The Product Guy

Oct 26 2009 11:43AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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By Nick Bajzek

Venerable CAD company Autodesk began previewing its new design technology late last week. Dubbed Project Cooper, the new suite is intended for novice-to-advanced users in the interior design, landscape architect, remodeling or furniture design fields. If you need quick but presentable drawings, layouts and plans, look no further.

I downloaded it this morning and have been playing around with it for a little bit, so by no means am I ready to give a tutorial (I’ll leave that to my colleague Jeff Yoders, Senior Editor and “BIM Boy” blogger at our sister pub, Building Design + Construction). 

But what you can accomplish in a short time is pretty cool—the company says you can whip up a chair, a kitchen cabinet, or entire bathroom and create 2D drawings and sketches to share with your project partners.

The beauty of the software, from what I can see, is that you really, really don’t have to be a pro with computers to get a handle on things. So, if you’re not up to the rigors of AutoCAD, this might be a good jumping off point. The software also has a library of pre-drawn stuff so you can play around with the design elements before you dive right in from scratch.

It also supports Windows 7 functionality—which I adore. I installed the Windows 7 Beta version on my computer and I thought it worked great (heck, anything is better than the bloatware-stuffed Vista).

Download the free application at www.autodesk.com/projectcooper. It’s free until April 30, 2010, and after that you’ll have to pony-up for the full version. But from what I’ve seen so far it’s worth it.

Added bonus—check out the video below: