When a designer or cabinet maker is building furniture for interior design in real-life projects, it’s always necessary to design cabinets to precise measurements.
When a project combines a custom shaped plan (top view) with a different shaped elevation (front view) and yet another shape for the side view, the overall shape of the cabinet can get very complicated to draw in 3D and the shapes of all the different parts of a piece of furniture can also become complex, tedious and error prone to calculate and draw.
One of the extremely powerful aspects of Polyboard is it’s capacity to easily draw and calculate very complicated shaped furniture.
Polyboard has three design tools that when combined can produce simply and quickly complicated shaped cabinets.
When you open the New Cabinet dialog box The Free Shape option allows you to draw a shape that represents the plan view of your cabinet.
The command Mutil Slope Top allows you to draw freely the shape of the top of your furniture.
Use the menu “Modify>Top>Multi Slope Top” to open this dialog box.
The Free Divisions command allows you to insert a board at any angle inside the cabinet.
This command is accessible when you right click inside an active volume or directly from the Modify menu.
When you combine all these options, you can build a complex shaped cabinet that is made of a multitude of different panels.
The amazing thing is that Polyboard calculates dynamically the real shape and size of every single part and updates all the drawings, cutting lists and prices as you design.
Here’s a short video that shows how design a piece of furniture that has a complex form.
Starting from exact dimensions of each view Polyboard calculates the overall shape and draws the precise shape and size of every part to manufacture the furniture.
Polyboard has an amazing geometrical motor that does an extremely good job of calculating all the parts.
My only regret is that it’s impossible to draw curved parts like a bow fronted cabinet or curvy tops.
For the moment, Polyboard as its name suggests, only works with flat boards and the shapes you draw for the plan and elevations have to be made of straight lines.
Note that each board can have a curved shape but the board is still flat.
Personally I don’t know of any other software package that can do this sort of work, if you do please let me know.
Here’s a image of the cabinet quickly rendered in ProgeCad.
Note the way that Polyboard has calculated all the different parts to build the “curved” shell.
Click here for more information on Polyboard
Click here for more information on ProgeCad
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That was impressive Ness, thank’s for sharing your effort. I know a certain cad drafting service that could help you out about more design.