A design-specification app

Design-specification

The Specifier is an app to specify a physical design.

A specification is a complete description of something.

Its completeness is determined by the user of that specification.

A physical design specification facilitates the production of a physical design,

both at prototype-test stage, when it is used by a fabricator or an assembler, 

and at production stage, when it used by a factory.

Land-vehicle design

A physical design is a designed solid 3D object.

We start with the specification process in land-vehicle design 

bacause a land-vehicle has some symmetry properties, has a substantial size, 

much larger than a PC screen, involves the use of wheels

and its PC-based specification is neccessary because it has to be produced accurately

since it will be used in a motive context with operational parameters such as balance

being directly effected by the design and it's specification.

Overview of The Specifier

The Specifier uses a hexagonal grid ( instead of a cartesian-grid ) as a better way to 

select points in a 2-D plane and points in 3-space.

The first version of The Specifier enables a designer to create a model of a 3D object

on a hex-grid in a WYSIWYG way. 

User-interface

A designer can load photographs of a real object into the hex-grid,

with a description of the camera parameters used in taking those photographs.

Then, identify ( in terms of 2D point descriptions ) the components in the structure of the object

in the photograph.

Then, for each component, they can describe its 3D orientation

and input real-world measurements to create a model of the component

that describes its dimensions, orientation and placement in the model of the object.

They can add some off-the-shelf commonly used constrcution compoenents to the model.

Specify joints to connect components and connectors or methods to bind the joints.

Implementation

The Specifier implements a custom rendering and visualization engine for these models.

This engine implements perspective correct display-screen mapping of 3D objects.

It models a single camera with location, orientation and film-size and focal-length control.

It maps all planar 3D-elements using direct, 4-point 2D-plane mapping.

Curved planes in 3D are modelled as piecewise planar flat planes. 

It does not implement any lighting controls

and uses colors and textures to indicate material properties.

InterUnit-UI

It is implemented as an InterUnit in our UI-design framework, InterUnit-UI.

Demo-date

We plan to demo The Specifier with these capabilities on December 15th.