I do 3D but "lightweight" 3D ;-) I do construction drawings for the highways industry - most of it is 2D but sometimes, 3D is involved (sometimes, the topographical survey is in 3D for example, or a client wants to visualise what the street furniture will look like or things like that or you need to create 3D drawings for public exhibitions etc). AutoCAD is the industry standard for highways, at least in local authorities, hence me using it (I used to work as a highways engineer for local authorities in London and I'm now doing a bit of freelance work for them now). We use a whole range of add-ons and other software to do calculations as necessary but in the end, everything is put together in AutoCAD.
If you do production design for example, AutoCAD isn't so good, I entirely agree, you're better off with Microstation for example. To be honest, I'm not even sure how AutoCAD compares to other packages for highways, I'm only using it because I had to in my job and after 8 years of using it every day, I'm far too lazy to learn how to use another package just for the sake of a little spare income (I'm getting out of CAD and into programming so, long term, I plan on giving up CAD drafting altogether). Also people hire me because they know I'm proficient with AutoCAD so my rates are competitive because I am quite fast at drafting with AutoCAD, my rates rely on my speed basically. On 29 September 2010 14:51, Hugh Frater <hugh.fra...@gmail.com> wrote: > Ah so you need 3d... Ok... I generally assume that people doing 3d > don't use Autocad as I know of a lot of people who just don't like the > way it works and use more heavyweight stuff like > ProE/Catia/Solidworks/Inventor etc etc... > > It's a damn shame that ProE isn't available on Linux anymore, I > believe there were a lot of people who wrote to them to complain when > they dropped support... > > We need more 3D packages, HeeksCad is nice, but sometimes it would be > nice to have some consistency with windows folk, I'm sure Mac users > feel the same. > > -- Next meeting: Bournemouth? TBD, Wednesday 2010-10-06 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://bit.ly/4sACa
