Designing Fabric products (Tents, Backpacks, clothing)

Hi Folks:

I'm new here, and I'm trying to decide if AutoCAD is the right program for me, or if some other program might be better.

I want to design fabric items, like backpacks and tents. So I'll need to take flat pieces of fabric, and cut and join them together in ways that make rounded corners. It's easy to design a rectangular box, but try to cut fabric so that it creates a rectangular box that has rounded edges and rounded corners ... not so easy.

Or ... design a two-hoop tube tent with the door hoop larger than the foot hoop. It's easy to draw this out, but its very hard to figure out how to cut the flat fabric so that it comes together to form the 3D shapes I want.

Does AutoCAD have the ability to do this? Can it take a 3D object and then create a series of flat fabric shapes that will come together to form that shape? Or conversely, If I draw out the flat shapes, can I use AutoCAD to "assemble" the flat fabric shapes to see how they come together?

Do these questions even make sense?

If you think AutoCAD is or isn't a good program for this need, please let me know. Or ... if you think another program would be better for this, I'm open to all recommendations. I'm very willing to invest the time needed to learn AutoCAD, but I don't want to get 50 hours into it, just to realize it can't do what I need it to do.

Your help and advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!!

I don't think AutoCAD is going to be the best choice for what your looking to do...

I found this though:

Answer

AutoCAD is a program that is fantastic if you have geometry that you want to represent in 2-D or 3-D. However, I don't really equate clothing with geometry. I did a Google search for "fashion design software" (with the quotes) and came up with these:

http://www.capterra.com/fashion-design-and-production-software

http://ezinearticles.com/?Get-Fashion-Design-Software-and-Design-Clothes-Like-a-...

http://www.optitex.com/

http://www.startingaclothingline.com/

http://www.fashioncad.net/

http://www.edrawsoft.com/fashion.php

Free download: http://www.softlookup.com/display.asp?id=4976

 

This one is a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator:

http://www.snapfashun.com/snapfashun.html

 

 

There are a whole lot more, but you can do the remainder of the searching. I'm an AutoCAD guy.

 

Good luck to you.

 

Bill DeShawn

http://my.sterling.net/~bdeshawn

KC

OK ... thanks for the answer. What about AutoDesk Inventor? Do you think that would work?