Design Furniture with free form shapes

When you start a new cabinet Polyboard proposes a variety of basic shapes that you can modify to fit your specific sizes and parameters.

These basic shapes are the plan with a constant height.

The basic ones are simple rectangular cabinets, L shaped cabinets and corner shaped cabinets.

Each shape is parametric and can be resized, adjusted and fitted out as you want. If the plan view of your project requires another shape you can use the Free Shape option.

In this option, you can let your imagination go wild and draw any shape. The shape you draw can only be  made of straight lines. Once drawn Polyboard enables you to qualify each line as either the front, back, or side element of your piece of furniture.

This enables the program to know how each element of your shape will behave when you apply Polyboard functions. Here’s a short video to show how to use this very powerful function to design a custom piece of furniture.

Specifically how to build a bookcase which has a cupboard in the middle section with two doors and is deeper than the rest of the bookcase.

Free form cabinets are cabinets which we can build not around a square, L-shaped or corner shaped cabinet like basic cabinets, but by drawing a shape – any shape – and building a cabinet around that.

We can use Polyboard’s free form mode to build cabinets around any shape. Here is the process of how we can do that.

We start a new cabinet in Polyboard. We have the basic cabinet shapes we can use, and we also have the Free Shape option. A free shape cabinet is one where we can draw any shape and use it to define our furniture. To draw the furniture, we open edit mode to draw lines and put coordinates in. We then give the lines a type – for example, this line is a side, this one is a back, this one is a front, and so on. This gives us the basic shape of the cabinet.

Moving on with the design of this example cabinet, we’ll add some different plinths. Once we’ve done that, we can design the different shapes of the cabinet. This is where we need to put in separations to separate the cabinet into three volumes. Then we put in an upright to align itself with the side of the furniture. This is an invisible upright, which serves to define and separate the internal volumes.

To make the sides of the cabinet with a particular shape, we can insert an inner tooling that allows us to cut out a shape. You can resize this shape, even if you have drawn it yourself and imported it into Polyboard. Alternatively, you can use an existing shape.

We then use Polyboard to add in some different types of shelves, such as a fixed shelf, as well as different types of doors, including a double door that is built in to the cabinet. We can then render the furniture.

The furniture has no assembly details so can we apply a fittings method to add these details.

Design furniture with Free Form Shapes using Polyboard Cabinet Software

If you have any questions or remarks please leave a comment.