Suggest blog topics and win a GrabCAD T-shirt

Guys and girls,

The holiday season is approaching. Which means in between more serious work and topics it's time to take a moment and cover any entertaining/cool/educating/gadgety topics out there in our blog.

But we need your suggestions and are taking orders for blog post wishlist :)

The main points:

- let us know what you would like to read about in our blog (that would preferably interest other engineers as well)
- write your suggestion here or in the <a href="http://blog.grabcad.com/2011/12/suggest-blog-topics-and-win-grabcad-t-shirt/">blog post comments</a> by Thursday, 8th Dec
- all good suggestions will receive GrabCAD T-shirt and some candy for Christmas ;)

It could not be any more simple :) (getting the T-shirt, I mean...), so shoot!

18 Answer

There are many different CAD software that is being used by the Various Engineers. There have also been requests for “which is the best” type questions. So maybe for a topic there could be a comparison of the various softwares, maybe pros and cons. This might help someone who is deciding on a CAD package which way to go.
Just a suggestion.

You could present some engineering companies, their work and their CAD systems. Just to see the achievements that they done

how about we get together and have a beer :)

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I would like to see more statistics every week. Not only "Top 20 Most Interesting CAD Models from Last Week". I mean something like the most downloaded models, the most active uploader (also for renders and comments), the most rendered, commented and liked models, top 20 (or 10, or 5) most interesting renderings, the biggest uploaded files (I mean size in MB), the most intresting CAD-movies on youtube (also video tutorials), etc.

I'd look into a topic on "How to cheat when there's no other way" on several design/engineering issues that pop up from time to time. I am making a list of such things that simply don't work within (some) 3D applications and some sort of "fake" solutions have to be applied to get the desired results... Sometimes, such things would become extremely handy for the best possible presentation of the project/design.

There seems to be a large surge of very talented users here who can post up some intense renders. I know this is primarily a CAD site, but I also see there are a good amount of members who have a great artistic eye and do a lot of renders even when they don't know a lot about the cad software yet, or even have a lot of models of their own uploaded. Right along side the "top ten models" blog I would like to see "ten interesting renders" for the week. Some of us might run out of model ideas temporarily, but rendering possibilities are endless especially with the number of models already uploaded to render!

You could also present a CAD problem and leave it up to us to solve it. I know that request section is already meant for that but there, when is already one solution it usually ends there. It would be interesting to see how dif. engineers using dif. CAD systems come up with one or multiple solutions.

Not sure if this is a blog topic, but one of the things that struck me were the number of engineers and the COUNTRIES they are from. GrabCAD is worldwide, and it would be nice to see a listing of all the COUNTRIES that are utilizing GrabCAD. I could search out each user but that might take me forever whereas I presume GrabCAD could do that failry easly.
Just curious... Just a thought...

Where to get or how to create .HDR environments for SolidWorks Photo View 360°. For me would be an interesting topic.

I propose to assess the winners by certaficats to give a value for the winner and GRABCAD, and your site will be known worldwide by that there are people who need your services but they GRABCAD not know, just a small proposal. Thank you members grabcad :))

How about a post about a scratch build desktop workstation? You could have 3 levels of build. An entry level, a mid level, and a top level. How about the specifics of the actual hands-on build? What components were chosen and why are they chosen over others? How is all the software loaded and configured? After the primary CAD package is chosen, what peripheral software is chosen and why? What peripheral hardware is chosen and why, and how is it configured?

What about if an engineer or designer - That has made there own model, models and took them to production and then on to market a little inside story from the people that has done this in the past.

A blog on companies that people work for as to what kind of software they use, what kind of industry they are in what kind of products they make how they got in to that line of work. Just general stuff for educational purposes so others know more about different sectors with in industry.

Posted this on the blog comment, still awaiting moderation... so I'll post it here as well:

Robert Voogt December 6, 2011 at 10:06 pm
Your comment is awaiting moderation.

@Daniel “Most Interesting Workflow of the Week”, brilliant!

I have some ideas as well:
I would like to see reviews of new released CAD / render software, this does not have to be every week. But every now and then there is a new CAD/render program or update. In the review one could talk about the user friendliness (interface), (new) features, some history about the program, user experience (poll?), price, why you should or shouldn’t use it(conclusion) and perhaps even comparisons between other Cad/render software.
Make the same object every time and see how long it takes to make it.
I know this is a lot of work, but it would also be a lot of fun, and this could be an “once a month”-blog.

My second idea:
“know your neighbor”, I think this has been done before, but I would really like to see it more often.
Members (at random?) are chosen and (if they want) are allowed to write about themselves. This (e.g.) should be about their CAD work, portfolio and interests.
This way we get to really know one another, and we get a better picture of the CAD enthusiast.

That would be awesome, Don Anneken. Like a CAD world globe.... where the height of a country is relative to the number of grabcad users.

I like it Robert. Now who wants to model a 3D globe with 3D COUNTRIES as Robert suggested?

i think its a good idea to organize GrabCad Charity that would help others that need our help.another idea is that we can have GrabCad Institude in lots of countries and the teachers will be top grabcad engineers in those cities.

Got my t-shirt yesterday, thanks! perfect fit!

I also like the stickers and the chocolate bar!