WorldCAD Access

ZWSOFT updates ZWCAD and ZW3D

Regular updates are a good sign that a software company has staying power in the CAD industry, and my rather bland headline tells us that in the past month China's ZWSOFT has shipped updates to its ZWCAD+ AutoCAD work-alike and ZW3D CAD/CAM packages.

(The "+" in the ZWCAD+ name indicates that the CAD program is no longer based on IntelliCAD code.)

ZWCAD+ 2012 service pack 2 improves image underlays, handling 1GB raster files easily (see figure), according to the press release. There's also enhancements to hatching, such as dynamic preview and boundary editing.

ZWCAD+ 2012 SP2 showing off a big raster underlay

ZW3D 2013 offers automatically generated constraints, constraint resolving, and drag'n drop actions inside the History manager -- plus a bunch of improvements to the CAM and mould modules.

As a bridge between ZWCAD and ZW3D, the company offers ZWCAD Mechanical for 2D mechanical designs. On iOS devices, they have their free Touch software for viewing drawings downloaded from Dropbox or email.

ZWSOFT has moved itself from an object of curiosity to a CAD vendor to watch as they aggressively expand -- and improve -- their software packages.

•  ZWSOFT+ demo: www.zwsoft.com/products/zwcad+.html

• ZW3D demo:  www.zwsoft.com/products/zw3d.html

• Touch download: itunes.apple.com/us/app/zwcad-touch 

 

In upFront.eZine this week: Bricsys finally announces BIM

In upFront.eZine this week, we have for your reading pleasure:      

1. American CAD/CAM Software Secure Enough for Chinese Military 

2. What Ralph Grabowski Thinks: The BricsCAD Mouse Steps Up Its Roaring
     - Architectural CAD
     - Two or Three OSes, One DWG

3. Out of the Inbox, and our other regular columns.

You can read all about the business of CAD at www.upfrontezine.com/2013/upf-772.htm

What's Inside? AutoCAD 2014

 

Here's what's inside 2014 

 

The cover image shows AutoCAD 2014 running on a Windows 8 touchscreen computer.

Autodesk last week announced and/or shipped its "2014" branded line of software. Unfortunately for us, they chose to emphasize during their official launch Webinar 'happy' (no kidding!) rather than new: "buy our suites, use our cloud."

To combat the reduction of new news, I've produced my annual guide to what's new in the newest release of AutoCAD. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2014 is 80 pages of new and changed commands and system variables, undocumented stuff, strong opinions and step-by-step tutorials.

This is a tradition now in its tenth year. Order your copy for $8 from www.upfrontezine.com/wia14 

TurboSite v1.2 adds so many functions it oughtta be named "version 2.0"

IMSI/Design keeps powering ahead with its mobile software for CAD users. It seems it me that a number of CAD vendors put out a mobileCAD program for Android and/or iOS for free, and then lost interest. Not all, of course. But they are in contrast to IMSI/Design who (a) charges for some of their Turbo-branded software and (b) keeps pumping in ever more functions.

Here's the list of new stuff for TurboSite v1.2, released last Friday:

• Box.com cloud file storage; get 10GB free storage when signing up through Box.com with TurboSite

• Display materials attached to 3D drawings, including color values, transparency, and lights

• New AutoShape tools for drawing and refining rectangles and polygons: rotate, make parallel, create rhombus, grip edit to make corners 90 degrees; convert ellipse to circle; added a Revision Cloud shape.

• Multiline text for annotative markups, with leaders
  
  
• Skype and FaceTime video chat

• HTML publish supports multiple layout sheets in DWG files
  
  
• New DWFx file support

There are a number of other new functions as well. While TurboSite is $499, the Reader edition is free. For iOS systems only. http://www.TurboApps.com

Transoft duz April foolz early

In a press release dated 1 April but slipped out on March 29, Vancouver's Transoft Solutions announced it was such an innovative leader that it was moving technology into the fifth dimension. As their subhead put it, "Vehicle Turning Simulations Will Never Be the Same."

The is-it-real-or-is-it-april-fools aura is, however, immediately dashed as the press release starts off, "In honor of April Fool's Day..." and "...a video spoofing its flagship software...". It would have been more fun if the first two paragraphs were canned, and the press release instead emphasized the point made in paragraph three:

We asked ourselves, how can we help our users generate vehicle simulations that are more real, and how can we improve the user experience using today’s technology?

This is where the next generation of vehicle simulation comes into play. We skipped 4D and jumped into the 5D world. 

Below we see a transportation engineer experiencing road conditions in 5D mode, in this case the software simulating transport trucks battling a snow storm.

With the press release a disappointment, the video it promotes is actually pretty good. View it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmTB77mGRzY

Live blog: Autodesk talks about BIM

Autodesk is this morning speaking to investors about building information modeling. We're listening in to hear what might be new or different. Us and 27 others are on the phone line.

