Friday, March 12, 2010

Drawing

Yesterday participated as observer at an AutoCad technical drawing course. I knew how to use AutoCad tools but wanted to see the drawing techniques. It was very interesting to notice the differences and similarities between drawing styles of the engineers. The main idea was they were all drawing some helper lines and establishing base points for their drawings.

Identified the most important functionality that boosts productivity, most of these are already scheduled in next iterations:
- the Ortho and Polar tools that are blocking the angles at which the users can draw seem the most important,
- possibility to offset a line at a specified distance - we could implement this by enabling our Translate tool to be called also from command line. Functionality that will be used to to make the helper lines,
- layers and functionality attached to them are very useful and practical for more complicated projects,
- tool to draw dimensions between two points - possible to use also as a measurement tool,
- add infinite lines,
- the trim and extend tools seem very useful. Will study how these apply in the 3D modeling world,
- mirror, move, copy relative to a base point - mainly we have this functionality - we just need some refinements.

1 comment:

architect Adrian Crisan said...

Definitely Layers and Group of Layers is very important.
That way the drawings can be organized easily.
A Layer can be moved in a Group of Layers. A Layer can be deleted, make active (will be the one you work on it, or if you want you can have more than one layer active - meaning the objects created will be placed in all these layers simultaneously).
A layer can be locked/unlocked.
Snapable/not. Visible/not. Printable/not.
Also, selection filters inside of a drawing is a must. I want to select objects based on: which layer they reside in, properties, name, etc.
Another very good idea is to have a "overwrite all the properties with". That does mean, a "filter" custom made can be applied to all the objects in that layer. For example, printing a drawing for architecture/engineering: all the objects in layer "elevation" will have a thickness of .25 mm, color black, etc. The user can create this "filter" and then apply to layers. The filter can be on/off.
It speeds up the process of drawing production a lot.