looking for new 3d cad

'From time to time I get the chance to earn a few brownie points by printing paper patterns or templates or some such for my wife. I was recently asked to produce a couple of circles of little dots with precise circle dimensions and doing this in SE was straightforward. I then print using the standard print dialogue but use the Microsoft "print to PDF" printer. I then have a file I can pass to my wife, although she generally asks me to print it anyway! Good for another brownie point. I went through this process for my concentric circles and, printing from Adobe Reader at 100% scale to an HP desktop laser printer, it came out to exact dimensions as measured with the beaten-up old plastic ruler on my desk. If not, it would have been a trivial job to calculate and set the print scale factor when printing from Reader.

As mentioned, the printer scaling can be applied at so many unseen points in the print work flow that it would be difficult to point the finger at any one of them; better to have a repeatable process that can be simply tweaked to calibrate. Given the alignment errors I always get when printing the patterns scaled up and tiled across multiple pages, there is sufficient mechanical distortion going on between paper and printer that better than a millimetre or so accuracy across the page is probably about as good as I would expect with my setup.

Edited By Nealeb on 23/03/2023 10:39:37

Hi

Both thee the above mentioned paulmills3 and paulmills4 are me, logged in on tablet last time I replied, sorry for any confusion butdid not realize I had 2 accounts will try to sort it later although it may have something to do with the fact at my last visit to the phsychiatrist she said I wasn't a paranoid schizophrenic and that thety were actually trying to get both of me

Thanks Dave silly old duffer Will try the ctrl-p thing later spent ages clicking every button loking for it even endured a couple of you tube torture sessions which just give me a headache

Well I'm now 10 weeks in and I'm going to have a go at the Bismarck

Just the outer view for starters, see how it goes

Day one and the hull was a bit of a swine, you need at least 100 slices to get it right, the bow flaring and the bulbous bow are a real pain, I used about 12 slices

Will have a go at the superstructure over the weekend, scale is 1:100 1cm/1M

She's actually rather a good looking bit of kit

Edited By Ady1 on 24/03/2023 03:02:16

One 1:100 Treaty busting capital ship in less than two days, that's how easy Alibre is

I'm more than impressed.

When I started it and just did a plain flat deck it was simple enough but when I looked at the hull I thought uh-oh we're about to come to a grinding halt here.... and it took a couple of hours to suss it out

But it turns out they have a boss command in the menu called Loft which allows you to feed any shape you want through 2D drawings which means you can do all sorts of weird curved shapes if you feed it through enough 2D drawings

That must be tempting the non believers

Pete