Press releases are by necessity brief, unable to capture the full extent of new products. I get that. Which is why I wanted to run past you some of items that might not be immediately visible in AutoCAD 2012:
- 8GB RAM recommended for 3D design work. I am using a quad-core 3.1GHz desktop with 4GB and 8GB ReadyBoost, yet found that things ground to a crawl when invoking Fusion. I've ordered another 4GB module; fortunately, the price has recently fallen in half ($50-$60).
- Fusion is thrown in for free. The EditInFusion command exports 3D solids and surfaces to Fusion. Here are the gotchas: 3D meshes and other 3D entities not supported. While Fusion is active, AutoCAD is inactive. Fusion has a utterly different UI from AutoCAD, and so it'll be interesting to see how much use it gets.
- 3D CAD translation from competitors also thrown in for free. Open models from Pro/E, SolidWorks, and others. Gotchas: no import from Inventor. No previews in the Open dialog box, so you aren't 100% sure which file you're opening. Models are placed as blocks, which first need to be exploded before they can be opened in Fusion.
- Side screen menu is gone. When Bill Fane heard of this, he wailed, "NOOOOOOO! SAY IT ISN'T SO!"
- Aerial view window is gone. No more DsViewer command, no more easily viewing the drawing on a second monitor.
- Trace command is gone, as is Blipmode.
Noooo!? BLIPMODE also ?! This is my youth that goes!
Posted by: Patrick EMIN | Mar 22, 2011 at 09:11 AM
The last three are not gone, just hidden:
http://www.blog.cadnauseam.com/2011/03/24/autocad-2012-missing-a-few-things/
Posted by: Steve Johnson | Mar 24, 2011 at 09:59 PM
Hello Ralph,
Here's a question or two, posed in a reflective frame of mind: -
"How does adding yet more bloat to a CAD tool help anything?".
Does a hardware requirement of 3GHz processor and 8GB RAM- merely to "grind to a crawl" equate to yet more dumb micro-data shuffling? I'm guessing it does.
I'll hedge a bet that there are even more lines of code with a commensurate increase in the probability of more bugs to be discovered?
Where are we going with all this?
My MDT R6 used to run ok with 0.5GHz processor and 0.5GB RAM. It now goes really well on my latest hardware, 3GHz HP XW8400 with 4GB RAM (cost = 500GBP).
Just idle wanderings.
Kind regards,
Jonathan
Posted by: Jonathan Yeandle | Mar 25, 2011 at 02:37 AM
Good job, Steve, in noticing that those commands are disabled with the Undefine command. First time Autodesk has done this.
Posted by: Ralph Grabowski | Mar 25, 2011 at 07:44 AM