| September 2000 DBUG
at Sargert Design Associates www.sargertdesign.com On Sept. 22 we made the trek to Springfield Mass. to see the first Sargert Design Associates meeting where it did not rain. It is always a delight to see the office of David Sargert, ASID, who does intricately detailed interior design and has finished photographs next to his great DataCAD models rendered in LightScape, and it is hard to tell which is real and which virtual. A large Boston contingent had commandeered a huge van to get there, and when asked if all the 40-something guys had a sing-along, they said no but they were all reading Harry Potter. Revit2 The really sharp guys from Revit Technology gave an extensive presentation on their competitor software to DataCADPlus - which they refuse to sell - you can only rent it. While it has all the automatic 3D stuff like ArchiCAD, ArchitecturalDesktop, and DataCAD Plus, what makes it really stand out is that it is absurdly easy to use and has virtually no need for training. They smartly oriented their presentation towards this, with the idea that DataCAD offices may want to merely Supplement with some Revit licenses in months where they need the schematic and design development abilities the software has. They also acknowledged that, as new software it is far from complete, and that every office using it so far, also has a strong 2D production CADD (such as AutoCAD or DataCAD) to do the details and condocs still beyond Revit. DataCAD 9 Mike Smith then took us on a whirlwind tour with a very quick look at ALL of the new features in DataCAD 9 (the list he used is on the right here, with the really big things highlighted in bold). The decade long awaited unlimited undo feature was slid over by this particularly jaded and experienced kaamaaina group, but they applauded when he pasted whole formatted MS Excel tables into a schedule sheet, and oohd when he had four or five drawing open simultaneously, and agreed that the DCAD9 upgrade is an immediate buy when he showed the batch plotting and plot preview. In the long run, though, what may have the biggest impact on the DataCAD world is the free Adobe Acrobat PDF file generator, and the Hyperlinks to any of the 3D GoToViews (as I mention in the 10/1 AEC Tech article you can read online.) |
Hilti - Laser Measuring Devices Symbols can be snapped to per ObjSnap settings |