Site seems a little fishy to me! I have been using Autocad since release 2.1 back on the old 5.25" floppys (some where at home I still have an original disk) and green screens and LDD since Softdesk 6 or 7. Autocad is pretty good at some things and miserable at others. Our current version of LDD is nice but leaves me wishing for more.

Anyone ever heard of a AE program called CDG or GDS or ??? This was the program to have back in '82 for civil engineering, but very expensive $15,000 for one seat.

Check out this site for a pretty cool "gratis" 3D modeling program.
Blender

its not fishy.

Blog that caught a minor over sight that gave away who was behind this thing...

I'm not saying who it is in cas eyou guys like the suspense... but I wont be complaining about free software from them.

70966 and registered.

Revit was onto something very good before it was bought out... now why would Autodesk do such a thing??? Scared?

I use Autocad's Architectural Desktop 3.3 because I have to and not because I want to. I hate the smart 3d objects... they suck! I refuse to use their WALL tool. Autocad does get my vote for being the best 2d program out there... but don't force it into the 3d world that it does not belong in!

For 3d I prefer to use FormZ. I was part of the beta testing for a program developed at the University of Utah Architecture department called Reals. (www.reals3d.com) The 3d world is great!!!

Another route that my office is exploring is 3d Studio VIZ with the V-Ray plug in. Amazing stuff.

I hope something cool comes of this... so is Google behind it? Man they are taking over the world!

its not google.

it is a known CAD company. although X-CAD could be a completely new product it may simply be version X.X(not giving away anything here) of their current product.

BTW the count is at 72308

If everyone who signed up got 1 more person to sign up then we would have our free software.... AutoCAD Inventor all the way.

77780

we are doing good to make 100,000

Wheeeeeeee!!!!!

90930 people have signed up, we need 9070 more people in 13 days, which is 700 people per day. We are so going to get our software. Lets do our part and get atleast 1 more person to sign up.

I too am an AutoCAD guy...I use LDD 2004 right now at the Surveying/Engineering firm I work at (one of the biggest in the East, and we're hiring!!). Been using AutoCAD since release 10 and it is by far the best drafting program out there for survey/civil work. So much better than that other crap program Microstation...just an awful frustrating program...

But yeah...I love how easy it is to customize AutoCAD with your own menus and layouts. I some visual basic commands and another guy here writes a ton of lisp programs for it as well.

It has it's share of problems but it is still the best out there...

And to you architectural guys out there...STOP TAKING OUR DRAWINGS OUT OF THE RIGHT DATUMS (CORRDINATE SYSTEM)!!!! For the love of god...when we send a drawing in the right UCS and all the coordinates right, why do you feel the need to take it and rotate it all over the place then when you send it back to us for the stakeout its all F'ed up...

lol Been there before..... But, the architects aren't the worst. I remember some of the first surveying work I was involved in dealt with a coal company that had developed its own datum that was "close" (their words) to NAD-27. Funny thing was, they had used it for so long (30+ years) nobody knew exactly what the offset was..... Took several days of GPS and conventional work tying everything together onto State Plane to figure it out. Turns out the offset was about 285'. Really raises the pucker factor when you are working underground....

Architects don't know what coordinates are. No, really. They don't. I asked one, one time, what coordinate system his file was in, because it wasn't coming anywhere close to where it should be (imagine you're doing a site design in Tennessee, and the building is coming in at, oh, I don't know, somewhere around New Guinea...). Well, when I asked, the line sounded like it went dead. So I asked, again... After hearing him clear his throat, he asked me what did I mean. I told him the survey file was appeared to be in state plane coordinates, but the building file I got from him wasn't anywhere close.... Turns out, they took a corner of the existing structure (which was demo'd by the time the proposed plans were being done), and made that 0,0,0, and arbitrarily started drawing w/ North facing up...

Dear god, make the bad men (architects) stop... I have but one wish... That architects learn what coordinates are. Then, they might actually have their CAD guys learn that you actually can rotate a view AND the UCS, and NOT just the building, so you can still draw w/ ortho, if you so choose... Drives me freaking insane. How do you do a site plan, down to the hundreth of an inch accuracy, if the freaking architect won't put the building where it's supposed to be???

