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February 16, 2007

Preview: SjorCAD :3d software for Pioneering



While I'm an enthusiastic user of SketchUp, a program written specifically for pioneering would be a lot more useful. That's why SjorCAD (Dutch/Flemish for 'LashingCAD') is a pretty exciting project.

Silas De Munck and Pieter Verberck, two students at the University of Antwerp, are developing this program, which will allow you to 'build' a 3d model of your project, and then automatically generate a list of materials needed, dimensions for the model etc.


When it is released, you will be able to place poles in a project, rotate them until they touch each other (SjorCAD uses collision detection, so it will know when two poles are touching each other, something SketchUp doesn't do), attach them together with lashings, and possibly even get an indication of whether your structure will be stable or not. This PDF file, from the Sjorcad site, has more information.

Development is still in the early stages, and the developers expect it will be around 12 months before SjorCAD is useful, so this is one to look out for early in 2008.

4 comments:

Loy said...

Oh, how long i've waited for someting like that!

Anonymous said...

Hi people,

tnx for the entry on this blogsite. Atm the project is buried under a pile of paper and other projects but I'm gonna try to continue working on it asap. I'll let you all know when work is moving on again ;)

Pieter Verberck (Clever Mara)

Jan Druyts said...

We want the program, is it ready yet???

Fi Nb said...

This program is useful for Scout who love Pioneering. And me too !. I'm very exciting about that software. I will wait until it comes true.