Hand CAD

Imagine making a free-hand sketch of a house, and then quickly digitally converting this rough, two-dimensional image into a crisp, straight-lined 3D virtual house. A rendering that's enough to use as the basis for construction.

It's an architect's, designer's or even an animator's dream come true. And now it's close to a reality with National Research Council of Canada (NRC's) Sketch-based Design technology, presently under commercialisation.

"For years the design industry market has been looking for a computer-aided solution to help designers during the early conceptual design stage. Our software makes conceptual design as easy as pencil and paper," says John Lyons, a business development officer with the NRC's London, Ontario-based Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Institute (NRC-IMTI).

The software provides a bridge between digital sketch and computer assisted design (CAD) technologies. Commercially available software provides for digital sketching, but no easy way to convert a sketch into exact two and three dimensional forms. At the other end of the design spectrum, CAD software provides lots of 3D power, but with a complex interface that severely limits early stage free-form creative thinking.