Category Archives: BricsCAD Shape

Addendum – Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings

This post is an addendum to a post from June, Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings. This post provides new information about useful functionality added in V19 of BricsCAD that is useful for any CAD Manager or power user who ever has problem DWG files to deal with. Yes, even if your site is still purely AutoCAD-based.

In this post I’ll describe the (inspector) LISP function. This was added in the V18 cycle but was significantly enhanced in V19. It’s probably the most useful LISP function you’ve never heard of.

Although it’s LISP, that doesn’t mean you have to be a programmer to benefit from it. If you’re a non-programming CAD Manager or power user, you can use it to work out what’s going on within any DWG you’re having problems with. You can use it to discover information about objects in the drawing; not just conventional entities, but also blocks, tables, dictionaries and so on. It even works with custom data.

I gave a brief demonstration of (inspector) in the last BricsCAD Unplugged episode about BLADE. However, you don’t need to use BLADE; just enter (inspector) at the command prompt, select an object and you’ll be presented with a dialog like this:

These dialogs are modeless, and you can have as many displayed as you like; you’re not limited to one. This dialog displays the same data in three different ways. At the top, it’s shown in traditional LISP assoc form, and by playing with the Expand controls you can vary the way in which this is pretty-printed. The bottom left pane shows the data in DXF form, which is probably easiest to read if you’re a non-programmer. If you’re more of an ActiveX person or you prefer to see the properties described with words rather than numbers, you’ll prefer the display on the bottom right, which shows the COM properties for the object.

If you want to select another object to inspect without calling (inspector) again, just use the [ > > ] button.

The grayed-out lines indicate data that is considered read-only. It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to change the data, merely that the ways in which that data can be changed within a program is restricted. Generally, it means you can’t change the ActiveX properties directly, but there are various other means that can be employed in many cases.

The lists are somewhat interactive; double-click on an entity name and you’ll be given another inspector window for that entity. You can burrow down through the drawing database in this way, looking for the source of your mystery DWG problem. If you’re using it while programming, you can use it to work out what set of circumstances is causing your code to trip up in certain drawings.

The (inspector) function has an optional argument, and what it will accept is very flexible. If you pass an entity name to it, you will get the data for that entity displayed. The same principle applies for various ActiveX objects: pass it a layer table object and the appropriate data will be displayed.

Direct access is provided to various useful things from within BLADE using the pull-down menu Lisp+DCL > Browse DWG Database:

If you pick Browse Text Styles, you’ll see something like this:

Double-click on one of the text style items in the left pane and you will get this:

As you can see, this is very handy for tracking down issues both while programming and when diagnosing DWG problems.

Finally, I should note that there is potential for the inspector to provide even more power in future. Bricsys LISP guru Torsten Moses is investigating the possibility of allowing the inspector to modify data, not just inspect it. There’s potential danger there, but if Torsten can make that work safely then that would be another invaluable tool for any DWG-based CAD Manager.

As I stated in my original post, it’s definitely worth a CAD Manager’s while to do the quick download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD. My experience in dealing with Bricsys is that requests for extensions for evaluation purposes are usually accepted, so you probably won’t have to give up your valuable tool as soon as your 30 days are up.

An email exchange with a friend about AutoCAD

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Here’s an email exchange I just had with a friend. He’s a local person who I don’t normally discuss CAD with. He works for an architect. He has given me permission to use this discussion here.

Hi Steve,

We are looking to update from 2007 and 2010 versions in the office to more recent versions of Autodesk’s AutoCAD.

We don’t need full version but if that’s what is available ok then. Lite version is ok as we use for 2D architectural only. We use other packages when 3D work required.

We also have call to open consultants drawings which may be prepared on full versions or other packages.

Can you let me know what the last version that didn’t require the annual subscription and is available and likely cost?

Much appreciated if you could help.

Cheers

Here’s my reply:

You’re out of luck. Regardless of the release, you can now only pay for AutoCAD by annual subscription (which now means rental and used to mean pre-paid upgrades). Cost is currently AUD $2605 a year. Autodesk occasionally does an “upgrade” promotion for old releases but it’s really just a rental discount (15% at the moment) and means throwing away your perpetual license. If you stop paying, you have nothing, not even your old release. Here’s the link:

https://www.autodesk.com.au/products/autocad/subscribe

There’s currently a 20% off deal for AutoCAD LT rental at AUD $460 a year, which ends in a couple of days:

https://www.autodesk.com.au/products/autocad-lt/subscribe

If you just want to convert back to AutoCAD 2007 or 2010 DWG format and work in that, you have a few options. One is Autodesk’s DWG TrueView, which is a free very cut-down AutoCAD that will allow you to open new DWG and save in earlier releases.

