Developing Generic Procedures of Creating Architectural Components for 3-D AutoCAD Course

Although there are plenty of AutoCAD books available for architects, interior designers, and engineers, it has been difficult for the author to find an appropriate textbook for students who major in interior design while teaching AutoCAD, especially 3-D AutoCAD at the sophomore level. Most existing 3-D AutoCAD textbooks are more engineering oriented. Industrial machine components such as bolts and nuts are commonly used as tutorial examples. The author also found that existing 3-D AutoCAD textbooks are lack of art and design subjects particularly subject matters of interior design and visual presentations. Therefore, it is necessary to develop course materials and to create tutorial examples that are relevant to interior design and architectural design with graphic images. Currently, limited generic procedures were found in the textbook to guide students to create 3-D architectural components and interior space models with 3-D AutoCAD. Therefore, creating appropriate tutorial examples is becoming more crucial in course materials. This article presents the tutorial examples and case studies with images in the newly developed course material, as well as how those 3-D examples and case studies were created. The author received a faculty research grant during summer 2006 to explore innovative design methods by using 3-D AutoCAD to achieve form transformation and space interlocking in design process. The goal of this research project is aimed specifically at the task of developing generic procedures for creating architectural components by using Boolean operations. This newly developed course material will be used in AutoCAD courses especially for 3-D AutoCAD. It provides students with more systematic and comprehensive tutorials and case studies. The author integrated two case studies of reconstruction of the masterpiece architecture in this course material because it is a research topic that many researchers and scholars are exploring. It provides the three-dimensional visualizations for these scholars to explore the hidden treasures in the past and to get inspirations for today’s design. These two case studies also presented typical architectural components, such as, triangular pediments, domes and barrel vaults in the application of Boolean operations in 3-D AutoCAD. The significance of this newly developed course material is that it provides more relevant interior design and architectural design tutorials and case studies with generic procedures, as well as visual presentations. Objectives of Course Materials The first objective of this AutoCAD course is for students to learn both surface modeling and solid modeling methods. Since Boolean operations are powerful features of AutoCAD to generate more complex forms, the second objective is to effectively demonstrate how to use Boolean operations and in the mean time to inspire students design creativities. Another objective of this course is to present procedures of creating architectural components as comprehensively as possible because most of AutoCAD textbooks are using interior design unrelated components as examples.