Lesson 1: Simple furniture design using the basic commands

This Polyboard tutorial is an overview of how to start using the basic commands for simple furniture design.

Traditionally, cabinet making has always started by drawing the project. Drawings use geometrical objects, lines, arcs, etc. to represent the final cabinet. The objectives of the drawing being to provide the design and all the manufacturing information to make the furniture.

This process requires a whole series of operation:

• Initial rough sketches to fix the overall design
• Perspective views to present the project
• Scaled drawings to get the overall sizes
• Scaled drawings of each part that will be assembled to make the furniture
• Calculation of the dimensions of each part
• Writing the list of parts with their respective dimensions (cutting list)
• Calculating the cost of the materials
• Calculating the time and price of the labor

I call this the design process.

To make things even more complicated it is often necessary to change and modify a project along the way and a minor change in the overall sizes requires that all the associated documents be updated. A real nightmare for complex projects.

The result is that the design process is complex, time consuming and error prone.

For some years now CAD programs have largely replaced manual drawing boards. Using CAD brings 2 major benefits to the design process, easy drawing updating and automatic dimensions. However as the cabinet or furniture is still designed using geometry, the time needed to obtain coherence between the different parts and operations remains difficult to maintain.

Polyboard opens up a new approach to cabinet and furniture design.

Polyboard is a parametric driven furniture and cabinet design program.

This means that the basic elements are no longer geometrical lines and arcs, but objects and materials that have properties.

These properties include their geometry (dimensions) but go much further and include also their relationship to other objects around them.

To design a piece of furniture with Polyboard one must define the characteristics of the different objects and their relationships to the adjacent parts.

This new way of seeing furniture design not only makes the process faster, easier and far less error prone, but is much closer to the way a cabinet maker thinks.

Using Polyboard we will be using panels that are defined as sides, tops, bottoms,shelves, uprights, etc. and telling the program how these elements interact with one another.

Once these elements and their interactions are defined this information can be stocked in a library and the elements can be simply pulled out of the library to build your cabinets and furniture. Polyboard will then assemble the different parts automatically and produce all the design and manufacturing documents perfectly, with no errors.

This video covers:

• Basic furniture design interface
• Properties menus
• Working with volumes
• Adding vertical separations
• Adding shelves
• Adding doors
• Adding draws
• Assembly details

If you would like more vidoes on specific topic please leave a comment to tell me the subjects would like covered.

Happy wood working to all,

Ness

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