In our last post, we described your first move at evaluating prospective CAD services: sending them a message.

Now we’ll describe the second move: evaluating the responses.

Here are the questions you need to ask about the responses along with how you should mark your answers:

1. Did the message arrive within one business day? Yes: 10; No: 0
2. Did the CAD service answer your questions pertinently? (sometimes their comprehension of English can be very poor). Rate on a scale of 1 to 10
3. Are they using your CAD platform? Yes: 10; No: 0
4. Do they have experience in your particular specialization? Yes: 10; No: 0
5. If yes, did they describe in some detail what they have done? Rate on a scale of 1 to 10
6. Did they express clear interest in working for you? Rate on a scale of 1 to 10
7. Did they tell you what to do next? Yes: 10; No: 0

Now add up all the marks you just gave, divide by 70 and multiply by 100. In other words, express your above evaluation as a percentage. Let’s call this percentage “the grade”.

Arrange the grades in a highest-to-lowest order. The highest five scorers comprise your shortlist of prospective CAD services.

The next step is for you to dig deeper into the capabilities of each of them so that you can end up with a final list of three services.

Stay tuned for the next part in this training!

Enjoy your day,

by R. Kamalathasan, Assistant Manager (Projects), The Magnum Group

When you do a paper to CAD conversion, the input document is often a scanned paper print (also known as a “raster image file”). It is usually in TIFF, JPEG, BMP or PDF format.

You will usually attach the raster image file to a new AutoCAD drawing and start tracing over it. You may sometimes get frustrated if the raster image file is too large: panning, for instance, takes an extended period of time because of the large size of the raster image file.

So what’s a solution to make it easy to work in AutoCAD when raster image files are attached?

The best way is to convert the raster image file to PNG format and then insert it into AutoCAD!

Photoshop will help you to convert the raster image files from any format to PNG. If you don’t have Photoshop there are some free programs that do the job. You can easily find one by Googling.

You will definitely have a better AutoCAD working experience with PNG files since they are smaller and have transparent backgrounds.

Hope this helps!

Technorati Tags: AutoCAD drawings, AutoCAD drafting, raster images, PNG, outsource AutoCAD, CAD services

by R Kamalathasan, Assistant Manager (Projects), The Magnum Group

Have you ever thought about using super-intelligent image resizing software to minimize image filesize?

Are you wasting a lot of time trying to resize images without causing their quality to drop like a stone?

Ok, then you should know about “Seam Carving”.

What’s “Seam carving”? No idea what it means?… ok, here’s a small description:

It’s an image resizing technique based on removal of pixels identified as zero importance by a special algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.

To get a better idea about the capabilities of seam carving technique watch this video: http://www.seamcarving.com/

SEAMonster and Liquid Resize are some of the wonderful programs that do image seam carving and they are free.

There is also a site which does online image seam carving. Check it out and get your images resized magically to
your needs!

Here are all our recent 3D visualizations in one place. They are all of imaginary cellphones. They were created by first making 3D objects in AutoCAD, positioning the objects for a suitable view, rendering the objects and touching up the final images with Adobe Photoshop CS2:

In order of appearance they are the Rolex cellphone, the Boss cellphone, the Nike cellphone and the Tiffany cellphone (click on the name for the full-size image).

Use 3D Visualizations for Marketing

If you have a conceptual product and need to visualize it to evince interest from potential customers, send us your sketches and surface finish description (the “texture”). Our graphic designers and CAD drafting specialists will create a photorealistic rendering in 3D that will wow your customers!

Learn more by viewing our 3D modeling page and our 3D furniture Visualization page.

We’ve done houses, condos, machines, household appliances and a whole lot of other images!

Our engineering drafting expertise in drafting artists’ impressions of concept products continues to evolve. Here is an illustration of what we think a Nike cell phone would look like.

It is completely shockproof, mainly due to the blue rubber bumper pads on the corners and the grey ones on the sides.

There are also air cushions for a second level of shock damping. Navigation is by state-of-the-art touch screen.

To conceive of this design, our engineers studied  dozens of sports shoe designs online and on the ground. The product was created with 3D AutoCAD drawings and then rendered using various software tools including Adobe Photoshop.

Also see our Hugo Boss cell phone and our Tiffany cell phone visualizations.

If you have a product idea and want to know what it will look like in reality,  give us a shout. Use our 3D product visualization in your project prospectus and watch your funding come in faster!

Technorati Tags: cad drafting services, autocad drawings, engineering drafting

Another thought our design team had in the wake of the Prada cell phone… a hypothetical Hugo Boss cell phone!

This one is modeled after the famous Boss men’s cologne. Because the palm-sized sphere has a much greater volume than a normal cell phone enclosure, there is plenty of space for all manner of extra features.

The new features that might be added to avail of this extra space are:
 

• Small, shuttered compartments for keeping various pills that have to be taken at regular intervals, with a flashing LED and beeper for each compartment that activate at dosage time

• A heating element around the whole enclosure for warming your hands in winter or warming up a large latte by immersing the phone in the latte

• An extra battery to power the heater

• A Swiss Army Knife

• A retractable ball point pen

• An LED flash + hazard light

• A refillable pepper spray

See other designer cell phones we’ve imagined: Tiffany Cell Phones

Any other features which you think should be added?

Any other imaginary products you would like us to create in cyberspace? (We’ll publish our engineers’ impression with a link to your web site.)

Use the comment form to get back to us!

Cheers

Technorati Tags: cell+phones, hugo+boss, designer+cell+phones, prada+phone, new+products, new+designs, iphone

LG Electronics has worked closely with renowned luxury goods manufacturer Prada to announce the LG-PRADA cell phone on January 18, 2007. A photograph of it is shown at left.

So our engineering minds got to thinking: what if high-fashion cell phones became a trend?

Our first impulse was to imagine what cell phones made by Tiffany & Co would look like.
Yup, you guessed it, it’s on the right!

(We haven’t put “Tiffany & Co” inside the cell phone screen because (and this may come as a surprise to you) we are just not up to having a friendly chat with their attorneys…

We have more designer cell phones in the works… come back in a few days and you’ll see the next one!

Technorati Tags: tiffany, prada, LG, cell+phones, designer+phones, engineering+design, product+design, new+products