A family's introduction to SolidDesigner
The prize for winning the user group's ME10 macro competition last year was a license for SolidDesigner. It has taken me a while to get everything ready. At the time of the competition the only PC I had was a 486/66 with 16Mb RAM! Obviously SD was not going to spin on that!

So it was down to the local PC shoppe. Special offer $1250: Siemens Xpert 8520 PIII 450MHz 64 Mb RAM "ordinary" graphics card, 15" screen. I decided to give it a try.

Got home, installed the necessary operating system, network card and ISDN. Got the customary codewords from CoCreate and installed SD.

Did it work?

No.

Here I was without a 3D card and only 64 Mb. This was really pushing it a bit. I didn't give up though. Tweaked the Exceed settings, memory limits etc. Tried again.

Voila! It worked.

mobile.gif (42489 bytes) Now I don't expect to be building 500Mb models. SolidDesigner for me, is an object to be customized. So to get the interface running and some geometry created is just great.

The problem now is to keep the kids off! It didn't take long for my sons, Tobias and Thomas, to realize that solid modelling was actually quite cool. OK, I thought I'll show them the basics and let them have a go themselves. They got 15 minutes on workplanes, Create 2D, extrude, blend etc. I guessed they'd get stuck pretty quick.

Oh no. Who was I kidding? 2 hours later they had designed their own mobile phone. Complete with buttons, transparent display and antenna. 2 HOURS!

So how old are these kids? Tobias is 13 (soon 14) and Thomas is 12. Both are hardened Nintendo64/PC game users and know a thing or two about 3D, perspectives etc. Not least, they know not to panic when something goes wrong and are not the slightest bit worried to try things they aren't familiar with. (And I'm not worried about allowing them!)

 

 

To be continued.....