“As experienced software engineers” highlights the problem with many CAD solutions. People who design physical “thingies” professionally are generally not software engineers.

We of course need a viable solution as an open source product but a lot of this is recreating the wheel without any knowledge of how the wheel is being used or why it is even useful to begin with. So you essentially end up with a knock off version of the wheel that doesn’t work the way someone who is experienced with wheels expects it to work.

The modern version looks ass.

Well just the other day I had commented about how I wanted to be a car salesman and work for Malfunctioning Eddie because the Thundercougarfalcon bird has so much eagle in it.

But then a kind stranger reminded me that it was in fact the Beta Romeo that has so much eagle.

So now I don’t know what job I want to get assigned in the year 3000.

Why couldn’t she be the other kind of mermaid?

According to a random Reddit comment it was down for maintenance, but that comment was made 20+ days ago. Odd there is no mention of it being down on the main page or anything especially because all of the links on the main page point to forum posts.

CAD software is made for situations like this.

Say you design a bench like they show in their example, that bench has defined dimensions length, height, depth as an example.

Then other dimensions would be considered constants, say for instance the size and spacing of the boards (slates) that are used for the seat of the bench.

These dimensions and their relationships are saved in the CAD design file.

So say for instance later on we want to make another bench with the depth of the bench increased and we want to keep the spacing of the boards consistent and assume we are going to keep the boards the same size. Well we will need to increase the number of boards that are needed for the seat.

But since we set that information up in the original design we can just change the depth dimension and the design will automatically update along with all of the linked components and design files.

Hopefully this makes sense. I will try and answer questions if it’s not clear.

Things like this I am always like wow that’s neat. Then I look at it more and I am like so did they not know that parametric CAD already exists. This could have been made in freeCAD for instance. Or if they still wanted the “programming” aesthetic it could have been done in openSCAD.

Then at least it can be saved and distributed in common CAD formats. And then the final design can generate the BOM and the 2d drawings.

Not specific to digital art but the “draw a box” series of videos are helpful and as far as I am aware these are all free on their site or YouTube.

Proko has some good content as well I believe they even offer some series that are around digital art. A lot of their content is free on their site but they also offer paid content. I have paid for some of the content but honestly I feel they have plenty of free content that maybe I shouldn’t have paid for it as it’s a bit advanced for my skill set.

These both offer some good information aimed at the foundations of drawing. Such as form and perspective that you need to understand no matter what media/tools you end up using.

Hopefully that’s helpful I am interested in seeing some other people’s suggestions as well.