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Animation Sessions at SolidWorks World 2011
In a previous post I mentioned the sessions I’ll be giving at SolidWorks world 2011. My sessions focus on rendering but you’ll find a lot of the time rendering an animation go hand in hand. For this reason I thought I’d post some of the animation sessions being given at SolidWorks World. Make special note of the first session listed, Creating Animation with SolidWorks – Motion Drivers:. This session is being presented by Jim Boland and is his first SolidWorks World session ever. This is hard for me to believe because Jim is a bank of knowledge on a number of SolidWorks subjects. If you’ve ever taken a SolidWorks training course there is a good chance Jim wrote at least a portion of the training manual. Him and I have collaborated on the PhotoWorks Step By Step Guides over the years and he recently finished the Creating Animations With SolidWorks Step by Step Guide which was reviewed here. No doubt attending this presentation will be time well spent.
The other two sessions listed will be presented by Marlon Banta and Ron Bates, both from DS SolidWorks. Like Jim, both of these gentlemen have a wealth of knowledge in a number of SolidWorks areas. Both are also veteran presenters at SolidWorks World and their presentations are always full of information. Some of their past presentations can be found here. If you’re looking for SolidWorks Motion information these sessions will be a good utilization of your time at SolidWorks World. There are so many good sessions at World seeing them all can be tough due to scheduling conflicts. Remember, all sessions will be available to SolidWorks World attendees after the conference.
Creating Animation with SolidWorks – Motion Drivers: This 90 minute session will take you beyond the keypoint and simple mate drivers used by most users to create their animations. This session will cover the different types of motion studies, how to determine which is best to use, how SolidWorks calculates the motion in each study type and the 360/100 Rule. Drivers that will be explored will be the various types of motors (constant, distance, data point, segment, expression, oscillating), and the physics based drivers (gravity, contact, and springs) plus some hidden function like damping and friction. Lots of good information to make animations easier.
Introduction to the SolidWorks MotionManager – Hands-on: Learn how to choreograph and build an animation by arranging components and taking snapshots of them at key moments during a sequence of movement or change. Attendees learn the basic skills to create animations using the SolidWorks MotionManager.
Advanced MotionManager Techniques: In this session attendees will learn more advanced skills required to create animations in SolidWorks. This session will compliment the Introduction to the SolidWorks MotionManager Hands on session that will also be presented at SolidWorks World 2011.
January 9, 2011 Tags: Motion, PhotoView 360, SolidWorks World 2011 SWW11, SWW11
Category: SolidWorks World 2011 No Comments 
SolidWorks World 2011 Sessions
2011 is here already! Time has been moving very fast for me lately which is part of the reason posts on this blog have slowed. Axis CAD Solutions LLC has been very busy creating images and animations over the last year and if you’re using SolidWorks 2011 you’ve had a glimpse at some of them. I’m excited 2011 has arrived for a couple of reasons and one of those is SolidWorks World 2011.
I’ve been to every SolidWorks World since 2006 and I still get excited about seeing old friends, meeting new people and giving presentations. Speaking of presentations, I’ll be giving three of them this year.
PhotoView 360: Instant Images is a hands on session I’ve given for the last couple of years. For 2011 it has been totally updated with a new model showing the latest PhotoView 360 functionality for 2011. This session has been popular in the past and this year SolidWorks has added a second time slot in response to an overflowing waiting list. You may still have time to sign up for this one but you’ll have to hurry.
PhotoView 360 2011: This Changes Everything is a session focused on PhotoView 360 2011 and how it compares to PhotoView 360 and PhotoWorks 2010. I’ll give a good general overview of the PhotoView 360 2011 feature set, talk about the new workflow options and highlight the difference from previous versions. This is a 90 minute session so there should be plenty of time to cover a lot of information.
SolidWorks to Modo: What’s in the Kit is a session that will take a look at the soon to be released SolidWorks Kit from Luxology. This kit has been created, tested and revised over the last year and you’ll finally get a look at SolidWorks World 2011. For this session I’m teaming up with Paul McCrorey. Paul has been a SolidWorks to Modo pioneer from the begining and I know he’s ready to show his stuff. It will be a lot of information to pack into a 60 minute session but if you’re a SolidWorks user who wants to explore Modo it’s a must see.
If you haven’t signed up for SolidWorks World 2011 there is still time. In fact, if you sign up before January 7th you’ll receive the early bird 2 discount of $100. Having a CSWP will save you another $100 so it’s not to late to attend and save some money. Hope to see you at one of my sessions 
January 4, 2011 Tags: Modo, PhotoView 360, SolidWorks World 2011, SWWorld11
Category: PhotoView 360, SolidWorks World 2011 2 Comments
NVIDIA Quadro 5000 Review
In September Brian Harrison from NVIDIA contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in trying out a new Quadro 5000 graphics card. I know most people would need their arm twisted to try out the latest hardware or software from a company but I jumped at the chance for a couple of reasons.
First off , I wanted to see if this new NVIDIA card performed better than my current Quadro FX 3700. The 3700 hasn’t been a bad card for me but it’s based on older technology and the 512mb of on board RAM fell short at times while working on demanding assemblies inside of SolidWorks. I also quite often receive a very annoying, “your system is running low on SolidWorks resources” warning that I attribute to the 512mb of memory on the card. I don’t know the low card memory is causing or contributing to the error (it could be an issue with SolidWorks managing resources) but a good way to find out was try a new card.
Second, I wanted to give GPU rendering a try. My new license of BunkSpeed Shot showed up a while ago but I haven’t been able to try out the GPU rendering feature of the software because my FX 3700 didn’t support it. The Quadro 5000 would let me experience the new GPU processing technology first hand.
Before we get started I’d like to give the full disclosure up front. NVIDIA provided me with a Quadro 5000 graphics card (which retails for approx. $2250) to use and test as I felt necessary with whatever software I wanted. When I was finished using the card for this purpose I was able to keep the card for long term testing and usage. I’ll have another post at some point in the future pertaining to long term usage and use with other types of software.
The NVIDIA Quadro 5000 Specifications: The Quadro 5000 is built on the NVIDIA Fermi Architecture and is advertised as being able to deliver speeds up to 4X faster than previous generation Quadro cards. The card carries and impressive spec sheet of features and honestly I’m not sure what some of the information on the spec sheet means but there were a couple of numbers that caught my eye.
The first eye catcher was the “CUDA Core“ category which listed 352. NVIDIA CUDA technology is a parallel computing architecture that enables applications to take advantage of GPU processing. GPU processing can be used for applications such as raytracing (rendering), video processing and FEA which require high levels of computation to process the information. The iray rendering engine found in BunkSpeed Shot is specifically designed to take advatage of the NVIDIA CUDA architecture and this is supposed to greatly increase rendering times. This is one of the areas I wanted to try so I was excited about the 352 CUDA cores.
Second eye catcher was the “Total Frame Buffer” number of 2.5gb. That’s 2.5 gigs of RAM on the Quadro 5000. That kind of memory was much more than other graphics card I’d ever used and I was anxious to see how that effected large assembly performance in SolidWorks.
One other note of interest for me was the physical size of the Quadro 5000. This card takes up two full slots in your PC box making it twice as thick as my FX 3700. Length and width were about the same as my old card and the Quadro 5000 plugged into the mother board without a hitch.
Here’s the entire spec sheet.
How does it work with SolidWorks? First step after installing the Quadro 5000 was load up the approved driver from the SolidWorks website. That was a painless process and the driver is approved for both SoildWorks 2010 and 2011 usage. I spent about 30 days testing the card with SolidWorks 2010 on a daily basis. The work was varied and included, modeling (both part and assembly), detail drawing creation and rendering. My typical assembly file is 100 parts or less so I wouldn’t say my SolidWorks usage stresses my system all that much. The exception to this is rendering. I’m rendering on a daily basis using both PhotoWorks and PhotoView 360. Both of these applications is very CPU intensive and neither has the ability to utilize GPU processing so having the Quadro 5000 for these applications didn’t help much in the way of rendering processing. The card preformed very well in those 30 days of testing and I didn’t receive the “your system is running low on SolidWorks resources” warning. Not once, which was a nice surprise. As stated before I’m not 100% sure graphics cards with lower RAM are causing this warning but I didn’t receive it with the Quadro 5000 (2.5gb RAM) and I certainly would have with my FX 3700 (512mb RAM). I did have some crashes during my SolidWorks usage and there was some screen glitches (repaint issues when switching windows). This is not uncommon for me however so I’m not sure I can attribute these specific instances to the Quadro 5000.
I don’t typically take a lot of stock in hardware benchmarks. Benchmarks will give you part of the story but every users has different habits and work their completing varies so in my opinion there is nothing like real world usage to test hardware. I did run the new SolidWorks performance test found in SolidWorks 2011 just to see what kind of results I could get. When compared to others scores I faired very well. Have a look, I’m listed as RobR XI. For reference I’m running an Xi built PC with a core i-7 965 3.2 ghz CPU, 12 gigs of RAM on Vista 64.
I also wanted to give a larger assembly a try so I loaded up the largest SolidWorks file I had on my PC, about 6700 parts. Have a look at the video to see the results.
How does it work with BunkSpeed Shot? Shot is the replacement software for HyperShot from BunkSpeed. Shot is built around the iray rendering engine from Mental Images which is a division of NVIDIA. Being a HyperShot owner I received a copy of Shot when it was released a couple of months ago. Shot is designed to process renderings with either the CPU, the GPU or in a hybrid mode which uses both CPU and GPU together. In order to use the GPU and hybrid rendering features in Shot you need to have an NVIDIA graphics card which supports CUDA. BunkSpeed claims at their website that using a CUDA enabled graphics card can significantly accelerate performance. This is something I wanted to try and the Quadro 5000 with it 352 CUDA cores was going to allow me to do this. I wanted to know what “significantly accelerate performance” meant in the real world.
I opened as SolidWorks file of a toy lego car from 3D Content Central in Shot. It was a small file that consists of about 8 unique parts. I added materials, set an environment, set up a camera view and then it was time to render. In the render dialog box Shot gives you the option to choose which method (CPU, GPU, Hybrid) you’d like to use to process your render. I saved three separate renderings of the car using a different method for each one. The results were pretty amazing.
CPU only rendering returned a time of 17:58.
GPU only rendering returned a time of 6:23
Hybrid rendering also returned a time of 6:23.
The GPU rendering method completed the image in about 1/3 the time of CPU rendering alone. That is a significant gain in speed! I’d like to point out that time was based on the Quadro 5000′s 352 CUDA cores. Less CUDA cores would return a slower rendering time and more CUDA cores would return a faster rendering time. The Quadro 5000 really showed it’s abilities with this small test in Shot.
Conclusion: The Quadro 5000 performed well for me in my 30 days of testing with SolidWorks and my short test with Shot. It’s certainly a very capable performance minded card. With a retail price of approximately $2250 it’s probably more than I would spend (or want to spend) on a graphics card. That said, if you’re a person who works on large assemblies in SolidWorks or creates images in GPU rendering software such as Shot then the Quadro 5000 would be a good investment. Yes, it carries an upper level price but the performance payback for the demanding user should be relatively short. If you’re thinking you’d like a new NVIDIA Quadro card at a lower price point you should have a look at Anna’s SolidMuse. Anna will be reviewing a couple of the lower level Quadro cards as well as the Quadro 6000.
October 18, 2010 Tags: Graphics Card, NVIDIA, Quadro 5000
Category: Product Review, Uncategorized 1 Comment
NVIDIA Would Like Your Feedback
If you’re a SolidWorks user and graphics card performance is important to you have a look at the new survey from NVIDIA. It only takes about 5 minutes to complete and once finshed you’ll be entered for a chance to win a new Fermi architecture based Quadro card. You’ll also have the opportunity to join the Quadro Technology Advisory Board (TAC) if you so choose. Hurry, survey ends October 12th.
October 5, 2010 Tags: Graphics cards, Nvidea
Category: misc. No Comments
September 1, 2010 Tags: Animation, PhotoView 360, Rendering, SolidWorks 2011
Category: PhotoView 360 No Comments
ioSafe External Hard Drive Review, Is It Disaster Proof?
You may remember a previous post here detailing the creation of an image for an external hard drive designed by ioSafe. I created the image for SolidWorks who was developing a case study of one of their customers, ioSafe. ioSafe uses SolidWorks to design, in their words, “disaster proof hardware”. More specifically, ioSafe designs, manufactures and sells a variety of data storage devices that have some level of water and fire protection. I was contacted by ioSafe and asked if I’d like to give one of their products a try and write a review for this blog. I of course jumped at the chance and what you’re reading are the results.
ioSafe sent me their 1 TB solo USB external hard drive. Opening the box I found a very well packaged unit secured in place using foam cages. Pulling the unit out of the box I was surprised by its weight and size. I have a couple of other 500 gig external drives here and they are much lighter and smaller. It’s not an unreasonable size at 5″W x 7″H x 11″L with a weight of 15 lbs. I was just expecting something a bit smaller. As you would expect the drive comes with a power supply, USB cable and instruction booklet. I made all the necessary connections and the unit fit nicely on the desk next to my monitor.
I powered up my system and the drive was recognized without issue. Just for reference I’m running Windows Vista 64 as my OS. The Solo is also Mac compatible but you’ll have to reformat the drive before use with your Mac. I copied about 100 gigs of data (drag and drop in Windows Explorer) onto the drive. While the data was copying the blue power lights, visible on the front panel danced around letting me know things were working. The unit was extremely quiet, if the power lights hadn’t been on I wouldn’t have even known it was working. I moved some files off the drive and opened a few SolidWorks files from the drive just to be sure everything was OK. It all worked as expected. Set up and use were easy and to this point the Solo wasn’t any different than other external drives I’ve used. What I really wanted to know however was if it could live up to the claims of being disaster proof. We are about to find out.
The ioSafe Solo housing is built from alloy steel. It has patented air flow (FloSafe) and water barrier (HydroSafe) technology along with a proprietary fireproof insulation material (DataCast). According to the specs it can withstand fire with temperatures up to 1550 degrees for 30 minutes and can be submerged in up to 10 feet of water (fresh or salt) for a period of 72 hours. All of this sounds impressive and reads well on paper but does it really work? Can this drive be thrown in a fire for 30 minutes, burned until cherry red and then dropped into a bucket of muddy water for an hour and still keep my data safe and accessible? Only one way to find out!
Overall I’m very impressed with the ioSafe Solo drive. It stood up to open flame, intense heat, water, mud, dirt, and was even dropped a couple of times. The housing took a beating but the hard drive inside didn’t even show a scratch. Most importantly the data remained safe and usable. I work with customer files everyday and of course back them up routinely. I’m a small business and because of this off site backups aren’t really possible, my backups are onsite and this makes a product like the Solo very attractive to me. It offers another layer of data protection for events that I have very little control over. If you’re in a similar situation or you’d just like more peace of mind in protecting your data then I’d highly recommend this product.
If you’re a SolidWorks user group member ioSafe is offering you a 20% discount on the product reviewed here. To take advantage of this offer contact your local SolidWorks user group leader.
If you feel the tests I put the Solo through weren’t severe enough, have a look at these videos.
http://www.geardiary.com/2009/08/04/could-your-hard-drive-survive-this-if-its-an-iosafe-yep/
http://www.macworld.com/article/142801/2009/09/iosafe_solo.html
http://the-gadgeteer.com/2009/09/01/iosafe-solo-usb-hard-drive-with-disaster-protection-review/
http://www.fhm.com/reviews/gadgets/when-tanks-run-over-expensive-gadgets-thats-cool-20091211
July 27, 2010 Tags: ioSafe, Product Review
Category: Product Review No Comments
SolidWorks 2011 Beta Is Live!
The SolidWorks 2011 Beta contest is underway! This year the beta contest has a number of smaller contest running inside the larger overall contest. One that I like is the specific PhotoView 360 2011 contest. The PV360 contest gives you a chance to win some great cash prizes while creating renderings.
- Did SolidWorks give PhotoView 360 2011 a comparable feature set to PhotoWorks?
- Does PhotoView 360 2011 support animation?
- Is PhotoView 360 2011 integrated into SolidWorks or stand alone?
The only way to find out is download the beta and have a look 
July 8, 2010 Tags: SolidWorks 2011 Beta
Category: misc. No Comments
Creating Animations With SolidWorks: A New Step By Step Guide
SolidWorks has released a new Step By Step Guide, “Creating Animations with SolidWorks“. This guide is the replacement for the Motion Manager Step By Step Guide and has seen a lot of enhancements. At 18 chapters and 516 pages it’s almost double the size of the old guide. before we talk about the new guide let’s take a moment to discuss the included DVD. The DVD housed in the back cover contains all the files needed to follow along with the guide examples. The files are in both a finished and unfinished state which means double the required information is burned onto the DVD. Becasue of this the DVD executable file needs to run in two stages requiring a fair amount of time to install all the data. DO NOT REMOVE THE DVD until the entire installation process has completed. Total install time on my M-6300 took about 60 minutes.
Chapter 1: As you would expect chapter 1 is an introduction to the motion manager UI. It also talks about the different kinds of motion studies, types of motion available in the software, motion drivers and gives a general overview on the process of building an animation.
Chapter 2 & 3: In chapter 2 the guide covers using the animation wizard to build rotation, explode and collapse motion and it also covers the different interpolation modes available in the software. You’ll save your first avi file in chapter 2 and you’ll also learn some good information about video file types, codecs and the different save options available. Chapter 3 shows the finer points of editing the various time line elements to better control the output. You also learn what the various color codes are for the keys and timeline as well as how to group edit and scale the entire animation.
Chapter 4:This is where you are exposed to view orientation for the first time. You won’t cover camera views here (that has its own chapter) but you will cover the other SolidWorks viewing controls as well as the perspective setting which can be very important depending on the type of animation you’re creating.
Chapter 5: Chapters 1-4 show you the basics of creating simple animations. For some users this will be the extent of their animation needs and many could stop here with the information they have picked up. Chapter 5 is where the real fun begins however and it’s the start of creating more intermediate level animations for users that need that capability. In chapter 5 you’ll learn all about animating appearances, lights and creating photo realistic output. If basic animations are good then animations that look pretty are better and chapter 5 helps you look pretty.
Chapter 6 & 7: These chapters continue on the intermediate level path and cover the various ways to drive motion in your animation. Free movement (with the triad and without), motors (all the various types) and mates. I’m covering it quickly here but these chapters go into a great amount of depth and do a great job of covering a lot of information.
Chapter 8:This chapter is entirely new information and could previously only be found by searching the web or SolidWorks forums. Chapter 8 covers how to animate parts changing size and shape including how to animate a spring compressing and extending. It also shows the use of equations in animations and has a great example of a wheel and suspension components.
Chapter 9: In chapter 9 you’ll use physical simulation techniques to help drive and control motion in your animation. If you’d like to show your motion being governed by contact forces, motors, gravity, springs etc. you’ll want to have a look at chapter 9.
Chapter 10: I really like this chapter because it covers a difficult to answer commonly asked question, ”What is the correct way to create this type of animation”? This question is difficult to answer because just like in SolidWorks there are many ways to achieve the same end result in your animation. There really is no “right” or “wrong” method but different methods offer different pros and cons and chapter 10 illustrates this.
Chapters 11 & 12: This is where the guide covers using cameras in animations and boy does it ever cover the topic. There is so much information in these two chapter and some of it is borrowed from the PhotoWorks Step By Step Guide. Creating cameras, setting the properties, depth of field, saving cameras, animating them, animating multiple cameras, using camera sleds. Everything you wanted to know about SolidWorks cameras is in this chapter.
Chapter 13: You’ll expand on your camera knowledge in chapter 13. Here you’ll cover walk-through and walk-around animations. Fixing a camera target point, following a path, making edits, everything you need to know about moving around or through your geometry.
Chapter 14: until this point the guide has covered creating animations using core SolidWorks functionality. Chapter 14 covers ways to use your motion analysis study from SolidWorks Motion to create an animation. It also discusses when and when not to use a motion study for creating an animation.
Chapter 15: What I think might be the best chapter in the guide. Chapter 15 covers post processing which is a very important part of creating your final animation even though it happens outside of SolidWorks. Often the video or image output from SolidWorks is just a small part of the final animation you’ll create. These elements will be compiled with many others in video editing or compiling software to create the final product. This again is information that in the past would have been difficult to find but is now included in the guide.
Chapter 16: Titled, “Advanced Topics” chapter 16 also covers information a user would have had to search out on their own in the past. Animating configuration changes is in there as is one of my favorites, animating dynamic section cuts. This happens to be a very powerful technique for creating many different effects such as pouring liquid. Chapter 16 also covers some of the common troubleshooting topics users have.
Chapter 17: This chapter covers the animation of large assemblies. The example used is the miter saw which you might remember from the PhotoWorks Step by Step Guide. You’ll learn the techniques and settings available to make animating large assemblies more manageable.
Chapter 18: The final chapter in the guide gives some general tips and tricks for creating better animations.
You can see a breakdown of each chapter by page header here.
The animations playing in this post are from the DVD found in the back cover of the guide.
This newest Step By Step Guide covering animation from SolidWorks is a huge leap over the earlier editions. Each chapter includes example files and case studies that allow you to follow along and create all the steps shown in the guide. The guide is in full color and most pages have at least one screen shot making it easy to follow along with the software. Most of the examples use interesting models and some “real life” animation situations. A lot of new information has been added to cover topics that users would need to search out on their own in the past making this guide a true one stop learning place. SolidWorks is capable of creating some really nice animations if you understand how to use the tools provided. This guide makes understanding those tools easier. If you’d like to learn more about creating animation in SolidWorks I highly recommend this guide.
My hat is off to the people at SolidWorks responsible for the production of this guide. The information, example files and final videos represent a huge amount of work and hours to create, edit and fine tune into a final product. They’ve done a great job with this guide!
If you’d like to explore the guide more or purchase a copy you can do so by contacting your VAR or clicking here.
As a full disclosure statement, I do sell this guide as well as the PhotoWorks Step By Step Guide on this blog. I do receive a small profit from each guide sold on my site.
June 22, 2010 Tags: Animation, Rendering, Solidworks
Category: Product Review 1 Comment
DraftSight: New 2D Software From Dassault Systems
Dassault had the CAD world talking when it showed a cloud based version of SolidWorks at SolidWorks World 2010. I sat in the audience during the conference and listen to Bernard Charles talk about the Dassault family of products and their mantra of “3d for all”. That’s why I was surprised when I learned the newest software release from Dassault isn’t cloud based and has nothing to do with 3D. Surprisingly, it’s all about 2D and it’s named DraftSight.
DraftSight is not a replacement for the SolidWorks 2D Editor (formerly known as SolidWorks DWG Editor). The two applications have similarities but are based on different technology. Like the SolidWorks 2D Editor, Draftsight reads and writes DWG and DXF files. It functions basically the same as the SolidWorks 2D Editor and other 2D CAD software you’ve previously used. DraftSight is aimed at the 3D CAD customer who needs to keep a seat or two of 2D CAD current to work with legacy data, do some 2D drafting, create schematics and offer other company departments (sales for example) some simple drafting tools. It’s not limited to this type of work however. You could easily use DraftSight to create 2D layout and detail drawings from scratch for any design in a variety of industries. Unlike the Solidworks 2D Editor that was free to all SolidWorks subscription customers, Draftsight is free for everyone. It will also be offered in Mac and Linux flavors later this year.
DraftSight is more than just software. Its also about community. When you activate your free copy of DraftSight you’re also signing up to be part of the DraftSight co
mmunity. The idea being, in order for the software to grow, mature and be widely adopted it needs to have a supportive user community behind it. The idea is based on the open source software model. With open source software, the source code is freely distributed, upgraded and altered by users to add features and functions. The DraftSight source code will not be distributed but it will be updated and enhanced based on user feedback. This feedback will be collected and voted on by the user community in much the same was as SolidWorks Brainstorm works. This allows you, the user input on the software’s future without actually having to know how to write code.
After using DraftSight for a few hours, trying to dig in and find out what’s under the hood I’ve learned that its really not that much different than other 2D packages. The software downloaded and installed in about 5 minutes (it’s only a 47 meg package). All the features and functions are there, the UI is very familiar, its very stable and it’s performance is good. I’ve had no issues opening dwg files created in AutoCAD 2004 and they write fine as well. It’s really a very functional, feature rich 2D product and best of all it’s free. Overall in my short usage time I like DraftSight. It’s UI is much better than the SolidWorks 2D Editor mainly because the tool icons are much more readable and understandable. It also feels like a more modern interface than the 2D Editor and it has a good amount of customizability. If you prefer to enter commands on the command line you can do that and you’ll find the commands you know from your previous 2D software work in DraftSight. Layers, line styles, hatching, blocks, references, grips, object snaps, patterns, tables, model space, paper space, full help files, etc. It’s all there.
