Complete design and production software for custom furniture

On one of my visits I met a custom furniture manufacturer who had recently purchased design software. He told me that if someone had told him a year ago that he'd pay almost as much for a piece of software as he would for a machine, he would have thought he was crazy. Now he can't imagine his day-to-day work without that software. It's made his work a lot easier and more diverse at the same time. For anyone who now makes custom furniture, design software is no longer a fad but a necessity. Because it's not just about the design and renderings presented to the customer, but also about other benefits such as optimising material consumption or saving time, the ease of changing the initial dimensions, the virtual breakdown of the furniture into component parts, the creation of working files for the machines, the production cost and the price offer.

Of course, not all programmes do the same. This is partly a question of complexity and partly a question of the client's real needs. It is preferable for the software to have different configurations so that the manufacturer can buy the module that suits him best and be able to move to the next level when he is ready. One such programme is Cabinet Vision, distributed in Romania by Nika Machinery.

Cabinet Vision, the complete design and production solution for the furniture industry

Cabinet Vision is a brand of the Hexagon Group in Sweden. Hexagon is a world leader in CAD/CAM software solutions for various materials and industries. It offers solutions in a wide range of fields, from furniture production to tooling, from woodworking and derived materials to metal, plastic and stone processing. The common denominator of all these solutions is increased production efficiency.

Cabinet Vicion's comprehensive and comprehensive software is used by more than 35,000 users in over 50 countries and is the market leader in custom furniture solutions for manufacturers. It is the best-selling furniture design software worldwide. With it you can custom design your entire home, from kitchen and bathroom furniture to dressing rooms, bedrooms or living rooms. It's modular software, with solutions for workshops with simple machines and complex, fully automated factories.

Design, presentation, production

What you can do with it Cabinet Vision?

• furniture design throughout the house as a whole;
• furniture design;
• photorealistic renderings and perspectives;
• price offers for the customer;
• customised drawings and reports;
• optimised cutting lists and bills of materials;
• barcode labels;
• files G-Code (the common name for the most widely used CNC programming language) ready to work for CNC Nesting or point-to-point for other types of computer-aided machines (circular, drilling and inserting machines).

In addition to highly realistic design and rendering, Cabinet Vision can fully automate and integrate design into the production process, regardless of the level of manufacturer - beginner or highly advanced. To automatically transfer files to production requires Screen to Machine Center (S2M), software that takes the machining information visible on the screen and transmits it to the CNC or other computer-assisted machines, thus avoiding human error.

Cabinet Vision has functions dedicated to working with solid wood as well as for chipboard or MDF. In the case of solid wood, the most requested decorative profiles are included directly from the furniture design area of the program: skirting boards, crowns, beams, 5-piece doors, etc.

The program can resize bodies automatically and in real time. Once the program is given the command to change a furniture body size, it will automatically change all the details, from resizing the part, to CNC orders and price quote.

The modules that can be purchased are:

• Solid Drafter - designed for design, rendering and pricing. It was designed for the showroom, as an economical solution for architects only, to design in front of clients and give a price quote.
• Solid Essential - is an economical option for integrating design into production. It allows you to make production drawings, renderings, bill of materials, cut lists and generate price quotations.
•  Solid Standard - for small manufacturers of residential and commercial furniture. It is the next level of integration, adding new functions to the existing ones, e.g. machining drawings (drilling/milling), complex customer offer.
• Solid Advanced - new functions are added to the functions of the previous module. The most important/used are:
  • Possibility to create custom scripts to automate the design of furniture fixtures and create new functions;
  • Cabinet Shaping (body change & automation);
  • 2D & 3D DXF export.
• Solid Ultimate - is the level that allows any manufacturer of furniture, solid wood or derived panels, to fully integrate design into production. This streamlines production by optimising material consumption, reducing working time and increasing productivity:
  • Contains all optional modules for smaller modules;
  • Optimization with continuation of the pattern from one board to another of the machined part;
  • MDF Door Maker;
  • Create methods of building countertops;
  • Add additional operations on parts directly from the design area, operations that are graphically visible;
  • Possibility to edit reports;
  • Custom hardware.

Nika Machinery provides you with full technical support so that you can use the program to its full capacity and choose the most suitable variant for your level of activity.

Additional features you can benefit from depending on the module you choose

Cabinet Vision is a complex software that allows the choice of additional functions depending on the nature of the production and the wishes of the manufacturer. Labels can be added to facilitate secondary processing, custom reports can be created with information specific to a particular type of production, table tops can be processed, or different MDF door designs can be made for furniture. There are options to optimise cuttings for solid, chipboard or Nesting.

The program also allows you to enter specific settings such as dovetailing the drawer sides with the sides. The new settings are then sent to the CNC for machining.

We discussed Cabinet Vision with Nika representatives

Cabinet Vision is an intuitive, easy-to-use program. We were convinced of this by a visit from NIKA Machine Tools who came to see us the other day for a presentation. We "played" with patterns, colours and lights, we furnished a kitchen and changed the doors according to our own inspiration and we came to the conclusion that if we stop writing, we can start designing 😉

I'll let you watch the video of the meeting!