pic: Schreiber Take on West Coast Drive

[R.C.]

Originally Posted by Madison

I think singling out that the students are rendering pictures of their models is a pointless exercise. That process takes a small fraction of time compared to what likely goes into modeling and constraining the parts in the first place.

I think, in reality, a point that can be successfully made is that a lot of these designs are built upon completely arbitrary criteria that have no real-world implications. They all mimic one another and those that have been successful before them, but they're not designed for any other particular purpose. Teams have had success copying 60/254/968, 148/217, et. al., but they never really grasp what makes these teams opt for certain methods or materials. That's something of a problem.

I can assure you that there are many more people that know how to operate CAD than can design effectively. We have tremendous trouble where I work finding people that are qualified to do both and frequent trouble finding people qualified to do even one or the other.

All of that being said, I learned a lot of what I know about design and all of what I know about CAD from messing around and trying to improve upon things I saw here and at competitions. With time, I grew to understand more about why certain designs worked and why others didn't and experienced a fair share of failures. I've been working as a design engineer for about four years now and am pretty damned good at it as a result of what I learned here. I think these forums can continue to be useful to new people in that regard if they're clear about the intent of their design.

When folks post a new picture or idea, it'd be amazing if they also outlined the constraints they worked under while designing and evaluated if they met those goals. Allow yourselves a hard limit on weight or materials or resources and see what you come up with.

Madison,

I agree with you here. Rendering doesn't take that much longer. Most of the time goes into making the model and only a fraction goes into rendering. Well most of the rendering process is just letting it do its own thing. It's pretty interesting to see elegant renders that show a lot of detail aka Lewis comes to mind (roboticwanderor).

Also most drawings are just copied and re-iterated. Some are just bandwagon drawings. Such as swerves and sheet. Sometimes I wish people actually thought about x resources they have and then try to improve their design based off their resources. For our team is it really really retarded to design sheet parts, but for teams like 148 its amazing since they have the ability to.

Over the years as a CAD person on CD I have learned that most of my ideas don't work and if they do, not well. These forums have taught me a lot about material properties, clean design, and working toward simplicity. It just takes some patience and the right people to help you understand what your doing wrong.

Andrew I love your napkin sketch. Most if not all my drawings are roughly sketched in my notepad and drawn over and over till I find "THAT" model. It saves a lot of time already having something to base your CAD off of. I'm sure a lot of teams take this approach already: Napkin -> Whiteboard -> Paper -> CAD -> CAM or Sponsor -> Part.

-RC