Software for furniture design. How to create the next masterpiece for free.

Design process, the evolving art

In 1939, Hans Corey got news of the recently announced design competition with the goal of creating a chair made out of aluminium (specifically to give a boost to the Swiss industry, heavily invested in this light and shiney metal). He immediately went home and started to work on his creation (soon to become the “Landi” chair). This process required a lot of conceptualizing, drawing, erasing and prototyping. Only much later, Corey was able to see a working model of the chair that he tried so hard to imagine and bring into existence. This was only possible with the help of metal workers and other people from the aluminium industry.

Modern furniture designers are incredibly lucky to have the tools that can take them from the early stages of doodling to a photorealistic render of the finished product – without leaving their workspace. And if they don’t like what they see… Yes, it’s back to the drawing board, however the digital drawing board is never too far.

Design applications represent one the most mature and well developed segments of the software industry. There are many different business models, from traditional B2B, with programs that cost thousands of dollars to open-source applications that take advantage of many years of research that the software giants such as Autodesk put into their code. As a result, the entire process of furniture design can be achieve using exclusively free software, and of pretty good quality to boot.

Free software solutions sometimes lack certain features (although without the need to support legacy versions their development process can be faster). It is important to create a pipeline that maximizes the strengths of different programs to achieve the best possible result. Let’s go from the start to the end, highlighting some solid software choices for your furniture design needs. You can, of course, free to hop around the Internet, trying to find similar programs that you might like better. The key thing to remember is that companies often create free programs only to make them paid software later on, either partially or exclusively. If you stick with open-source software you really ensure that at no point in the future the program you like will not be free.

Freehand drawing software

As you begin by simply sketching out your ideas, one of the best choices is InkScape. Free and open-source, under the GPL license, InkScape works on Windows, MacOS and Linux. InkScape works with vector files which means that you can import your successful drawings into a CAD program, preserving some features of your initial design. If you only plan to be a casual furniture designer, there is a web-based tool for creating vector-shaped drawings: Vectr.

Free CAD software for furniture design

Even if you plan to be building your newly designed piece of furniture with your own hands, chances are that you will want some formal plans. Otherwise your finished product will not look much like the original concept. And if you are intending to hand over the manufacturing part to someone else quality technical CAD plans are a must.

CAD software market is heavily dominated by Autodesk (and probably represents a significant portion of the company’s revenue). But there are very strong free and open-source programs such as OpenSCAD, FreeCAD and LibreCAD.

Free visualization software

Now, you probably want to see, how your design looks in real life, but without spending money on building a prototype. Professinal visualization artists traditionally stick with well-known 3d animation packages, such as 3ds MAX, Cinema 4d, Maya and Houdini (Unreal Engine is also a good choice for interactive applications, and there is a free tier). In the last five years there has been a shift to Blender. It is a free and open source 3d animation software that rivals the established programs used by big studios. Most recently, the Blender Foundation received financial support from industry leaders, such as Epic Games and Unity Technologies.

The key thing to remember is that some common formats used in CAD programs can be directly imported into Blender. DXF and Collada are two such popular formats. Otherwise, you can import just your flat designs as jpgs and trace them in Blender, using standard 3d modelling tools. Blender uses a physics-based rendering engine, Cycles. You will have to create materials using a node system. There are also many materials that can be downloaded from different sites, sometimes as a part of a free model. BlenderSwap is a common site to download models and envoronments. If you want to create your own materials from scratch, there are thousands of textures available for free online. To have a modestly realistic result, be sure to use what is called a ‘normal map.’ You can always recognize normal maps because they are blue and purple. A good way to look for textures is to Google someting like “leather texture normal map.” The idea is that if you can find a “normal” version of a texture, there is surely a regular texture of the same exact material (and you can just use a plan color for your desing, the normal map will ‘sell’ it). What does a normal map do? It is a way to create a slight 3d effect without having to model actual surfaces.

The real fun begins when you add lights to the scene. This allows you to make a realistic render of the entire composition. For best results, use an HDR image. This allows for a more natural looking light in the scene. If you have reflective materials used in your furniture model, the HDR image will reflect on them, with a very realistic effect. HDRHaven is a great source of free quality HDR maps.

Preparing your digital files for a 3d printer

Another step that actually brings you closer to manufacturing the furniture you design. Althought not entirely economical (yet), this is a very viable mode of prototyping and even creating some accent parts. While you can output 3d meshes out of many CAD programs, as well as 3d modelling packages, they are not going to be suitable for 3d printing. The problem is that 3d printers need input files with very well optimized geometry. To start with, a typical mesh created by a 3d animation packages is made up of squares. But 3d most printers like to work with triangle-based meshes. Apart from that, there are many topology issues that are ok for rendering files on screen, but simply do not work with solid objects. Solutions for this problem are often found inside 3d software (sometimes plugins are required, 3D Print Toolbox is bundled with Blender), but it is best to use dedicated programs. A solid choice for cleaing up and preparing your meshes is Meshlab

Conclusion

These are the programs that can get you well on your way for designing furniture, using exclusively free (and mostly open-source programs). The rest is up to you. Learn the software, eperiment and build your own workflow.