Doors and drawers

[DanEpps]

Leigh

Can you post some specs on what you are trying to make (tool, geometry, etc) or the door you created and what tool you used to make it?

[Gene Davis]

To Dan, Damon, and Dean: your various responses to my post to Leigh are quite overblown, considering exactly what I said.

Here is the essence of the written forum rules, that I agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening, sexually-orientated or any other material that may violate any laws. I don't think that anything in my post violates this.

And my thanks go out to Kerry and to Glenn for pointing out the differences between that the other software package I mentioned, and eCabinets. It was nice of you both to instruct me, but I knew beforehand what that software is all about.

No design team has ever built a good product, nor improved an existing product, by operating in a vacuum. Thermwood's excellent design team must certainly have examined every other existing piece of software doing rules-based-configs and parametric product builders, so as to come up with the best way they could get an open-system cab builder to both display the product graphically and then write toolpath code efficiently from it.

A whole lot of the product change requests that come from the posts at this forum, are based on what the requestors have seen elsewhere in some other kind of software package, be it CAD packages, web browsers, spreadsheet programs, rendering packages, or product configuration packages. None of us operate in vacuums, either.

What Leigh wants is as valid a request for a change to the software as any other requests that have been put up here, and in fact it may exceed in importance and value-to-end-user many of those requests.

If you count on the rendering part of eCabinets to help you sell custom cabinetry to clients, what is as important as having the doors and drawerfronts in those renderings match the selections that the client has made in species, design, and finish?

My own experience in dealing with clients, when submitting renderings to them, is that if the renderings are to be in color, and are to show what fronts of cabs are to look like, that they had better match exactly what the customer is wanting, because if the renderings don't match, it can be a huge distraction, and cause for negative vibes. If a client has not chosen a "look" for the fronts yet, I prefer to offer black-and-white renderings, with the lines looking as if the drawings were done by hand, because this conveys the feel that everything is preliminary, and that anything is readily changed.

While I cannot read Leigh's mind on this, my guess is that he wishes a way to catalog his library of over 300 door style offerings, and have the ability to swap any door into a job a client might pick, and be able to do it as readily as door change can be done now, with the small catalog that exists. This, so that the pics clients see look almost exactly like what they will get.

I my earlier post, I expanded upon that by saying the need exists for not only this, but to be able to readily swap species and finish, within any door and drawerfront style selected.

I was not denigrating the eCabinets software package, nor its developers or champions, in discussing Leigh's request, or by mentioning how such changes to a rendered room are handled in another software package.

I am a Conestoga customer and have been since 2002, long before I came into the eCabinets software package. My jobber catalog has its door and drawerfront styles and options listed in section 4 of the catalog, and that section has over 70 pages, with far more styles shown than the 18 doors that come in the eCabs package. Perhaps all that Thermwood needs to do in enhancing door and drawerfront rendering capabilities is to include the rest of the Conestoga catalog. That, and allowing a global command to change species and finish, would go a long way toward giving users what they need in selling jobs.

And it might even help Leigh.

[DanEpps]

...Here is the essence of the written forum rules, that I agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening, sexually-orientated or any other material that may violate any laws. I don't think that anything in my post violates this...

You continue to conveniently ignore rule number 5 from the Forum Entry Page:

5. Do not refer to competitive software or machines, either positively or negatively.

[Gene Davis]

How about that other software discussed in an article in eCabs magazine? I've a copy of that on board, and can make lots of comparos!

[Dean Fehribach]

OK, I've made a copy of this topic, removed the hijacks from it for easier reading, and have locked this one so we can get back to Leigh's original question and hopefully be more productive.

And Leigh, I want to apologize for your topic's sidetrack.