CAD Forum

Hello!

I am hoping you may be able to point me in the right direction. I am the programmer at a small, custom wood shop that builds traditional wooden windows and doors. We are attempting to rebuild our site and want to add a more dynamic element to the door design section. I want to embed a CAD tool in our web site that will re-draw our door designs based on the dimensions that our customers enter into fields on the page. In time I hope to convert our whole library of designs to this approach. I have beginner level design skills, which will improve with work, but I am intimidated by the sheer number of CAD tools out in the marketplace! Would you be kind enough to give me some ideas of products that I could load into a web server, might have an API, or other method of receiving variable input for existing templates and that can be programmatically triggered to re-render an image?

ie. Single panel door (template ID=123), height=80", width=36", panel=glass ->GO (grab new .jpg/.png/.pdf from output and present to visitor's screen)

I apologize for very probably using the wrong lingo! I am deeply appreciative of your experience and time taken to read this.

Sincerely,
Scott Campbell
Restoration Sash & Door

If you are just looking for embedding 3D model... Cadenas might be an option (it was used by some of the supplier site that i commonly visit)

https://www.cadenas.de/news/en/reader/i ... ur-website

Example of site using cadenas:
Bossard
https://bossard.partcommunity.com/3d-ca ... &cwid=0576

You might also consider using DriveWorks and have the customers enter dimensions in a table that drives the models.

Thank you, both! Your suggestions were perfect! You pointed me in the right direction to learn the terms 'CPQ' (Configure/Price/Quote) and '3D Configurator', which then led me to lots of similar products and related comparison web sites. My first instinct when approaching this project was to host the 3D rendering and then code the 'configure/price' logic myself, instead of outsourcing the hosting and logic layer to a provider. But that was before I learned so much. Your suggestions ultimately pointed me to a DIY platform called Verge3D, which sits on top of a local installation of Autodesk, Blender, or Maya and acts as a web-intermediary, communicating with the underlying rendering. Have you ever seen someone struggle through the 'build it' vs. 'buy it' analysis for a web 3D project? I am curious how they have turned out.

Thanks again for your generous attention!
-Scott