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.