That tongue twisting title brings us to todays post about 3 products I'm quite fond of-Piranesi, Squiggle and The Architects Font Pack. As the architectural profession has moved from the beauty of hand drawing towards the accurate but often sterile world of CAD drawings there has been a growing call for products that return our drawings to the look of previous times.
The first of these, Signature CAD's Squiggle, has been around for many years and is a great tool for taking 2D vector files, such as plans or elevation in DXF/DWG format and applying Squiggle's filters to get a hand drawn look. There are a number of preset line types or you can adjust to create a style that mimics your own sketch style like a nice shaky "I've been up all night drinking coffee trying to get this project done" style. You know that look...
Next take a look at Piranesi by Informatix. This gem allows you take take 3D views or 2D drawings from your CAD/BIM program such as ArchiCAD, SketchUp, Artlantis Render, AutoCad, Microstation, Vectorworks or Revit and "paint" to produce non-photorealistic images. It's easy to achieve effects such as watercolor, chalk or pencil drawings using Piranesi's unique tools and filters. The results are beautiful and easy to achieve. Use a Wacom Tablet to get results that look even more convincing.
Lastly the Architects Font Pack by Urban Forest provide a collection of 6 TrueType Fonts (plus one bonus font) to provide the finishing touch to your drawings. Included are MrHand, Heavy Hand, Glascow, Scribble, Sketcher and Stamped. These are system fonts so they will work with any application that can use them. I like the combination of "Scribble" for notes and "Stamped" for drawing titles.
Piranesi and the Architects Font Pack are available for both Mac and Windows OS, Squiggle is unfortunately Windows only but can of course run on an Intel Mac with Windows installed. We'll make these available in one big bundle of hand drawn goodness until 12/31/08 for $799. Click on "Traditonal Taste Trio" to go back in time.
GC
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