 
"Autodesk pioneered the concept," says Amar Hanspal, senior vice president of Information Modeling & Platform Products Group at Autodesk. "Ten years into, we are at a medium level adoption level [in North America and North Europe]." Number of firms adopting BIM grew 45% between 2009 and 2012, according to McGraw Hill -- from 49% to 71%. But not all these design firms are using BIM on all projects.

Because he is speaking to investors, he needs to tread the tricky line between 'BIM is successful!' and 'BIM still has lots of future sales! [and hence future growth for Autodesk]' "It is a good news story, but there is still more to get," he explains.

Governments are legislating the use of BIM in projects now or within a few years, as illustrated by this slide:

 

Some builders specify Autodesk software, or Revit, or Civil 3D. Now he is showing slides to make investors happy: massively increasing sales. Spending on all brands of BIM is $2 billion now and will more than double  over the next couple of years.

Autodesk likes emphasizing the growth of its suites (26%) because being a new "product" they are growing faster than individual packages.

Now showing a couple of user case studies, including the Botswana Innovation Hub building. On this project, Revit Architecture was the primary design tool.

"BIM in infrastructure is where architecture was ten years ago. So that's an opportunity going forward." He presents dismal statistics, like:

• Construction has had little in producitivity gains in the past 40 years
• 50% of projects break schedule targets
• 30% of cost is from waste 
• Construction industry has historically spent almost the least on IT, just 0.15%. 

But do  not despair, investor: Construction is starting to spend on IT! For instance, they were the first to adopt cell phones. Autodesk hopes they will now adopt iPads, too.

 Here is the conclusion:

 

ASCON's sub-d software runs on Androids

Knowing that Android's market share is 2-3x larger than that of iOS, ASCON last month released their sub-division modeling software on Google Play store. It has the utilitarian name of SubDivFormer and can be accessed from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ascon.subdivformer

The software runs on Android smartphones and tablets, and has the following editing functions:

Extrude -- Intrude -- Subdivide -- Bevel -- Bump -- Split -- Bridge -- Merge -- Delete -- Move -- Rotate -- Scale.

 

 

AutoCAD 2014

Autodesk is announcing their 2014 line of software this morning, and we are listening along to the Webinar. There are about 1,560 others watching at this point.

First item up is an emphasis on you buying their suites of software. Did you know that you can be 42% happier just by using a suite? The science of statistics says so.

Live from San Francisco.

 

ReCap is the first product mentioned, the name being short for  Reality Capture. Actually, it is just a rebranding of Autodesk's collection of software for processing point cloud data, and is included with all suites

Geolocation with Live Maps is also included with all suites. Perhaps there'll be more details later.

AutoCAD 2014 supports Windows 8 and Design Feed. Will there be more on this later? (See http://www.autodesk.com/products/autodesk-autocad/features.)

We are now hearing about other suites, though not features but how the software is being used. "By using suites, the firm saved thousands of dollars." Yup, buy-our-suites is the Big Push today. Odd thing, though, is that the suites are shown in very tall boxes, even though I don't think you can buy Autodesk software in boxes anymore, let alone really large, Release 12-size boxes.

This product box must hold a lot of software!

 

The number of viewers peaked at just over 1,600 and is now falling, perhaps because of the lack of information about the new software releases. It is disappointing.

I think the problem with customer stories is that all CAD vendors have them, meaning that just about any software can be used for any project. For example, is Inventor the only CAD package that can design an oil platform? A rhetorical question, because Catia, Creo, NX, and others are just as capable.

And so that's why the (missing) list of new functions is crucial: how is Autodesk's 2014 software different from its competitors? We don't need to know how it is the same.

"As you know, numbers don't lie." This factoid is being used to push Autodesk's vision of the cloud. For instance, one million online renderings in the last three months.

"We've covered a lot in a short amount of time." The Webinar is coming to a close.

 

2014 book

Readers write:

It is that time again when I think you must have a What’s New book coming out shortly. Please let me know if this is the case this year and how soon before I can purchase a copy.

- A.B. 

Good timing in asking! I am working on the ebook right now, and hope to have it ready for sale next week in Monday's upFront.eZine.

The entire catalog of ebooks is at our eBooks.onLine site: http://www.upfrontezine.com/ebooks.

 

In upFront.eZine this week: 4M pushes BIM onto IntelliCAD

In upFront.eZine this week, we have for your reading pleasure:      

1. IDEA Architecture 11: Pushing IntelliCAD into BIM
   - IDEA Demo
   - FINE Demo 

2.  Out of the Inbox and our other regular columns.

You can read all about the business of CAD at www.upfrontezine.com/2013/upf-770.htm