373 17 th International Research/Expert Conference ”Trends in the Development of Machinery and Associated Technology” TMT 2013, Istanbul, Turkey, 10-11 September 2013 HOW TO USE CAD TOOLS FOR MODELLING VIRTUAL ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENTS? 1 Zona Kostić * Dragan Cvetković * Aleksandar Jevremović * Dragan Marković * Srđan Trajković ** Duško Radaković ** * Singidunum University, Belgrade, 11000, Serbia ** College of Professional Studies – Belgrade Polytechnics, Belgrade, 11000, Serbia ABSTRACT Working on distance has become a necessity. Especially this problem exists within the educational institutions where the need for practical teaching (on distance) is increasing. This paper describes how to use almost any Computer-Aided Design tool for the virtual environment creation, usable for remote modelling and assembling. The basic functions are created using CAD tool and the environment is exported and shown using the X3D technology. The comparative study of commonly used CAD software in engineering, 3D Web technologies and the best combination of the mentioned components has been described in the paper. Based on the experience, authors drawn the directions related to the future development of engineering virtual environments. 1. INTRODUCTION Industrial design refers to those activities involved in creating the look of the product, deciding on the product's mechanical architecture, selecting materials and processes, and engineering the various components. Using Virtual Reality (VR) technology industrial design can be performed within Virtual Environment (VE), which shortens design and development time. Thus, industrial design shares the characteristics of VEs (e.g. collaboration) and in the form of Virtual Design, becomes applicable in engineering courses. It aims to enhance the validation of product concepts via advanced simulations, to increase the efficiency of component and material reuse in different life cycle phases, and to reduce simulation costs. CAD software has been around a long, but the size of the 3D model, compatibility issues in cross- platform environments, and limited flow over Internet still present a problem in terms of their exchange and sharing. Development of standards for exchange of 3D objects over Internet helped in developing specific applications for designing, planning, and education. 3D Web technologies promise many applications in simulation and training, making users directly participate in and explore the virtual environment, making them sharing objects easily. This paper describes how easy it is to create and use virtual environment that allows collaborative work of many distant clients. The environment aimed to support practical exercises of mutually distant participants is intended for fast, accurate creation of simple models. It can be designed in any CAD software. This paper at first detects CAD software and 3D Web technologies in order to make the best choice of these two. After that, creation methods are described through using concrete tool to export 1 The work presented here has been supported by the Serbian Ministry of Education and Science project grant number III44006.