Illustration Made Easy

By Mike Hudspeth

Product designers always come to a point in the project when someone asks for illustrations for everything from technical manuals to packaging and labeling. At a company where I once worked we had an art department that handled that job. They’d ask us 3D modeling guys for images. We generated the images in the formats they required and sent them off. Imagine our surprise when the images came back highly simplified and none too accurate. We couldn’t understand how they could take the 3D vector-based art we sent and return what we got. We inquired. It was then that we found out they were printing out the images and redrawing them from scratch. Suffice it to say we were amazed. We had to educate the art department in the tools they had at their disposal. They had no idea.

I don’t imagine things are all that different at other companies. People just don’t know what kinds of tools are available to them.

One new tool designed to help you get and use the illustrations you need is Corel Designer Professional 3D Version 12. Corel Corporation has made a practice of providing people with powerful tools to make their jobs easier and this version of Corel Designer is no different.

What Is It, Really?

If you’ve ever used CorelDraw in the past you’ll be perfectly familiar with most of the interfaces in Corel Designer Professional. At its core, it is the Draw graphics suite, significantly tweaked to increase technical illustration functionality. You get Designer, a 2D illustration program that will allow you to quickly and easily generate illustrations that shine; PhotoPaint, Corel’s marvelous bitmap editor; CorelTrace, a powerful bitmap-to-vector conversion tool;  plus a few utilities.

> > Figure 1:  Corel Designer Professional 12 simplifies and organizes things so you can go from 3D data to 2D illustrations efficiently and with great results.

 

Corel Designer Professional 12 has an interesting approach to creating technical illustrations (see Figure 1, above). One of its handiest capabilities is its 3D Import Utility. Essentially, you tell Corel Designer Professional 12 that you want to import 3D data. You can import several formats: Pro/Engineer, CATIA,  IGES, and STEP. The import utility window comes up and shows you several views of the data it has read (see Figure 2, above). You can rotate the data into the orientation you want. Once there, you can position the model parts as you see fit: Drag, pull, and rotate anything you want. You can even make section cuts to let you look inside your model. Shade the 3D data, see it in wireframe, perform hidden line removal. You can visualize your data in all these ways. When satisfied with its appearance you just save the model to the Designer 2D workspace.

< < Figure 2: When you open a 3D data file in the 3D Import Utility you can manipulate the data however you need it and drop it right into Corel Designer Professional’s 2D illustration interface.

 

Whether you import 3D data or create 2D data from scratch, Corel Designer Professional 12 gives you some innovative ways to get it done. Aside from the Corel interface, Designer Professional 12 offers several other interfaces to work with. You can select a Micrografx, Illustrator,  even Visio, whichever one you are most comfortable with.

Corel Designer Professional 12 comes with a Symbol Manager that is very much like a collection of interactive clip art. For things like fasteners, this is quite useful. You can search for the specifications you want and the Symbol Manager will locate the object you’re looking for (see Figure 3, below). Interestingly, you can bring in multiple instances of the symbol and Corel Design Professional 12 will treat them all the same. If you make a change to one of them they will all change accordingly. It’s a lot like an assemblies module. If you later want to change just one object in the series, you can. You select the one or ones you want and disassociate them from the rest of the group. You can even re-associate them at any time.

> > Figure 3: The Symbol Manager lets you bring pre-defined objects into your illustrations. That saves you tons of time in redrawing.

 

2 1/2D?

One of the best things that Corel Designer Professional 12 does is let you draw on 2 1/2D planes. What’s that? Well, think of it this way,  if you were to print out a 3D model the image would be flat and 2D. It would still resemble a 3D object but from a static point of view. The mark of a true artist has always been how he manipulates his medium to depict what his muse is saying. Corel Designer Professional 12 does this by establishing what looks like front, right, and top planes. When you select a plane you restrict yourself to drawing on that plane only (see Figure 4, below). Anything you enter will line up with it. It’s not really 3D, but it will produce some pretty convincing approximations.

< < Figure 4: Corel Designer Professional 12 lets you establish 2 1/2D planes in space on which you can create geometry that looks 3D. This is a really fast way to put on holes or text.

 

Some of the other useful functions in this latest version of Corel Designer include the ability to create labels based on object data like part names. You can even establish live links in the illustration that can take you to resources on your local network or even the Internet.

Can you think of a better way to create an online owner’s manual? Corel Designer Professional 12 has dynamic guides that you’ll probably know better as “snaps.” And when you add a callout or label you can set Professional 12 to automatically create a gap around it so you can tell it apart from the geometry below it.

If you create technical illustrations in the course of your work and you need a tool to improve your work, take a look at Corel Designer Professional 12. It certainly has made my job easier.

Mike Hudspeth is a senior designer for a global medical company and has been using a wide range of CAD products for 20 years. He,  his wife, two daughters, and their cats live outside of St. Louis, MO. You can send your comments about this article through e-mail by clicking here. Please reference “Corel Review, October 2006” in your message.

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Corel Designer Professional 3D Version 12
Corel
Ottawa, ONT., Canada