Life after/beyond PowerCadd?

[fred johnson]

Hello Peter,
Although I have normally used VWA like it was PC/WT as it was when was MiniCad I do see the value in some of the BIM capabilities. I have recently started to learn VWA as it was intended to work and am impressed with what it can do if one choses to go in that direction, especially with similar tools to Sketchup with much more features . My education was slowed as for years I just concentrated on specification writing. There are endless YouTube video's to guide one through most anything.

[Keith Renton]

Hi

After 30 years I've now making the jump over to Vectorworks Architect. I'm still in the learning phase but so far have been impressed at the capabilities and similarities between VW and Pcadd and Sketchup. It's not as daunting as I had thought or feared. I'm working through the on line tutorials which are excellent and have booked 3 one to one tutorials with a trainer here in the UK. It's a real shame that Pcadd seems to be on a downward spiral even if it can be made compatible with latest OS and hardware.

Regards

Keith

[fred johnson]

Kieth,
Johnathan Pickup is excellent as a trainer and resourse (although no tool maker like Alfred) has some very good tutorial stuff on YouTube. My VW Users Group actually had live on screen workshop with him some years ago.

[Derek]

PeterKona, I didn't start this thread.

[Keith Renton]

Hi Fred

Thanks for the Johnathan Pickup name, I'll check him out. I've been methodically working my way through all the VW on-line tutorials and will also be getting one to one training in the coming weeks. I want to make sure I can make the most of all the features available and set up drawings correctly so that I can make the most of VW capabilities, work efficiently and limit the frustrations that can come when embarking with a new piece of software.

Regards

Keith

[Alfred Scott]

I don’t get it. Maybe visit the WildTools page at

http://www.seqair.com/WildTools/WildTools.html

At last count, there were something like 450 drawing tools, and in the last five years the new capabilities added are unbelievable. Screws, bolts and nuts of any type imaginable at any direction in a 3D space, PixelTools where you can erase, crop and apply a huge number of core image filters to bitmaps. Trees and shrubs in plan and elevation, and with flowers if you like. Importing shapefiles, survey dimensions, DXF from LIDAR. Cover flow in dialogs providing literally millions of choices of shapes and colors. People. Favorite lines. Shingles. Color noise in Jiggle. HeadLOK and ThreadLOK screws. Picture Frame tool with a picture slide show of my family, dogs, Bill Stanley, Susan Stanley, Mike Cleveland, Andrew Burgess, etc. Digital terrain models in TopoTools for slope analysis, section profiles and topo contours. Dogbone fillet. Centroid. Linear and area patterning. OpenClip for copy and paste with FormZ. Favorite offsets and button dock choices for most tools with a dialog. No program in the world can come close to the WildTools Pen tool, which has many variants. Multi clip and combine operations. Importing GPX and Google Earth placemarks. It’s ridiculous to think that some other program (BIM!) will provide even a small fraction of these capabilities. I’m using iMacs with Thunderbolt displays and Solid State Drives and everything happens instantly. What would these wonderful new machines possibly do for me? What do you want to draw that you can’t now? The purpose of the software is to empower you to draw.

(I talked to Susan Stanley the other day and caught her up on all my latest jokes. She has coffee every morning with Todd, who is in good shape and who knows he’s got a ton of work to do.)

I suppose 64-bit when we get there might have some benefit, but the purpose is to allow for impossibly large files and you can have 50MB drawing files now but nobody does that.

My nephew has an office in the same same office building I’m in, and they have a truck where they go around and do LIDAR scans of existing buildings, but they have a terrible problem with millions of line segments which they have to filter out and fight with when WildTools handles it effortlessly by creating a single hatch object.

My biggest problem in WildTools is coming up with new things to do. Right now I’m working on the Thicken tool to deal with circles and ellipses more elegantly as a Bezier instead of a polygon with lots of points. Matt Arnold has a stone pattern to add to the Pattern tool where we have all these brick patterns recently added complete with color noise.

Alfred Scott
Stupid in Richmond

[fred johnson]

Alfred,
Hardly sounds like software on a downward spiral.. good work Alfred. BIM may prove to be be very efficient at "assembling" but it ain't "drawing".

[Mikeconcentric]

I'm switching to QCAD for 2D! Enough is enough!

[Howard in Durham]

Alfred, the problem with 32 bit Powercadd isn’t PC or WildTools. The problem is intractable progress. The 2020 TurboTax works with Mojave, but nothing older. Next year’s TurboTax will require Catalina or newer. Eventually Safari will likely be obsolete under Mojave, along with other stuff. It’s only a matter of time, and the path of continued use of PC will require 64 bit M-1 chip compatibility, and it should happen this year. 64 bit and m-1 compatibility would, in a nutshell, simplify our lives, and provide a future for PC.

[jfindlay]

User here since the Power Draw days. I know it's been said many times here, but an update - a simple update, would go a long way. I already have one Revit station in my office and if this drags on too long, it will eventually make sense to move everyone over.