Who still uses plain old Autocad?

[Anonymous]

we do, i've been trying to get us upgraded to Revit or even Architecture for the past 4 years with no luck...company had a very bad experience with a failed up grade to ADT years ago...

so I'm just wondering. How many still use straight old autocad?

Paul C

[Anonymous]

Only for my model airplanes.

Professionally, I've never used it w/out a 3rd party add in (DCA / SDSK), now C3d.

[JamesMaeding]

I think lots of people do, because its a platform for lisps and other progs.

In fact, I have advised several people in Civil Engineering to do so, as they do not want Civil 3D, and Mapwas only needed for importing dgn's, but that got added to normal acad.

I believe normal acad users will switch toBricscad in the next few years, dut to cost.  The domination of Autodesk is crumbling because they have broken the relationship with so many cad managers on many levels.

I have to say though, that Map is pretty nice if you have to deal with GIS data, and do not have time to learn other tools.  Its worth the $1500 if you will deal with GIS data.

Manifold or ESRI tools are still the norm though, and manifold is like $500 for full package with all whistles.

[pendean]

The best way to cross-grade to something other than plain AutoCAD (Architecture, Civil3D, MAP, REVIT etc.) is with a lot of training: while 'built on AUtoCAD' these are truly different programs for their intended disciplines and many users never quite invest in what is needed to move a user from drawing lines to using objects.

You will find that many trained users will never drop their vertical to go with plain AutoCAD, and many untrained AutoCAD users, and many more that have no discipline-speicifc variant to move into, are just as happy with Plain AutoCAD.

So the answer to your question is: who are you asking? because that is the answer you will get.

[Anonymous]

Dean my question was just general inquiry in nature.. with the hope of showing yet even more proof, that you can be more productive with something that has a little more horsepower.. there are better ways othere than drawing lines, ( althought that does get the job done) there are are lot of good products out there....and its a shame to be stuck in the "if it aint broke, don't fix it" situation...yet again....

Paul C

[JamesMaeding]

But don't be fooled by Autodesk marketing or anyones for that matter, about add-ons being suitable for a task.

What software people are doing is tying all kinds of things togther, so that you stop drawing lines and arcs and do objects that display themselves as needed.

It is a huge jump to do that, and not worth it until the objects are really well developed, and easily sharable.  Demos are highly unreliable for testing BIM level tools, as one small missing detail in how something displays will mean people revert to hand drawing things, thus destroying the integrity of the model.

Its true that modeling takes a fair amount of learning and testing, but the objects must represent what you want to design, not something just close.

[pendean]

Proof to those that cannot see the light is pointless, a losing battle: drawing lines remains acceptable since the delivery form (paper) is still how a builder works and how governing authorities permit projects.

Verticals come into play internally within a company, and when collaborating with others already using verticals fully, especially if you repeat or expand on current projects or customers with reusable content. If the bulk of your projects are small/fast/furious/low cost and one-offs, they are not for you: drawing a line to represent a cabinet or wall or door requires no thinking on part of a low-cost drafter on a lower cost AutoCAD variant.

It appears they previously moved to ADT with no training or experienced staff to lead the way, and you seem to repeating the process again: if you truly want them to consider or commit to ACA or REVIT (or both), it may be cheaper to hire staff experienced in those programs to lead the way on a few key projects (or one key project). Bean counters and upper management are convinced with actions and savings they can see, not studies or posts on blogs they consider of no "real" value to them.

Nice topic BTW. Enjoy.

[Anonymous]

I'm all about Prior Planning and proper training...looking back over my career, it seems I have a knack for transitioning companies to new software.. I admit it has been to an Autodesk product from some other software....I've done this before.

and you are correct, the original atttempt at ADT was doomed to start before it even began...there was not method or outline of anykind, it was hey lets try this.......not good.....so here we sit....thanks for your input all.!

[dgorsman]

We use it for quite a bit, albeit with a number of third-party add-ons for the modeling side.  I can't see us going to a pure vertical since their very narrow focus on doing one thing very well doesn't allow us the flexibility we need to meet client requirements.  Its also necessary for the thousands (probably tens of thousands) of legacy drawings.  Clients are, for the most part, unwilling to pay us to completely model everything in a drawing just to update one little corner of a 2D drawing from 20 years ago.

[Anonymous]

far more organisations use plain CAD software (be it AutoCAD, Rhino, Microstation, etc etc) than BIM (be it Revit, ArchiCAD, Vectorworks, Digital Projects etc etc). More and more organisations are moving towards a part or full BIM adoption but this will be a long drawn out process which will continuely evolve.

if your organisation has the budget, time for training and is going to benefit from using BIM do it in a planned and gradual manner. there is no rush and you do not want to get bitten a second time like you and maby others did with ADT which IMHO was a very poorly developed and implemented piece of software.

