Sunday, April 4, 2010

Autocad 2011

There is not much point me going into the user interface etc etc as you could go to, say,Robin Capper's excellent blog at http://rcd.typepad.com/rcd/ where he does a good job of giving a run down on R2011. You might have to reverse through to the post, as he seems to be churning them out!

So, I'll just outline my experiences with it and hope that someone gets around a few of the things that I found as I proceeded to waste my Easter weekend drawing a set of instructions for a do-it-yourself cabinet assembly.

On firing up for the first time I noticed: No toolbars. Well, it turns out that they are still there, just hidden-I guess that Autodesk want you to move towards the Ribbon system. Here is a snip of my screen setup, just of the ribbon, shown vertically as I have two screens:


(By the way, there is a snipping tool in Vista-look under Accessories)

How to get your toolbars? Just to the right of the Quick Access Toolbar there is a small triangle.


Press this and locate "Show Menu Bar". Then go Tools/Toolbars/Autocad and tick the ones you want.

Another fun annoyance, was the helpful popups that appeared in the top right hand corner.

On pressing "Don't show me this again" it appeared yet again, and again. A friend told me that they were all different ones and that after a while all sorts would be eliminated. Makes sense, really, because you want your new users to be looked after.

A lot of new changes are not immediately apparent- for instance the loft command has been overhauled to allow for surface creation. Previously, the dialog box came up automatically, now you have to use the Settings option to make it come up.

As usual with new releases, I tread carefully, making sure I do regular backups.

The neatest things I'm finding are:

*The materials system has been overhauled and is looking good.

*Hatching has had a lot of work done on it and seems much better.

*Polylines are a lot nicer to edit - but old habits die hard!

*There is a new display bar on the right of the screen which has the often used orbit button on it, and the "Steering Wheel" which I have not been using but have been driven to because of it's handy little button marked "Center" which is great if you want to reset the orbit center graphically.

3 comments:

RobiNZ said...

You can link to specfic post on almost any blog. The "Permalink" will never change even if the blogger changes the post title or edits it.

On Blogger they are the link on the time at the bottom of the post. On my blog they are behind the title of the post and on the "Permalink" link in the post footer.

Rich said...

Great post! AutoCAD 11 seems like a great product. I work with the McGraw Hill Sweets Network, where you'll find any kind of auto cad drawing.

wanluqman said...

I would like to learn LISP , I did learn basic knowledge on VBA & wrote app. to automate reinforced concrete beam & column. I think LISP will do the similar better, would like to view some samples.