https://www.autodesk.com.au/products/dwg/viewers

Another free option is BricsCAD Shape, which actually gives you more open/save options for drawings than AutoCAD itself, as well as being a 3D architectural modelling application.

https://www.bricsys.com/en-intl/shape/

There’s another free 2D application called DraftSight but that’s not keeping up to date with the DWG versions (it’s still on 2013 format):

https://www.draftsight2018.com/

If you want an AutoCAD-like perpetual license product for 2D drafting that will work directly with the current DWG format, you can’t go past BricsCAD. Works just like AutoCAD, uses the same files, up to date with current versions.

Full perpetual license is AUD $765 for the Classic version or AUD $1010 including a year’s maintenance. After that, keeping up to date at AUD $320 per year is cheaper than any option Autodesk has, even for renting LT. You can alternatively just pay your $765 once and do the buy-upgrades-whenever-you-want thing that Autodesk stopped doing years ago. It also gives you an upgrade path to full 3D and even BIM if you want to do that further down the track.

https://www.bricsys.com/en-intl/bricscad/

It’s a quick download and install which won’t harm your AutoCAD installation. You’ll probably find BricsCAD will work noticeably faster than any recent AutoCAD, which has got very bloated in recent years. This is particularly obvious if you’re running older hardware.

No, I’m not on commission!

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings

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Here’s a mega-tip with a lot of experience behind it:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

Why? There are too many reasons to fit in one blog post, so I’m going to do a mini-series. The first post is about using BricsCAD to fix up drawings that are giving your AutoCAD users problems.

One of the things that surprised me most when evaluating BricsCAD as a potential replacement for AutoCAD was that my expectations were wrong when it came to the reliability of opening DWGs. Over the years, I collected a variety of DWGs that gave various releases of AutoCAD some problems. Some of those problems occurred while performing some kind of editing or processing, while others prevented AutoCAD from opening the drawing at all. I was expecting BricsCAD to have all those problems, plus perhaps some additional incompatibilities of its own.

What happened was the opposite. I don’t think I came across a single drawing that AutoCAD could open but BricsCAD couldn’t. On the contrary, BricsCAD was much more forgiving than AutoCAD, breezing through the process of opening drawings that had problems that originated in AutoCAD. Maybe 80-90% of my “problem” drawings were problems for AutoCAD alone. In many cases an AUDIT in BricsCAD and a re-save was enough to make the problem go away in AutoCAD. In other cases I could use BricsCAD to recover the unrecoverable using the traditional methods of WBLOCK, saving as an earlier release, saving as DXF, binary search (I may do a later post on exactly what that means), and so on.

Note that you may be able to obtain similar results using other DWG-based products such as DraftSight, ZWCAD or even the free BricsCAD Shape. However, I don’t have the experience with those products to be able to confirm that. Autodesk’s DWG TrueView, being a cut-down AutoCAD, tends to have the same problems as AutoCAD.

One thing that was particularly pleasant about using BricsCAD to fix problem drawings was the speed at which it could be done, because of BricsCAD’s generally superior performance. Closing and opening AutoCAD is painfully slow these days as the bloat gets worse, so having a product that fires up quickly is very handy.

Also handy is the availability of tools within the product that make it easier to locate and fix problems. Of particular importance is the Drawing Explorer, which provides a consistent and efficient interface that provides access to over 20 different types of aspects of a drawing (e.g. layers, linetypes, text styles, etc.):

One example arose showing how useful this is, when my users were having an intermittent problem with some drawings locking up AutoCAD 2015 on open. Some trial and error made it possible to discover that the trigger for this was the existence of a text style (any text style) with a bigfont attached, where the bigfont SHX file did not exist. It was possible to fix this in an earlier or later AutoCAD release, which the users may or may not have available to them, by opening the drawing, using the STYLE command, then using that dialog box to go through each text style one at a time, looking for bigfonts.

It was much easier to quickly fire up BricsCAD, use the STYLE command which opens the Drawing Explorer in the Text Style section, and see all of the text styles laid out at once (see above). It was very efficient to quickly look for recalcitrant bigfonts and make them go away, or to see instantly that bigfonts weren’t the problem.