[Anonymous]

Depends on what you mean by "plain" AutoCAD.  We didn't buy a vertical because we couldn't find one that provided the level of data control we wanted, so we wrote our own.  It is AutoCAD without a vertical, but it's far from plain.

[JamesMaeding]

exactly, almost no one lives without lisps or something added.

The danger for Autodesk is when those add-ons work for intellicad products.

The way to guard against this is write better add-ons themselves that only work on acad.

But they are not good at writing engineering software it seems.

They get the sharing and production issues wrong, that motivate us to make models in the first place.

[JDMather]

AutoCAD is pretty much dead in the MCAD world.
Mechanical has all moved to Inventor or SolidWorks, the rest are dead wood or were already using Pro/E, Catia or ......

[art_turner]

here in the midwest, in steel fabrication, i get drawings produced from revit, and turn them into real steel with autocad.  i get drawings produced with inventor and solidworks, and same thing. just about all the larger companies with degreed engineers who are designing are sending in bid drawings not done in autocad, but we are producing shop drawings in autocad.

i dont think its going away. i have dabbled in inventor and solidworks for years, and just plain lines, text and dimensions is going to be the ultimate goal for a long time. and sometimes the quickest way to get there is lines, text and dimensions.

one of the big things in my opinion, why there is such a marketing push to move on and declare 2d dead, is because they dont want to make it too good. from day one, autocad has needed its own file manager. i need an index of every drawing on the network, every drawing i did for the last 10 years, and every drawing the other guys do.

then the other thing it needs, an abstract parts scheme. we have a crappy database of parts shippable, billable, costable, all that, and the link to actual drawings is vague.

and then the other thing it needs, a builtin drawing viewer so you can make a real block manager. that was a hue and cry 20 years ago, and they never delivered on that.

i think they think all those things are outside the scope of autocad, or would interfere with veritical sales, but its the things where we invariable invent our own solution.

[Anonymous]

I still encounter plain old AutoCAD in the production housing industry quite often. When the CAD conversion happened in the mid to late 90s for these builders they all came up with their own solutions for handling the various options, elevations and customizations that their standard plans have to do.

Those solutions range from "Just copy the last job that was done similarly and strip out the contract-specific items"  to the few I've helped develop that involve a complex series of X-refs to create a lot-specific.  These all work well for 2d cad but don't translate into most of the verticals very well.  At best you're using Walls/ Doors/ Windows in Architecture to alleviate some of the tedium and errors invovling linework and manual door/ window tagging.

I don't forsee most builders moving towards any of the 3d solutions like Revit or fully embracing ACA any time soon.  They all have been developed with a "one and done" mindset.  None of them have support for keeping the same drawings around, reusing them over and over for 10 years or more in different configurations.  Even using a simple program like ACA it's easier to draw 2d elevations than attempt to model all the changes that come from adding brick, a bay window and a dormer to a simple box of a house model.

The company that I've worked with that was most involved in a vertical was Centex, but I have no idea what happened to that now that they've been absorbed by Pulte.  Even there, however, you were using a highly customized version of the software, one that -at the time- we were told had almost $1mil in additional development and customization behind it.  No small 2-300 home per year builder is going to do that.

[Anonymous]

Art, just a couple of things here:

1.) There are much better products available such as Tekla and SDS for structural steel production that provide a much greater bang for the buck than anything Autodesk can currently offer. Even for the individual producing steel design/drawings for fabrication, these tools more than pay for themselves in short order.

2.) Typical "text and dimension" drawings are going to go away a lot sooner than anyone expects, especially for steel and pipe fabrication. Newer applications (not produced by Autodesk) create electronic exchange files that can and do communicate directly with the machines now found in modern pipe and steel fabrication facilities.  Typical design type drawings will (already has in some places) give way to drawings that give the bear minimum annotation to control installation/erection and provide legal coverage.  Even those type of drawings will eventually give way (already started) to construction tools like ASD and ConstructSim.

3.)  2D has been dead forever.  2D drawings were for many decades the only way we had to communicate a 3D design to fabrication and construction, but the design and the end product have ALWAYS been 3D.  The only issue that remains is convincing the "don't wanna change" crowd that changing is easier faster and more profitable.

4.) What you need is a document management.  If your drawing files are in such disarray, no doubt so are your contracts, specifications, communications and every other dataset required for a project.  And yes, that is outside the scope of Autodesk.  not because they interfere with vertical sales, but because they interfere with current applications support and development. They need to pay attention to the tools they have on deck, and stop running around attempting to fill every niche in the applications market.

