The development of an educational computer aided design system for garment manufacture

A computer aided design (CAD) system for the design of flat patterns for female clothing has been developed specifically for use in an Educational environment. This Pattern Making System (PMS) has been developed using a commercial computer aided design software system, CADDS 4X, originally marketed for Mechanical Engineering applications by the Computervision division of Prime Plc. The software operates on a Sun 3 computer Workstation under a Unix operating system environment. The features of the PMS include software programs, written using CVMAC, the macroprogramming language of the host CAD system, for the creation of basic blocks for many styles of garments to suit any size of female body within a specified size chart or user defined anthropometric data. Also included are software programs for the design of auxiliary patterns such as collars, cuffs etc., together with programs to proportionally grade patterns to different sizes. These programs have been compiled with appropriate CADDS 4X graphics functions and structured into an icon menu driven shell to form the PMS. The main emphasis in developing the PMS was to make it suitable for an Educational environment. Therefore an extensive set of demonstration programs and on-line help ivfiles has been written and incorporated into the PMS to assist the user. These help files explain the details of the PMS and the CADDS environment, the functions of the programs and the graphics commands and give guidance in their use for the novice user. Furthermore, a series of explicit tutorials have been written so that inexperienced users can self-teach themselves in the use of the PMS for pattern design so that the PMS also forms a system for computer based learning. The intention and hope is that, through the use of this tutorial based PMS, students will gain considerable insight into the use of a CAD system for pattern design which they can readily transfer to other commercial systems.