What a Mesh

Splines in AutoCAD 2011 part 1

With so much to cover about AutoCAD 2011, it’s hard to decide where to start. But since surface modeling is probably the biggest news in terms of new object types, commands and workflows, it looks like a smart place to begin the AutoCAD 2011 posts.

Before diving into the surfaces, let’s talk about an AutoCAD citizen that has been around for a while, and that certainly needed some enhancements. I’m talking about the splines.

So why work on splines? First of all, in order to have healthy surfaces, we need to be able to make better splines than what we had available. Secondly, since we added multi functional grips for polylines, it seemed to be the right time to make the editing consistent.

All this release, as last release, has made improvements in direct manipulation. You may have seen that we have tried to eliminate as many dialog boxes as possible (have you checked hatch already?). Not being disrupted by a dialog box, and being able to always focus on the object, will really help you improve productivity. In other words, you will finish your work faster.

Back to splines. If you move into the 3D Modeling workspace (you can do that from the Quick Access Toolbar or from the gear icon at the right of the status bar), you will notice there’s a new tab called Surface. This tab contains a panel called curves, and Splines have the lead role here. If you need to work on splines for 2D drafting, you may consider either remembering the options, or directly customizing your UI in order to have these icons on your Draw tab in the 2D workspace.

 

So what’s new? Well… where can I start? Now we have three methods for creating splines. We just had one in the past, which was the SPLINE command. It created a spline through Fit Points. That option is now called Spline Knot, and you can find it in the drop down under Spline CV. The second method we’ll cover is Spline CV. This enables you to create a spline through Control Vertices. If you have used splines in other packages, you will know what I mean. If not, I’m going to cover the fundamentals in a following post. The third method is Spline Freehand. This is the good and old SKETCH command, which has been enhanced. If you have a tablet, you’ll love the new Spline Freehand.

In the next post I’ll cover Spline Freehand extensively.

For now, just try something (assuming you already have 2011). Start SPLINE command, and do whatever you did in the past in order to draw a spline. Now hit Enter. Guess what? No more three annoying clicks in order to define tangencies! Yay!

See you later. My plane is landing in LA, and I have a long day ahead speaking about AutoCAD.

AutoCAD 2011 hits the surface!

At last! Now I can start showing all the stuff we've been developing for the whole year.

AutoCAD 2011 is out! 

Since you're reading What a Mesh!, I assume you have a strong interest in design and modeling.

So let's focus on those features. I will be posting videos, tutorials, white papers and tips & tricks on the following months.

Ever needed to model surfaces in AutoCAD? We did have the ability to extrude, loft and sweep open profiles and get them, but now we have a full feature around Surface Modeling. But not just a NURBS modeler.

We are introducing Explicit Surfaces, which means that the surfaces will have the properties according to the method of creation at all time.

What about moving a curve that was used for surface creation? Well... let me introduce you to the concept of Associative Surfaces! Surfaces keep associativity with the curves and surface edges used to create them, even after a trimming operation. Nice!

So you want more? More control perhaps? We can use parameters on the surfaces, and drive them through the Parameters Manager introduced in 2010!

Not everything is about surfaces. We also enhanced solids and meshes.

If you liked the concept of Direct Manipulation introduced with Mesh modeling, I challenge you to find one task dialog. Not one for creation and editing of surfaces (just one for rebuilding NURBS). This means, you work faster. All can be done in canvas.

What else? Better splines. Much better splines, really. Stay tuned.

But that's not all. We added better interaction for complex models. Selection Cycling and Object Culling will help you select the right entities, and not display undesired grips.

Have you heard about point clouds? Do you imagine 2 billion points (yes, 2,000,000,000) being attached into AutoCAD without performance loss? Not science fiction. You got it.

Now you can also have a much better representation of materials in the viewport and rendering. And all the materials are shared with Revit, Max and Inventor. 

Talking about interoperability. You may want to understand how to operate with Inventor, Revit and Max. We'll also cover these aspects.

So stay tuned for the next posts.

Until then, here is an interactive overview of AutoCAD 2011.

Interactive Overview of AutoCAD 2011

Hotfix for Autodesk Impression 3 and Windows 7

If you are using this amazing tool for creating much more compelling presentations of your projects, and you have already switched to Windows 7, you will be interested in this hotfix, which will allow you to run Impression in your OS.

You can download the hotfix from here.

If you have never seen Impression in action, please check it out at Autodesk's site. You need to be under Subscription in order to use it.

I'll make some posts about it in the near future.

Audience participation part 1 - MyUI

Hi everybody,

this post is basically a request for help on some research I'm doing. I need to understand how you are using AutoCAD's UI, and this is what I need:

I'd appreciate if anyone who reads this can send me a screen capture of their AutoCAD in production. I want to understand how you use the different UI components (Ribbon, no Ribbon, tool palettes, toolbars, command line, screen menu, etc). If you have more than a workspace, please send me one screen capture per workspace.

If you hopefully decide to help me, please send me the screen captures in an email with MyUI in the Subject. This is very important for me, since I will filter the answers into a folder.

Send the emails to [email protected]

Thanks for all your help!