[dgorsman]

2D is not dead, *especially* in the piping industry.  The sheer volume of legacy drawings coupled with a industry cycle away from mega-projects towards debottlenecking and other minor upgrades means it is both cheaper and faster to make updates to an existing 2D drawing than remodel the affected area with new modelling software (the format of which might be unusable after only a couple of years).  Thats to say nothing of isometrics, PFDs, P&IDs, control system schematics, and the host of other 2D only drawings.

And, seeing that you can't (or at least, shouldn't) have more than one model of an area, its a lot easier to piece out that work with a handful of independant 2D drawings than if they were all dependant on a single model.  What, break down the models even further?  Yes its possible but at some point the effort exceeds the benefits.

Finally, there are archiving concerns.  If you only store the model and not the drawings, recovering the project drawings at a later date for legal or updates will cause issues due to version conflicts and making sure matching settings are used for the extraction process.  A recent discussion I had regarding process conditions on isometrics is relevant here.  If the process conditions change but the piping stays the same, do you want to update the attributes in the finished drawing; or find the model (oops, we aren't running that version anymore, we need to upgrade the model), get the original ISOGEN settings (oh, the previous CAD manager didn't store those...), run ISOGEN to generate the isometric (wait, it doesn't like something about the converted components), and make the manual fixes to match the previous drawing?

[art_turner]

in 1990,  if memory serves me, somebody from autodesk was quoted in cadence magazine, " we are going to move all our users to 3D". This train has been coming so long you will excuse me if i have a hard time believing 2D is going away a lot sooner than anyone thinks. make it act like an iron shop, where you can slice stuff up and put on 3d glasses and see what the heck you are doing, and i will believe it. the current product is hard to use.

[Anonymous]

   The drawing is 2D because it is a sheet of paper, but it is an attempt to represent a 3D construction, it always has been. 2D is an intellectual fabrication, created to communicate a 3D design, always has been. 2D has always been dead it has never been alive.

   We live with 2D drawings now simply because shortsighted people cannot get past handling the 2D paper drawings.  Some folks are still mired in the 2D "drafting" world, laboriously slogging in plan elements and annotating, then laboriously slogging in elevation elements and annotating them. Geez, what drudgery.  Others, nearly as shortsighted, use the 3D model only to cut out 2D pictures for 2D drawings then laboriously slog in annotations.  Still others even less shortsighted, annotate the actual model, but still produce the wholly unintelligent piles of paper.  A very few (and not using Autodesk products), understanding that drawings are merely a report from the model used to communicate the 3D design, drop very few "report" drawings from  the model, and those are scantily annotated, preferring to communicate the design using the model database and not a media that was developed in the dark ages. Managing and transmitting data, not paper.

   No need to break up the engineering model at all, use model display sets.  Attributes are defined for each component during modeling that contain everything anyone may ever need to know about the component; pipe spec., diameter, process, paint, insulation, treating, testing, etc.  Then using those attributes display sets are created to display any feature desired, from Line Number to process to individual components.  Add schedule data to that and tools such as ConstructSim or ASD can track and manage the fabrication, transportation, storage and erection of the components.  This is not the future, this is going on now.

   You brought up IsoGen.  IsoGen is only necessary to create the 2D "report" of the 3D model so someone can handle a sheet of paper.  It is entirely possible (and is in fact being done) to go from a checked 3D model straight  to CNC coding to control fabrication (pipe cutting and end prep) without creating the "report" drawing from ISOGEN. Then an assembly "report" drawing is created by the shop from SPOOLGEN and posted to the monitor over the assembly bay as is a 3d model of the individual spool.  The only paper generated is the "shopping list" used to check the components collected by the warehouse from the electronic "PO". 

   You only had to go through the gyrations you mentioned because you were mentally locked into getting the 2D "report" drawing of the pipe isometric.  Had the previous modeler not also be so locked in, he might have had the foresight to archive the IDF files of the isos (instead of the unintelligent paper drawings).  Your solution then would have been considerably easier; retrieve the proper IDF by line number or process, import that data into SP3D or SmartSketch or SpoolGen, model the changes, re-drop the IDF and send it to the shop.  If you never go to paper, you never need paper settings.

  But you may be right, as long as shortsighted people maintain their addiction to paper, 2D “report” drawings will be around.  With any luck they will retire soon.

[Anonymous]

We moved in 1992. Others didn't because they had on their "don't wanna change" glasses.

3D viewers like Navisworks, make looking at AutoCAD models a breeze.  But other applications like Tekla have built-in 3D viewing capabilities that make modeling like playing with Legos. Google Tekal structures then select "images".