Similarly, the consistent, searchable and efficient interface of the BricsCAD Settings dialog makes it easy to check the values of any settings that you suspect may be triggering the problem in AutoCAD:

As a CAD Manager, it’s definitely worth your while to do the quick download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD. My experience in dealing with Bricsys is that requests for extensions for evaluation purposes are usually accepted, so you probably won’t have to give up your valuable tool as soon as your 30 days are up.

Once you’ve determined that it really is an invaluable tool to have around, the cost of entry is low enough to make it relatively easy to justify the investment. You won’t need to recover many drawings to get your money back.

BricsCAD Shape for Mac

Video – 3Dconnexion fine tuning in BricsCAD and BricsCAD Shape

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The second video in the cad nauseam YouTube channel is more typical than the first in that it’s a tips and tricks video. In this case it only applies to BricsCAD and Shape users, but future videos will provide information for AutoCAD and other DWG-based CAD applications.

BricsCAD Shape – can a free DWG product be a BIM game-changer?

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At the Bricsys 2017 Conference in Paris, one of the biggest surprises was the announcement of BricsCAD Shape. This product was demonstrated live, very impressively, in pre-release form. As I live-tweeted at the time, the demo jock was able to create a pretty decent architectural model in minutes, from scratch, very easily. That product has now been released.

What is BricsCAD Shape?

Shape is a 3D direct modeling application. At the core, it’s a simplified BricsCAD BIM. That means it’s small, fast, stable and it uses 2018 DWG as its native format. These are all good things. It’s obviously aimed at the AEC market, but there’s nothing to stop anyone using it for anything. Use it as a lightweight DWG viewer/editor if you like.

As you can see, it has a very simple, clean, cut-down interface. That dude is French Architect Jean Nouvel, by the way. He’s a block; you can erase him. He doesn’t appear in DWG files from other sources you open in Shape.

The idea is to do most of your work with the 18 buttons in this mini-ribbon/monster toolbar thing:

For less common operations, there is a set of pull-down menus. Although it’s hidden by default, you can even turn on a command line (Shift+F2) that will be very familiar to AutoCAD and BricsCAD users. Try to do without it; you will then discover how the excellent Quad Cursor interface (inherited from BricsCAD) uses AI technology to save you time and clicks.

How do I get it?

Click this link, enter your email address (no, they won’t sell it to spammers), and download away. Unlike Autodesk downloads, there are no nasty Akamai download managers to contend with, no multi-stage install processes, no massively bloated files, just a straightforward download of a 212 MB MSI installer. Time to download for me on ADSL2 was 2m 56s. The install time, including user interactions was 36s. Time for the first startup, including online registration, was 15s. That got me to the startup screen. The time for the first drawing startup was another 10s.

You can be using Shape in under 4 minutes. That is, you could be using it yourself in less time than it takes to read what I have to say about it.

How is it licensed? How much is it?

It’s a perpetual license, and it’s free. Bricsys has stated that it will always be free. Not much to complain about there.

So what’s in it for Bricsys?

The problem Bricsys faces in churning over large numbers of Autodesk’s disgruntled customer base is not the products. The products are fine. BricsCAD is notably superior to AutoCAD in a bunch of significant ways (while remaining inferior in a handful of less important ways), and costs a fraction as much.

No, the problem Bricsys faces is in persuading large numbers of people to try its products. Shape is an attempt to make that happen. It’s an ice-breaker in a way that goes beyond the usual 30-day free trial product.

There’s hardly any bar to entry; anybody with an email address can own it with zero investment. The interface has been kept very simple and there are a whole bunch of bite-size tutorial videos that demonstrate how to do things. If this product can create a buzz and get people to use a Bricsys product, half the battle is won. The models it creates are ready to be easily taken to the next stage using the full, paid product, BricsCAD BIM.

It’s not SketchUp
There are superficial similarities between Shape and the discarded-by-Google product, Trimble SketchUp.

However, there are very significant differences. SketchUp Free is a cloud-based product that works inside your browser (the paid product is currently a desktop product). Shape is a standalone application that does not require the Internet. SketchUp has its own file formats; getting those models into CAD or BIM is fraught. Shape is not just using industry-standard DWG file format, it’s a proper, efficient, accurate CAD application. Because it’s a cut-down version of what Bricsys is hoping you will use to fully develop the models later, there is no translation. The model you build in Shape opens directly in BricsCAD BIM where automatic classification of building elements can take place.

BricsCAD Shape. It’s free, it’s easy, it’s DWG, it’s CAD, it’s 3D, and it’s a pathway to BIM. It could change the game. I have no way of predicting whether that will happen. But if it does, it’ll be another kick in the guts for a dormant Autodesk that has largely given up on improving its products.