Here's another architectual complaint...make the building lines match the dimentions...don't just override the dim text...and hoabout making sure the dimentions work to close the building line...that would be nice...

wow what a generalization!...yeah all us architects are 'bad men'...yeah civil guys they know what there doing, give 'em floor plans with vertical elevations and they still can't grade a f#$^** site.....i'm sick of doing all the gradng for projects 'cus these dipshits don't know what contours/grades are relative to a building!!!.....that's my rant...time to rotate my ucs back to my customized world system

lol...like we didn't see that coming...lol...

I'm not a civil guy...I just out the stakes in the ground where the Architect/Civil people tell me to...

tom

why are you leaving it up to the architect to locate the building on your drawing? Does not seem prudent on your end, you were hired to do the civil/site work, the only file you should be getting from the architect is the footprint and you should be locating it on your own drawing.....i'm always amused by the bashing we architects take but nobody ever wants to actually look at, or god forbid comprehend our drawings....architects are bad blah blah blah they don't know what there doing blah blah blah.....i gotta say for being a 'bad man' and not knowing what i'm doing, i'm doing alright for myself.....bash on!!!

may as well bash the contractors also:

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost.

He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further
and shouts: "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet
him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am"

The man below says: "Yes, you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet
above this field at 40.55 deg. North latitude and 120.28 deg. West
longitude"

"You must be an Architect," says the balloonist. "I am" replies the man."How
did you know?" "Well" says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is
technically correct, but it's of absolutely no use to me and I still don't
know where I am."

The man below says, "You must be a contractor.""Well yes" replies the
balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well", says the man, "You don't know where you are, or where you're going
and you've made a promise that you can't keep but now you expect me to solve
your problem; and you're in the same position as you were before we met, but
now it's my fault.

We need the Slab Drawings to do large foundation stakeouts. The Dims on the plans rarely match the actual line lengths in the CAD file so we don't use the footprint on the site layout because the civil guys usually just use the foot print supplied from the architect which as I said before often has discrepancies between the dims and the actual line length in the CAD file.

So when I build the footprint from the dims I have to make sure that the building closes withing about 0.05' which it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't (then I call the architect and make them fix it before I stake it). Then I take it and overlay it on the footprint supplied in the site plan and it rarely matches up...sometimes up to 0.5' off. So then it's another process to make sure that the building we are staking is in the right place...

Not all architects are bad...just seems like the last 3 or 4 that I have delt with have been a PIA who supply me very inaccurate drawings...

Tom

i agree that is F#^$^ up....that should never happen....any dims that are over-ridden should only be done as a last resort and only on interiors of buildings, no dims should be over-ridden that relate to the actual exterior perimeter of a building

my current idiocy:

Funny stuff. I forwarded that around my office.
Thanks for the laugh, we need it over here. Work is insane..

Totally unacceptable in my office.. If anyone explodes dimensions or edits them and gets caught they are screwed... Obviously we arent going to dimension to the nearest fraction of an inch but within an inch is normally acceptable as long as its inside the property lines or matches existing, etc..

We use MEP and Civil consultants even though we are capable of doing everything in house. It just makes sense for us to hire out for it. We have spent a lot of time correcting their work as well, its just part of the industry..

As both a civil engineer and architect guy (dual degrees), I can verify that civil engineer's are by far the laziest of the two. That can easily be shown by what the civil guys are arguing about in this thread.

92376

we are SO there

Land Development Desktop will do that for you too.

Yeah that was standard in 2002 I think. Much improved in more recent versions though.

I just wish they would add support for curved breaklines in the Terrain Modeler...and the curved Figure lines don't work worth shit because the field data is never perfect...

Tom

92994
i signed up earlier and it was just over 92k. no conformation email yet tho.

man, all this talk about arch. stuff makes me want to stick to my Mechanical and Electrical Drafting work even more. i thought about doing arch. or civil, but i think ya'll have changed my mind. seems like to much work. i'll stick to my complicated Aircraft wiring diagrams and mechanical builds compared to that stuff.