From Concept to Creation #CADventures with AutoDesk Inventor!

By Aliza Wajih

Hi Everyone! Here is another great story from the Research Platforms!

Last week we ran our hugely successful CAD course for the first time after #ResBaz! We used Autodesk Inventor to teach 3D modelling and once again had a fun and wonderful learning experience. The workshop was fully booked within the first 2 weeks of advertising and there were plenty of requests for more… so keep an eye out for them because we will be running more CAD workshops very soon!

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Paul Introducing ResPlat and ResBaz 

The purpose of the course was to give a basic introduction to Autodesk Inventor as well as help participants develop an intuition about the how to take an idea, transform it into a 3D model and modify it so that it can be printed or manufactured.  

After introducing the fundamental concepts of design we looked at some practical examples with a capstone project of designing a fan using some basic Autodesk tools. This was the best way to show participants that even the very basic knowledge of CAD can enable you to make very complicated designs. It was also a great way to demonstrate that what we learnt in class is directly applicable to real world problems. Below is a picture of Ali Daneshpour who went ahead and 3D printed a model of that fan and brought to class for everyone to see!

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Ali With his 3D printed fan and CAD model

Later that week I also discovered a similar model of the fan being used a propeller for a ship. You can imagine the excitement to see that what we did in class with just a few basic tools can be used to design a giant propeller! The link below will take you to that page

Moving onto our next challenge, The Lego Man was also a great success and had people learning and having a little bit of fun with animation and assembly! This is regarded as one of the more challenging aspects of design but everyone made it took very easy! Check out Jaimys’ Lego man and his rock star moves!
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Lego Rockstar with Jaimys

To see all our adventure follow #cadventures on twitter and see everything that happened on the day! 

Participants and feedback

To give you a little background information about our participant, we had a diverse group of talented researchers from molecular chemistry, architectural and engineering background. We encourgae a collaborative and friendly environment in our workshops, so even though most of our participants were not of similar academic backgrounds everyone not only worked with us but also helped each other overcome challenges while collaborating in smaller groups.

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 Group work in progress on day 2…

From the amazing feedback we received, the course was taught well, ran at good pace and everyone found the helper were always there to fix bugs and clarify doubts (for the participants reading this… Thank you for the lovely feedback). I would like to thank the helpers,Paul Mignone (@PJMignone), Vincent khau (@thevinniek), Bobby Lii, Karlo Julian, and Tony Zathila , who put in tremendous effort to make this another successful course.

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Another day of overwhelmingly positive feedback for @awajih08 and her #cadventure team #resbaz .@ResPlat pic.twitter.com/uSlCrPjomX

— Paul Mignone (@PJMignone)
June 30, 2015
And last but not least, I would like to thank all the participants who came to the workshops. I got to meet some brilliant people and I am glad that my team and I could help them with their work and research. It makes me feel that I am part of a bigger community and that all the hard works has paid off. (#myresearch) Keep inspiring us!
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