Holy shit. Where the hell have you been?

Well, I have been under a lot of pressure recently. For a couple reason, some work and some personal.

The personal reasons are that I found some lumps on my ribs. I had surgery yesterday to remove them and two are benign and the third is going to have to be remove at a later date. Though they think it is also benign, it is also more serious.


Over the same period work has been very rough. My advisor has pretty much been relying almost entirely on me for several projects we are working on. One of which is actually my grant and has a $500K on it. So, a big conference is coming up and I have nothing yet.

Meanwhile the conference is closing in and I have another surgery in a couple days... So I need some help.

First I'd have to ask why you want to use a vector program if you're looking for 3D? If you're looking for 3D on a zero-budget, I have been toying with Google Sketchup + Kerkythea (http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/). Kerkythea is a renderer only, but has a plugin for Sketchup that will allow you to export. It's not particularly glorious, but it does the job.

I've only just tinkered with Inkscape but it's built-in help and tutorials seemed pretty solid. Nothing I've come across so far has baffled me.

Thanks for replying.

I used to use Illustrator, my friend suggested Inkscape. I use them because the journals prefer .eps files. I can convert .pdf to .eps.

I will take a look at sketchup. Basically, I have a 3D graphic I made in Matlab already and I wanted to include it in my drawing to give the audience a visual picture of what I am talking about.

I have a 2D rendering of a 3D potential. I want to essentially put lines on the outside of it so it looks like a coplanar waveguide.

http://bmf.ece.queensu.ca/mediawiki/upload/thumb/d/de/Cpw.png/350px-Cpw.png

Much better than that though.

Oh, you want to make a 3-d box? that would take about 2 minutes in Sketchup. Great program, easy to use.

Yeah they need to be oriented correctly. I had trouble getting it in the same perspective in SketchUp. Let me post the potential in PhotoBucket and then you can get a better idea of what I am talking about.

I also do not think this is hard for someone who know how to do it.

Well, I'm travelling at the moment, won't be back until Sunday afternoon. If you still need the help then, I'd be glad to try. (that's why I havn't offered until now)

...Except that I make plastics for a living. I have no clue what a coplaner whosawhatzits is, or how to make a box look like one. Still glad to try, though.

Ive used both illustrator and photoshop a lot. There is a way to make basic 2D vector shapes and then give them a 3D affect in illustrator. Its not the best looking effect but it works, not sure if it is what you would be looking for either. I could try as well.

http://s353.photobucket.com/albums/r387/MycroftHomlz/