What software are you using for Sigange Designing?

[TEN]

Flexi - Subscriptions, design versions for designers and full versions with production manager for production. We have creative cloud for when it is needed.

 

[Bobby H]

Corel is my choice but I have slowly been setting up illustrator's workspace to be more like Corel's.
I can now zoom with the mouse wheel

While I'll use the scroll wheel to zoom in/out and hand-pan the view in CorelDRAW, I prefer Illustrator's standard keyboard shortcuts for those tasks when using Illustrator. Animated zoom (toggled with the Ctrl & Spacebar keys) works in a far smoother, controlled fashion than choppy mouse wheel zooming. Toggling the hand tool with the spacebar does better than pressing the mouse scroll wheel. At home I use a Wacom tablet; there's no scroll wheel option with a pen. In that situation the keyboard shortcuts are a must.

Flexi - Subscriptions, design versions for designers and full versions with production manager for production. We have creative cloud for when it is needed.

Our shop still has 3 Flexi licenses (plus an EnRoute license), but they're all used for production work rather than design. One of our guys likes using Vinyl Express LXi for his stuff. Most of the vector design work is being done in either CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator because the design capabilities in those applications is so much better. Flexi feels like it is still stuck in the 1990's. We'll use it for running vinyl cutters or prepping artwork to cut on one of our routing tables.

 

[JBurton]

I'm trying to get into 3D representations for isometric renders in the web based Sketch-Up, but trying to make a building in there look similar enough to the client's is kicking my butt. I'm not committed to buying a licenses for any 3D software until I learn enough to atleast show a channel letter or illuminated cabinet on a building.

The secret is to avoid making the building look like the client's actual building, just make the signage look legit, then import a picture from any given angle, and place the signage on the picture.
The first thing I did with sketchup was map a bunch of buttons I knew I'd need. Not sure what was already set, but having orbit - o, hand - h, rotate - r, move - m, extrude - e, scale - s, and top/l/r/bottom views to the arrow keys, really made it a lot easier. It also helps if you were a pc gamer in the early 00's and played a bunch of Homeworld, it's a very similar camera experience. I'm working off an old standalone version, so I also have a plugin to make faces, and one for importing/exporting dxf files, along with e-cut for corel to export proper dxf files. Without those two plugins, I was at a loss as to how to make anything work right.
Example: (Of course I don't have any wallsigns handy, polesigns are a little trickier to get aligned properly)