SpudFiles

What design tools do you all use for the graphic schematics. I know MS paint is one, but what about the animated ones?

For a start, you could click on the link in my signature.

I'm not stupid. I already searched everything I could think of. And I kept coming up with thousands of posts that have nothing to do with what I am trying to find.

animations can be done in Gimp, Photoshop, or Fireworks
3D modeling and animation can be done in Blender(what i use), 3DSMax

i only listed the most common, there are many many more you can use

You can't go wrong with MSPaint for mock-ups

If you're actually machining to some kind of accuracy that needs better measurement than using a ruler then at the very least you need a more sophisticated graphics program or even a CAD program.

I'll probably end up doing the mock-ups for my currently believed-to-be-next cannon in a copy of GIMP because at 1.5m the blasted thing isn't very manageable on paint which can't scale things down and still be able to work on the details.

GIMP is a free photo editing program similar but lesser to Photoshop.

However since I've spent hundreds of hours on GIMP before getting Photoshop I feel a lot more comfortable with it and can't see much point in learning the extra bits in there for no good reason.

I use MSPaint for animation frames as it's simpler to move things about then I drag each frame to GIMP and glue them together in a .gif file.

Thanks a lot yall.

Google Sketchup. It is fairly simple, but it certainly isn't the best.

Sparow89 wrote:I'm not stupid. I already searched everything I could think of. And I kept coming up with thousands of posts that have nothing to do with what I am trying to find.

Search for Keywords:
You can use AND to define words which must be in the results, OR to define words which may be in the result and NOT to define words which should not be in the result. Use * as a wildcard for partial matches

I just searched 'design AND program', came up with at least 5 topics about what you are looking for from a possible 42 or something. That's what you need to try and do when searching.

I'm not telling you off or anything, just letting you know your searching can be improved just by adding those words like 'AND', 'OR' and 'NOT'.

MrCrowley wrote: I'm not telling you off or anything, just letting you know your searching can be improved just by adding those words like 'AND', 'OR' and 'NOT'.

Thanks McCrowley

SketchUp is excellent for sketching directly in 3D. I've been using it for about 4 years now. But for quick mock-ups you can't go wrong with a pen(cil) and paper.
I might be biased but I think learning to draw proper plans and diagrams helps one's engineering skills.