Bad Artist, FLOS CAD and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

There I was, sitting around reading the special edition of Scientific American on Time... and I wanted to write something about it... and realized that I needed to draw a picture.

Again. I always end up stuck there. Drawing the picture. I've practiced over the years, but never actually created something I was happy with. I failed Art in secondary school, and over the years have continued to fall below average when it comes to getting images out of my head and onto paper. I've always envied people who could draw like the illustration on the right. I've seen people who can do it, and I'm always in awe because... unless I take an entire day drawing something, it looks like a product of a stick figure addicted to methamphetamines.

Now, I can generate stuff by programming it, but then it gets long and involved just for a simple image. What I really needed was a computer aided design package (or at least I think so), or a drawing application that makes up for my lack of skill. Instead there's a whole bunch of applications which require more skill and knowledge, and as I griped about many times before - none of them were open source or free software.

Well - part of that has changed.

Free Software/Open Source CAD

Hoping for a quick solution, I started looking around for Free Software/Open Source 3D CAD options. To my surprise, the list has grown considerably - plenty of CAD software on Sourceforge! Woohoo!

For about 10 minutes. Once I downloaded a few and tried them out, I decided on Wings 3d because for someone who hasn't used CAD more than rotating an image of the Shuttle in Autocad back around 1985, I needed something pretty simple right out of the box. The others out there might interest people with more experience, but I'm not experienced enough with CAD to know. I'm a newbie. I just want to hack out some images.

The documentation download is larger than the application, which could be seen as a bad sign - but I saw it as a good sign and proceeded. It works! It's cool! Left click, right click, froody.

And the little Celeron swamped. Good thing I'm getting another system this week... a business investment which I'll write about (and probably have pictures of Vlade and I building) later this week. An AMD 64 bit beastie, full up... not one of those Semprons, with enough RAM to and video to handle the database manipulations I'm doing these days.

And I have a hell of a lot to learn before I can draw anything that I want to with any CAD project... But at least there are a selection of Free Software/Open Source CAD applications now.

At the end of all of that, I still have to figure out how to draw different color spirals in a cuboid. Ugh. I wish I could just upload the images from my head... Or even learn CAD like Neo learned kung-fu in 'The Matrix'...

Any ideas from any of you would be greatly appreciated. It looks to me like I still need to strengthen my weakness in art, but with more of a context than before.