design your own r/c plane with RC CAD
 Here's
an interesting and nicely-designed website with an intriguing product
which I found in trying to answer Randy in his quest
for r/c model plane-designing software (see the post
box page).
The site is the home of RC CAD which is a software program "specially designed to help modelers to create airplanes. It
supplies a three-dimensional visualisation of the model you are
designing".
As you can see, the home page is very attractive, and from this
opening page you can navigate to pages such as What is RcCad,
Download, Purchase, Screen Shots, User Feedback, Gallery and Links.
The site offers a free download of a trial version of the program
(3·2 MB) and the full  commercial
version is available at a competitive price of US$49.95 which you can purchase
on-line. The program runs
under Windows 95B/98/NT-SP3. Incidentally, the Gallery page gives access
to a large collection of planes designed with the software of which the VRML files are
available for free download, like this "XR-41" by Kyle Pearson
designed on the full version. You can also even fly your models using
mouse or joystick!
Model aircraft design is a specialist field of which I know
absolutely nothing, so I can only pass on such information about the
program that I imagine will be useful to those who are interested in
this aspect of the hobby. Certainly, the screen shots show attractively
designed pages, dialog boxes, etc., and the whole thing has a nice
'technical' look to it, if you know what I mean!
|
Features of the program include
- real-time rendering
- real-time morphing of the 3D model whilst you edit it
- insertion/removal of fuselage sections
- automatic trigonometric interpolation of fuselage sections
- smoothing tools
- scale 1:1 printing
- picture import to convert 2D plans to 3D objects
- resize and move tools to fit the imported picture with
your drawing
- fuselage transparency to aid equipment location
- different colours for easy identification of each type of
equipment
- library for common r/c equipment (servo, receiver, etc)
These screenshots are thumbnails - click them
for an enlarged view. |
If anybody uses this program already or has a go at it after reading
this, please let me know - it would be interesting to know what it's
really like.
http://www.rccad.com |
