Perhaps the most fascinating command new to AutoCAD 2007 is Sweep. It takes (just about) any shape and extrudes it along a path. (The old Extrude command was fussier than its new Sweep replacement.)
Above, I swept the red spline along the black one (the path), and told Sweep to twist the path by 90 degrees, and then displayed it in Conceptual visual style with facets and isolines turned off. Another simple trick is to sweep a circle along a helix path to create coiled springs.
OK... nice command, but the ACIS kernel has been able to do this trick from the day it was included in AutoCAD -- and competitive programs have had sweeps for years.
AutoCAD isn't some bargain basement wannabe CAD program -- it's a multi-thousand dollar program. Why get excited when it gets capabilities that it should have had a decade ago?
Posted by: Evan Yares | Apr 23, 2006 at 03:55 PM
I have to agree with Evan.
We are seeing things appearing in AutoCAD, that have been available for in some cases, over ten years in competing products, and/or the underlying libraries that AutoCAD has been using for quite some time.
ACIS sweeps? That's really, really old news :-)
Posted by: Tony Tanzillo | Apr 24, 2006 at 06:15 PM
Does anybody remember Rhino 1.0 Beta (1996) Plug-in for Autocad. What were they waiting all these years? Don't you sometimes feel like the new features were withheld from being released just to be able to call them new 10 years down the road?
Posted by: Tomislav Zigo | Apr 26, 2006 at 01:08 PM
yes Rhinoceros 1 beta, but i think you mean Accumodel that was the Plug-in from McNeel that worked in autocad and could do sweeps (yes back in 96) TOMISLAV.
the foolish ways of autodesk, go figure the CEO is one of the Bush cronies, 'science' ya....
Posted by: Joel | Apr 16, 2007 at 04:07 PM
Tanck For this Post.
Posted by: Ali Taheri | Jun 10, 2007 at 01:48 PM