Our company is looking for freelance support as part of our team turning designs & concepts into fully realized digital submittal packages through the use of 3D modeling and 2D technical drawings. This person will be responsible for creating documentation that clearly and thoroughly captures the design intent, while simultaneously ensuring the pieces remain buildable and production-friendly.
Fully remote, company is U.S. based but open to working internationally
Minimum of 1 year experience, preferably 3 years or more, creating fabrication shop drawings and production drawings.
Please respond or DM for further information and with your qualifications. Thanks!
what s the webpage of the company ?
is it an onsite job or remote ? yes / no - in which city / country ?
maybe give a few more infos - so you will need less sorting on the applications.
I had been experimenting with Rhino and Millwork drawings. It would be really good for it. The only catch is that there are so many programs out there for millwork. Some are hella-expensive and hard to learn. And like all high-level programs when you hit the constraints it can be pretty bad.
Rhino would be good for custom one-off jobs. I wanted to figure out a way to get cut lists and stuff like that. It wouldn’t take me that long to do it manually for a small custom vanity or even a full kitchen. But as soon as real volume hits… I don’t think I would be competitive with Mosaic, Cabinet Vision, or even some of the plugins available for Sketchup.
What I like is that I can model the kitchen but then I can use the model for the rendering and construction docs. I was thinking about building a “Millwork Starter Pack”:
I worked as a joiner in a big commercial millshop after apprenticing as a cabinetmaker in a family owned and run custom cabinet shop. I trained at Auburn University in Construction and Architectural Drafting and Design before completing my schooling as an Industrial Design. I have used Rhino3D since V2 in 2001 in my work as an Interior Joiner in Mega Yacht interiors and exterior styling as well as outfitting and conceptual design and rendering for bespoke yacht and other marine projects. Please fill me in on your present needs by DM and lets talk about how my Rhino skills and work experiences might help fill your current design needs. J. Culbert
You can do most, if not all, of what the others are doing using Grasshopper. I built a complete millwork system with a Human UI frontend for ease of use. It includes a 3D cabinet generator and I’ve integrated it with an Airtable database to generate complete itemized estimates instantly using purchase history pricing, variable labour rates etc. CNC programming is done using a second generator with a similar interface to the first but it would output grouped 2D geometries to specific layers and Z heights to feed into RhinoCAM to nest and auto generate toolpaths. Using an AutoHotKey script it’s literally a single button press to program each nested sheet. An average sized kitchen would take about 2 hours to model, estimate, generate a proposal with a render, create shop drawings, material and hardware purchasing lists, and generate CNC programs.
I’ve evaluated many of the industry leading software packages and they do indeed have their place, but for me, the main reason I did it this way is that they generally tend to only do the easy stuff really quickly. When you get into complex custom pieces I prefer the speed and simplicity of modelling in Rhino over anything else out there. As a bonus, when you build it yourself it’s tailored perfectly to your specific shop setup and cabinet design, and after the labour to build it the lifetime subscription fee is $0.
If you’re doing that all within 2 hours that’s pretty amazing. You could do 5 kitchens in the time span it takes a person to do one. Kitchen design isn’t that lucrative but if you can pump out 4 or 5 kitchens in a single day… are you just sitting on this or actually using it?
RhinoCAM isn’t cheap from what I gather. I think it’s subscription now? I’ve never seen it used for millwork (like cabinets) either, more for steel milling.
Rendering can be a time pit because you have to build the scene. To make a quick render isn’t that bad but for photo-realism…
The dimensioning is also slowing me down. It won’t be so bad if I’m not doing shop drawings (Architectural drawing levels of detail) but for shop drawings, so far, I don’t know… the snapping just isn’t working out with all the edges and small parts and it’s making it take really long to fully annotate. Shop drawings don’t necessarily have to be that detailed. Sometimes I see “shop” drawings with barely 20% more information compared to the architectural/ID set.
Hello Piyat,
If you are still looking for someone I would be glad to assist you.
To discuss further in detail kindly reach me at annaradnor70@gmail.com
It took a while to get it that quick, little automations using macros and scripts throughout make a big difference. That and countless hours of practice! I built it for a business that I had and used it daily for around 3 years. Through the process I spent way too many hours learning Grasshopper and exploring plugins. At this stage, now that I’m fairly proficient at it, I could build out a system from scratch in about a week or two depending on complexity.
RhinoCAM is relatively inexpensive. Great value for what it’s capable of for sure. For millwork (and my machine) I used the 3 axis version which comes in at $2,500. A $300/year subscription is optional, it gets you the new version update each year.
My renders are more stylized than photo real. I guess in this community using the term “render” for this isn’t entirely correct but to clients the difference isn’t that huge. I would texture everything by layers and use a customized display mode in a layout tab. It would have a template for the proposal and the pricing info was populated from the estimate data previously sent to Airtable being stored as DocumentUserText items. Similar to how you would set up a title block.
For dimensioning there are some quirks/inconveniences as you’ve mentioned, to help work around some of those I use the alias: '_Dim Continue=No O and you select an edge and it picks the ends for you automatically, as well as '_Dim Continue=Yes NewChain=Yes to run a string of dimensions. It’s quick enough and if you maintain a standardized format you can fly through it without much thinking most of the time.
Apologies to the OP… We’re getting a bit off topic here, this should probably be moved into a new thread or into DM’s.
My name is Jessica Ochoa Johnson. I graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture in 2012 and transitioned directly into the film industry. Over the past 13 years, I’ve worked as a set designer for feature films and episodic television. While I’m passionate about what I do, the industry has slowed significantly since the strikes of 2022/2023 and I’d love to take on contract work like this.
In Rhino, I design and build detailed 3D models of complex sets and create construction documents for our construction crews.
