OUAN406 - AutoCAD

After being given a half day tutorial on AutoCAD I felt comfortable enough to go away and start producing the design of my set using the software. With certain aspects that I wanted to create it did take a little more experimentation with the program with the help of some online tutorials in order to achieve what I had in mind, such as detailed windows and how to produce accurate arches etc. Below is a series of screenshots showing the types of things I've been producing. There is a combination of buildings, windows, walls and some furniture such as the book case and the staircase. One of the hardest aspects of creating various parts of an environment in this way is imagining it as you're designing it and making sure everything is at the correct scale in order to fit and work as one final piece once everything has been cut.



Once these designs and ideas were transferred onto AutoCAD like shown above. They next had to be converted to DXF files in order to work with the software Ethos which prepared the CAD images for laser cutting. In order to do this, I selected certain objects from the document on AutoCAD and placed them onto a new document. Once the design was positioned on the corner of the page, I saved it as a DXF file, and continued this process until all of the different designs I wanted to laser cut were separated onto appropriate documents. I also had to make sure that the amount of designs I put on a single document didn't amount to more than around 90cm high, as this is just under the limit for the size of material the laser cutter can fit under the lid, on the work area.

The DXF files invert the colours of the drawing, and look like this;