Sunday, April 09, 2006

Bootcamp Day One - AutoCAD 2007


Day one: We went over the two most significant additions to AutoCAD.

They have been mentioned before. The 3D solid modeling which gets some of it's functionality from Autodesk Inventor, and the new visualization capability that inherits items from Autodesk 3D Studio Viz. Two terms that impressed me were related to visualiztion. The first was Edge Overhang and the second was Edge Jitter.

Both were used in the image above. When we want a view to appear to be hand drawn Edge Overhang makes lines extend beyond the intersection by the amount of the setting, and Edge Jitter gives the appearance of multiple hand drawn lines in place of the one perfect line. The interesting thing is we can work in this mode and Visualiztion Styles can quickly change between different modes.

Other new terms and capabilities include...

Walk and Fly for manuevering in 3D.

The creation of animations gets significantly more powerful and useful.

"Shift + Mouse Wheel" to 3DOrbit (Default in AutoCAD, not default in Civil 3D).

There are MANY more Materials that can be applied from both Inventor and 3D Studio Viz.

We can render cropped views for quick checking before actual renders.

Perhaps most interesting of all is that most of this is relatively simple to use. That is good news for Instructors, Technical Support Staff, and most importantly Users.

I hope to check in tomorrow.

No comments: