The AutoCAD 2008 new stuff!

For us Civil guys there is a lot of new features just in Vanilla AutoCAD that will help us in our daily ins and outs of drafting! I’ll just name a few here, but my first suggestion is to install C3D 2008 and when the New Features window pops us go for it!  This will show you if I remember! (I’m on my plane flying back to the Great White North!) some of the new AutoCAD features and most of the new C3D features!  Highly recommended!

If you could I would set up a lunch and learn for everyone in you cadd department and over one or two lunches I would go thru the New Features. This would be in my opinion the most efficient way of the company to train your people on the new features! Instead of each operator running this at there desk and wasting one or two hours you could instead do this as a whole and get it over in one or two lunches.

Now for AutoCAD 2008 pay attention to the new annotation scaling, the MText tabling (Real coot) and the MView layer settings (Again real cool, one of my wishes).

Which one of the above is the coolest? All three! Really, each one is going to make your day easier.  Have a look how the annotation scaling can have different text locations based on the current mview. So instead of having to create different layers for each text size/scale all you do is assign a different text location (for when the text overlaps something else after it gets bigger or smaller) for each annotation scale.  This is quit ingenious! It also works for dimensions too.  This is something else, in dimensions you can also toggle off dimensions and leaders based on the anno scale factor.  So let’s say you have a detail that is really finely detailed at say a 10 scale but you also need to drop get back and show the same part at 20 scale with less dims.  What you do is you create two different anno states, one for 10 scale and one for 20 scale and then you select the leader or dim you don’t want to see at the 20 scale right click and tell it not to be visible at the 20 scale and then it goes into a ghost state and won’t plot if the mview is 20 scale but will still show up in the 10 scale mview that is right next door in an adjacent mview on the same layout.

Now for the Mview layer settings! Another real cool one! This is building on the fact that now we can turn on and off layers vie mview, right? But now we can go about 3 steps farther, we can now set the layer states, color, linetype, lineweight etc vie the mview!  What this means is that we can have two mview side by side with the same layers on in both vports but the layer colors can now be different. So we can show the SS in a proposed (thicker lineweight) in one mview and in the next we could change this to a gray linetype to show it as a proposed existing utility.  Play with this and you will see the possibilities! Home run here for Autodesk!  Real cool!

The Mtext tables is another one we have all seen in desktop publishing programs but never in Autocad? Why? Well good question but now it is here! If you have ever used a desktop publishing program and love the idea that you can have text automatically flow to the next column then this is what it is.  For those two or three pages of notes that need an addendum added this is sweet! 

Again they are all fantastic! Can you here me jumping up and down on the airplane as I write this! Flying somewhere over Wisconsin!  Go Vikings!

I have so much to add!!!!!

Come back tomorrow for more in C3D…….Patience is a virtue!

billneu