As a professional designer, you need a program that’s going to keep up with your needs. It has to keep track of changes you make and it has to have a usable user interface. In this article, you’ll learn about the improved features of AutoCAD.
User Interface
AutoCAD keeps making improvements to their user interface, as you can see on RedStack. The New tab has been renamed to Start tab. While the appearance looks relatively the same, it’s now visible at all times as one of the drawing file tabs over the top of the drawing area. This way you can easily return to the tab at any time with just one click.
There are also many other user interface enhancements. The Help System’s user interface finder has an animated arrow that identifies tools in the Status bar, as well as the ribbon. While it’s not actually a new feature, the Lock user interface control is available on your Status bar, making the capability for users to unlock and lock tool palettes and this helps the ribbon panels to be more easily accessible.
Documentation
Part of the greatest news about AutoCAD is that there have been improvements to the dimensioning commands. Instead of having to choose from almost a dozen different tools to add radial, linear, angular, ordinate, or baseline dimensions, now you provide a single DIM command that guesses the type of dimension you’d like to make when you move the mouse over the existing drawing.
A new tool on the ribbon allows you to control the layer where the dimensions are made, just like specifying a layer for hatch patterns. If you try to put a dimension in that overlaps another one, a menu will offer options to break up, move, or replace the existing one.
Design
AutoCAD, which can be found at RedStack, includes many three-dimensional improvements, including an updated section plane tool and many others that enhance the program’s cloud capabilities.
In addition, the software has a new rendering engine that is in place of the Mental Ray engine that was formerly included. The new engine produces greater results, and there are a lot fewer settings for the user to have to learn.
The new engine also has imaged-based lighting environments that will apply lighting effects automatically. Some of these image-based lighting environments have 360-degree background images that surround the entire model, or you can use a custom background image.
Improved Collaboration Tools
In addition, there are improved tools that allow you to easily transfer drawings from one user to the next and allow you to communicate with customers when you need to use a drawing for a quote. You can also add images from different software and this program will help you translate the information.
This program can be used for many different design purposes. From someone who needs to make a basic drawing to show customers an idea, or to someone who needs to make a very specific drawing for machining purposes, this program does it all.