Hello ID students,
I've recently just come across this engineering community website where people share their CAD work, called GrabCAD. As a member (free online registration), you have access to tons of CAD models and projects that may be very useful to support your own projects. For example, you can download a model of a typical AA battery and another model of the battery housing, which you can then import into your CAD assemblies without having to build these off-the-shelf parts yourself! Perhaps you want to create a scene in your rendering software where you have your model sitting beside some other objects; you can download these "other objects" and import them into your rendering environment! For example, say you designed a new fancy pen holder and wanted to render it with some pens in it; well, download some pen models and import them into your renderer. Done! No need to make your own pen CAD.
So check out GrabCAD here: www.grabcad.com
There are other sources for getting CAD files (predominantely STEP/STP or IGES/IGS), but this one is pretty cool based on my experience over the last couple of days.
You can even download a car model if you wanted!! Have fun and good luck with all your projects!
- Tim
