CAD for emerging textile

Computer-aided design (CAD) has brought a revolution in the textile industry, but CAD enables a methodology of study of consumer behavioural patterns and thereby defining trend directions having some limitations too, says Dhananjay Singh Tanwar.

Human life has evolved in close intimacy with nature along with the basic desire for decoration and ornamentation in their mind, which leads to development of design and ornamentation not in ancillaries/accessories but also in garments[1, 5]. Creative ideas concerning fashion/market trend used to develop innovative and new products and CAD technology used to bring them together from virtual sense to real one[2, 3].

Textile designing is extremely complex mechanism having wide range of fibre, blend proportion, physical characteristics and construction type, which makes manual operation more complex[4]. Conventionally it is very difficult to reach the demand of growing fashion in short period of time due to lots of manual operations not in production but also in design process. Boon in technology, adaptation of IT and computer science in researchs, it has been found that computer becomes an integrated tool for manufacturing and designing the world over their imagination, out of these CAD is most adaptable tool for textile designing[6, 7].

CAD (Computer Aided Design) or CADD (Computer Aided Design Draft) is the use of computer technology to aid, the design of a part or full product for the process or design documentation like DesignCOM. It is visual as well as symbol based method of communications whose conventions are specific to the respective technical field and built-up from graphical user interface[6, 8]. The CAD system has been built-up from the GUI with NURBS geometry modelling kernel offers wide range of design based tool to designers to architects their design activities[11]. Originally, it was developed by using FORTAN computer programming language but with new technology C, C, Java has been utilised for its growth[9, 10].

To implement any design using CAD software a general sequence required, ie, Visualisation of design, tools selection, modification, save data, print review, connection to machine (via CAM) and design production[6, 11].

Modules of CAD software[12, 13, 14]

Edit module

It is the mother of all modules. Edit is one of the module, which can cater to the needs of jacquard, furnishing, carpets, durries, plastic mats, sarees, labels, towels, dress materials, knitwear, lace, printing and many more industries. This module combines excellent collection of painting tools, and powerful retouching capabilities û all in one easy-to-use Windows application (true colour editing up to 16.7 million colours).

• Dobby module.
• Jacquard module.
• Print module
• Weave library.
• Colour library.
• Yarn library.
• Checks & stripes library.

System requirement [12, 13, 14, 15]

In general, minimum system requirement are:

Hardware

• IBM compatible INTEL Pentium III/750 MHz or INTELPENTIUM IV 2.6 GHz or higher.
• DDR-RAM or higher and 20 GB HDD (SCSI preferable) or higher.
• 1.44 MB FDD or/and CD Drive or DVD Drive.
• LAN card and AGP card 32 MB (Sis 6326 or equivalent) [24 bit colour support].
• 17" or 21" colour monitor (1024X768 to 1280X1024 pixels or 50-1200 dpi) and 256 simultaneous colour schemes out of 16.78 million colour.
• 101 KEYS Keyboard or advanced (Numeric data), Electronic tablet with pen (Motif design) or Stylus and Mouse.