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Thursday, May 6, 2010

New Autocad


AutoCAD 2011

Recall from last year’s product launch that AutoCAD 2010—which included new freeform mesh modeling tools, greatly improved PDF support, and the ability to create intelligent, parametric drawings—was referred to as a “watershed event” in AutoCAD’s history, unmatched by any previous release. Autodesk continued its use of superlatives including “most exciting,” “fantastic,” and “best ever” to describe this year’s release of AutoCAD. While the application does include some very useful enhancements that build up nicely upon the last release, it is ultimately the users who will determine if these are indeed as ground-breaking as Autodesk makes them out to be. The enhancements fall under three main categories: improved conceptual design capabilities, increased productivity in document production, and better parametrics.

On the conceptual design front, AutoCAD 2011 includes a whole new set of advanced surface modeling tools in addition to the mesh modeling tools that had been introduced in AutoCAD 2010. The new tools, shown in Figure 1, enable users to easily create smooth surfaces and surface transitions, with automatic associativity that maintains relationships between all of the objects. In addition, the surfaces stay associated to their underlying geometry and automatically update when the geometry is changed, providing a fluid interface for 3D design. While the new surface modeling capability is undoubtedly most helpful for the manufacturing industry, as evidenced by the example shown in Figure 1, it can be extremely helpful in AEC for exploring organic building forms that can subsequently be exported as NURBS surfaces or solids to Revit for further development. And given that the majority of AEC users already have AutoCAD for their drafting needs, the new freeform modeling capabilities may reduce the need to use a different application such as Rhino or form.Z for conceptual design.


Figure 1. The new surface modeling tools in AutoCAD 2011 allow for easier creation of freeform surfaces. (Courtesy: Autodesk)

Also, because the surfaces created with the new tools stay associated with their defining 2D geometry, the ability to add various kinds of geometric constraints to drawing objects in relation to other objects—which was introduced in AutoCAD 2010—can also be used to control the geometry of the surfaces parametrically. For example, you could use a dimensional constraint to parametrically change the size of a circle, which in turn will automatically change any 3D surface object that has been defined from it. This is not full parametric 3D modeling that is available in sophisticated mechanical CAD applications, but is a useful extension of AutoCAD’s 2D parametric capabilities to 3D design.

Another new feature in AutoCAD 2011 that is relevant to conceptual design is point cloud support. Users can now bring in a point cloud created with a laser scanning device and use that as the basis for creating a 3D model, similar to how a drawing can be created by using a raster image as a reference. Point clouds with up to 2 billion points are supported. However, there is no way to automatically convert that point cloud into a 3D model—you still have to create the model from scratch. In time, however, third party developers could use Autodesk’s powerful API to develop enhancements to the point cloud functionality and provide some automatic conversion capability.

The third main enhancement on the conceptual design front is the expansion of the materials library to include an enhanced set of materials that enables users to create rich visual representations of 3D models (see Figure 2). It includes over a 1000 predefined materials that can be dragged and dropped to apply them to objects. The same library is also now included in all Autodesk applications, providing consistency and ensuring that material information is fully retained when the model is passed from one application to another. Users can customize the materials and save them to their own library. Libraries can be imported and exported as well as shared with other users.


Figure 2. The expanded materials library in AutoCAD 2011 that is also now implemented in other Autodesk applications. (Courtesy: Autodesk)

On the 2D documentation front, one of the main improvements in AutoCAD 2011 is in hatching. The Hatch command can be accessed more easily through a contextual tab. A hatch’s scale, rotation, and origin can now be directly edited using an expanded object grip functionality. There are additional options for hatches include transparency, background colors, and gradient fills, which enable users to add more colors and shading to drawings. In addition to hatches, transparency can also now be applied to entire layers as well as specific objects, providing users with new options for managing the appearance of drawings (see Figure 3). There are new “Hide Objects” and “Isolate Objects” tools to control the visibility of objects regardless of layer, so designers can focus on the objects themselves without having to think about what layer they belong to. Polyline editing has been improved with enhanced grips that can be used to add, remove, or stretch vertices, and to convert straight-line segments to arcs, enabling a more direct manipulation of these elements.


Figure 3. The new ability to apply transparency to layers in AutoCAD 2011 provides more control over drawing appearance. (Courtesy: Autodesk)

AutoCAD 2011 also introduces two new commands that can speed the process of creating or selecting objects based on the properties of existing objects: the “Add Selected” tool, which can be used to create new objects based on the properties of an existing object; and the “Select Similar” tool, which enables quick selection of objects that include the same type and properties in the selection set. While these are not novel ideas and have already been implemented in several design applications, they should certainly help AutoCAD users do their work more quickly and efficiently.

Rounding off the set of improvements in AutoCAD 11 is the ability for design constraints to be inferred in real time, as the designer is drawing, rather than manually defining all the object relationships desired. This feature builds upon the constraint-based parametric drawing capability introduced last year and is a good step towards making the application smarter and easier to use.

Last but not least, AutoCAD 2011 is optimized to leverage Windows 7 functionality. It is compatible with all editions of Windows 7 as well as with Windows Vista and Windows XP operating systems. Also, it should be noted that there is no file format change that users have to worry about for AutoCAD 2011.

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