Most of my 2D CAD experience has been with AutoCAD LT. I’ve also used the full version of AutoCAD but honestly LT meets my 2D needs just fine. I don’t run LISP routines or scripting and if I need any 3D capability I go to SolidWorks so, for me LT is all I need. DraftSight will have no issues replacing my seat of AutoCAD LT and in my opinion AutoCAD LT is about the level of product the current release of DraftSight is. I don’t use my seat of AutoCAD LT all that often but the need does arise on occasion and it’s becoming harder and harder to do this as I upgrade my computer and operating systems. My older seat of software isn’t compatible with the newest operating systems but I don’t use the software enough to justify the upgrade costs. This makes DraftSight a very attractive product for me since it can meet all my 2D needs and it costs me nothing.
Later this year the public beta of DraftSight will end and the release version will be available for free to everyone. At that time DraftSight will also offer some add-ins to the product which will be on a purchase basis. The current list of add-ins is small but that will chnage over time as the community grows and requests more capability.
Currently the add-in products available for purchase will be:
API extensions for those users that would like to customize, automate and integrate the product.
Tech support for those users who need help and or training.
Network licensing for those users that would like to be able to manage multiple installs. The network license add-in also includes the API extensions and tech support.
If you have some spare time in the near future and are looking for a very capable 2D drafting application at a very attractive price (free) download DraftSight and give it a try.
June 22, 2010 Tags: 2D CAD, DraftSight
Category: misc., Product Review, Uncategorized 4 Comments
Northern Vermont SolidWorks User Group Welcomes SolidWorks CEO, Jeff Ray
The Next NVTSWUG meeting will be held on Thursday June 10th at NRG Systems from 4-8pm.
We have a great meeting lined up for June. Everything has fallen into place to make this meeting a one of a kind event. This meeting will start a bit earlier than our typical meetings so please make arrangements to leave work early if you can.
The meeting location:
The meeting location will be at NRG Systems in Hinesburg. Driving directions can be found here. Since 1982, NRG Systems has manufactured products to help our customers measure and understand the wind. We serve the wind energy industry exclusively, from wind farm developers and turbine manufacturers to electric utilities and research institutes, in more than 135 countries. NRG is also a SolidWorks customer and a member of NVTSWUG. We greatly appreciate the use of their facility for this meeting. NRG has been kind enough to offer tours of their “green” facility for all NVTSWUG members before the meeting from 4-5pm. If you’d like a tour please arrive to the meeting at this time.
The presentations:
We’ll have two presentations for this meeting. We will be lucky enough to be hosting SolidWorks CEO Jeff Ray for the first presentation. I expect Jeff to speak for about 45-60 minutes about the future direction of SolidWorks. I’m sure he’ll also be open for questions as he’s typically very receptive to them at these types of events.
The second presentation will cover the SolidWorks sustainability software. The full version of Sustainability is an add on product to SolidWorks but every seat of SolidWorks does include Sustainability Xpress so the presentation will be useful to all users. In a nut shell SolidWorks Sustainability helps engineers to design more environmentally friendly products by providing information on how design aspects (materials, manufacturing process, location, etc) impact the world around us.
Here’s the agenda:
4:00-5:00pm ……..Tours of the NRG facility
5:00-5:30pm …….Official meeting start, food, the latest NVTSWUG and SolidWorks news
5:30-6:30pm…….. Jeff Ray speaks
6:30-6:45pm………Break
6:45-7:45pm …….Sustainability presentation
The official meeting start time is 5pm which is 1 hour earlier than our usual meeting start time. The agenda is a bit loose and there should be time in there for some chatting and networking.
As always we’ll have food and beverages.
If you’re in the Hinnesburg, Vermont area feel free to stop in.
June 9, 2010 Category: User Groups No Comments
