, our lovable dragon since the water pump was full of strange shapes I didn’t even want to think about figuring out how to create. Of course there were the strange shapes of the head and the tail, but beyond that, a fairly reasonable task for someone who hadn’t seen this kind of program before.
First, I just sort of sat down and broke Haku down into parts and shapes. What needed to be produced first? What was “easy” and what was “hard?” Helen suggested (and I’m so glad that she did) that many of the shapes and slots of the model could be easily copied given a number and distance. This was especially helpful in making the pins, the cams, and the slots for the pins. As I mentioned earlier, Helen helped me see how you could just line the tri-ball up with midpoints of edges and use that for referencing how to make different parts align. For creating individual shapes, I relied heavily on the original Adobe Illustrator file and physically measuring Haku with a ruler to get the dimensions. I quickly realized that in my case, blocks were my friends. With that, constructing the more structural parts of Haku were pretty straight forward. I copied the cams and rotated them 45 degrees in succession. The tri-ball made it fairly easy for me to “snap” and connect the different parts during assembly.
Unlike some people, I quickly abandoned the idea of extrusion and opted to do the best I could with simple shapes, leaving detailed portions of my model underdeveloped. Haku’s head is a block, and his tail and spines are ribs. I think the main concept of the model is retained, but if I were to do this assignment over, I would definitely ask for some help in figuring out how to extrude Haku’s head, tail, and spines so that the model would be 100% complete. For certain parts, such as the crank and the two main supports, I was required to create some shapes out of other shapes. The “combine shapes” tool was very helpful given that I remembered that all of the shapes were the same part.
As a finishing touch, I added the wood texture throughout the model, and colored the laser cut edges “Indian Red” for effect. Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the finished product. It’s not much, but it’s a lot more than I thought I would be able to do. The bitmap files I rendered won’t resize, so sorry about the obnoxiously large pictures.
