Friday, November 30, 2012

Grab those supporting CAD files with GrabCAD

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