Bernd Lederle, Archimedialab, Shanghai, China and Ditzingen, Germany [email protected] www.archimedialab.com
Alfred, I must say I really appreciate your work on WildTools. It is simply the best drawing tool for my purposes … concept+design of complex buildings, and it shows its strengths especially when dealing with curved and irregular geometry. (I come from an aeronautical engineering background, eight semesters … before I studied architecture.) In combination with OpenClip “Copy and Paste” functions to integrate my PowerCADD drawings into FormZ makes it fun to generate complex 3D models quickly from the drawings. (I just wish it worked the other way as well … copy and paste the FormZ model into a PowerCADD presentation.)
The ease of use and functionality of WildTools is the envy of all of my colleagues here who are stuck with AutoCAD and Windows-based computers. No other drawing tool I know has all the features that make WildTools so powerful. If there was one thing I could wish for, it would be a more powerful parametric stair tool that includes pre-defined limits and platforms.
Even though these days full BIM solutions seem to be all the rage, none of them can hold a candle when it comes to creating complex geometry based design concepts compared to PowerCADD with WildTools.
All of the projects attached were initiated from (precise geometric) sketches in PowerCADD, taken into 3D with FormZ. Even though we do not use PowerCADD for the production and working drawings, the full extent of the concept design process relies on it entirely.
Regards,
Bernd
Thank you, Bernd. As it happened, I taught myself drafting when working on the F.8L Falco drawings and with aircraft drawings you are always dealing with curves which are precise shapes that must be drawn accurately. This experience was what made me concentrate on curves in WildTools. A smooth curve through points is a natural thing to want but I could never find any program that would do that. I bought books on the mathematics behind computer graphics, but I could not understand the math so I just looked at the pictures. Finally I just sat on my back porch and came up with a way to do it and that gave us the WildTools Spline tool. Then it was cutting Bézier curves, trimming and extending them, perpendicular and tangents to these curves….
Please don’t tell your friends that your software was created by a Speech and Drama major who barely made it through college!
Alfred Scott
