Which tool to use to easily modify a pre-designed 3D drawing?

Hello everyone,

In advance I apologize for the ingenuousness of my questions, I have heard about autocad and 3D drawing for the first time only a few days ago

Tu put it in a nutshell, the company I work for is having a 3D drawing crowsourced (using either autocad or solidworks) and I need to come up with the best way way and the best tool to easily modify it once it has been designed.

Basically, the design is very simple: it is a 3D cube, which we'll be using to visualize market segments in a business-oriented environment. What we'll need to do will go no further than creating/modifying new blocks within the cube, changing colors and axis legends.

So I was wondering if there was some kind user-friendly CAD player/editor that we could use for that purpose. Note : some departments of the company use autocad and solidworks extensively, so we can have access to these pieces of software, but my team and I know nothing about CAD so it'd be great if there was a simpler alternative.

In advance, in thank you all for your help

It would possibly be easier to answer your question, if you could post examples of what you have (will have) and the sort of thing that needs to alter, it may be worth waiting untill you have something definate to work with.

Sure, so here is a screenshot of what we managed to design ourselves, using ppt.

In this visual, each cube axis represents a way to segment markets (e.g. X = customer type / Y = geography / Z = product type).

What we'll need to do consists in:

- creating/modifying/moving/extending blocks inside the cube (such as the blue and green ones in this example)

- rotate the cube to see it from different angles

- manage easily the legends on the axes

- export them to powerpoint decks

Basically that'd be it.

Thx

There are no "easy" methods. Since you don't know AutoCAD or Solidworks how about asking for help from one of your co-workers who does?

Have you given any thought to using something other than these two programs? It appears that what you are doing doesn't necessarily require a CAD program which in this case would seem like overkill.

I agree with ReMark on this, it is certainly doable in Autocad, but would require a certain level of proficiency to manipulate easily, I would certainly look at adding toolpalette menu's for selecting objects and rotating views, and using transparency to see the various levels, there must be some marketing tools that would be capable of doing this.

Pretty easy to do in SolidWorks, IF, you know SolidWorks, but since you don't know SolidWorks......

I have come across DesignSpark, any thoughts?

Pretty easy to do in AutocadLT, IF, you know LT

Might as well throw this in too.....SketchUp. Free and easy.

Might as well throw this in too.....SketchUp. Free and easy.

Thanks, I'll try it out. And does it allow you to open designs made with Autocad/solidworks?

Thanks

I don't know. I think you can open AutoCAD drawing files (or import them) if you have SketchUp Pro which is not free.

Why haven't you at least asked one of your people who uses either of the programs to give it a shot? What do you have to lose? Your pride? You all work for the same company.

I don't know. I think you can open AutoCAD drawing files (or import them) if you have SketchUp Pro which is not free.

 

Why haven't you at least asked one of your people who uses either of the programs to give it a shot? What do you have to lose? Your pride? You all work for the same company.

Ok I'll try and see what it can and cannot do.

The thing is that I am an intern, so I have limited leverage to bother our CAD people with this ... That's why I am reaching out to the CADTutor community ...

Let someone else in authority do the reaching out. You've done the research. Make a recommendation.

What is the source of this "pre-designed 3D drawing?

Who is going to be editing it and why?

From your description thus far, I suspect MS Excel would be a better solution than a CAD program.

It sounds to me like you want an easy to edit 3D graph for data presentation purposes.

Because I know SolidWorks better than I know Excel, it would be far easier for me to do in SolidWorks.

But I suspect that it is far far more difficult to LEARN an appropriate technique in SolidWorks than in MS Excel.