I used Fusion… for 3 or 4 years… Hundreds of parts designed, tool libraries filled out. Hook fully set. Then WHAM! - (Autodesk) pulled my license, locked up all my parts. No warning! Want to keep using it, buy a full license! (And no, I had not violated any of their terms of use) No appeal! We’ve got you over a barrel and we know it, pay up! So I bought a license… and discovered that half of the features I had been actively using were locked away behind a paywall (particularly the good toolpaths like Steep and Shallow) that was going to cost me thousands to unlock. There are no words to describe my rage. source: https://tinyurl.com/y47d6pdf
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Aren’t the machining extensions something like $100 a month to unlock? Now that Autodesk and Module Works have teamed up, isn’t that $100 a month getting the best 5-axis paths available? So for something like $2500 per year you are getting the equivalent of PowerMill Ultimate ($13,500/year) or WorkNC ($35,000 up front and $7000/year to continue). Doesn’t seem that outrageous to me.
Holy Smokes! You did? I’m with Altamiro A J, I need to know. I’ve been kicking around Blender and, by comparison to Rhino, it is awkward. But I want to use them both, and I’ve gotten comfortable with my Rhino moves.
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Of course I didn’t wait; there’s more on this forum, and etc.
But thatks for tipping me off!
Nobody has heard of this, it seems? Perhaps it’s not “good” according to this thread?
Another one:
Looks competent enough (and supposedly has its own geometric kernel)?
Altair Engineering website is buggy. Altair Inspire forum is moribund: Inspire - Altair Community
ZWSOFT forum is ‘Temporarily Out of Service’: Message - CAD/CAM discussion forum - zwsoft.com
ZWSOFT Headquarters: Room 01-08, 32/F, No.15, Zhujiang West Road, Tianhe District, Guangzhou 510623, China.
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ZWCAD looks like a decent AutoCAD alternative. Just the marketing made me cringe… I wish they’d just cut to the point or actually just show us what the software does. Their forum has been down since… well since I first learnt about them (I’ve extensively studied AutoCAD alternatives). The CAD itself seems like a decent product. But when these companies that specialize in software have websites that are literally broken… it hurts my confidence just a bit.
Want a great marketing idea? If the software actually works, pay someone to build/model something with your program in a reasonable amount of time and stream/post it to YouTube. No techno music and fancy video editing needed. Can’t? Because nobody actually knows how to use the software? Or it crashes every 8 minutes? To me that seems like the only reason for the music and the fancy video effects and transitions.
I’ve had some success using GstarCAD (another AutoCAD clone based out of China). The new version has a lot of improvements including a LISP debugger… so I’m absolutely going to try it at some point. I used the 2020 version. It was really good but had a few flaws that forced me back to AutoCAD. Some have been fixed in the newest version others I’m not sure. It does crash quite often but not so much that it’s not useable on a daily basis. And… it has basically the same Dynamic Block functionality as AutoCAD LT (no constraints, but the action parameters, which I used 99% of the time anyways).
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According to my own testing, BricsCAD seems the best AutoCAD clone to me. Highly compatible (even scripts and RUI files), stable and fast. Licensing is reasonable. Not sure about their BIM product. But i have to say i didnt test Gstar.
Not to many years ago BricsCAD was a standout for sure. The company went in the wrong direction. When I tried the program I every chance in the world to perform and started out with a positive attitude. I was also willing to look the other way on several of the smaller bugs. I found that almost 50% of the time I would try to use the program for something, I would either be on their forum or in contact with tech support. In one example I couldn’t even do a simple 3D sweep. Things like this rendered much of the program completely useless for me. This was their '21 version I believe.
Contrary to what people claim there was very little tech support (it used to be great, a common theme…). This may be due to their “maintenance” subscription where you have to pay a yearly fee for “priority” support. I think that’s bogus because most the issues were flaws with the program rather than me needing help figuring out a feature.
Their marketing is… well… For one they appear to be doing a lot of guerilla marketing. I found more inaccurate statements about BricsCAD than any other program I’ve ever used. My discovery was that most the people saying great things about the program, in one way or another, weren’t actually end users. I do know people that used older versions successfully, but they only did very basic stuff (and there’s better cheaper options if you only have basic needs).
I wasted about $2,000 on the “pro” version, not to mention the lost time. I hate to share such a negative experience because I know so many nice/helpful people are fans of the program (their experiences are probably based on older versions)… but I absolutely cannot recommend it.
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I should have added that i was only talking about the Lite version for 2D drafting. This seemed fine, straight forward acad with good pricing on a permanent license. I never did anything 3D with BrisCAD
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I basically downgraded myself to the “Lite”. I was pretty dejected about the whole thing. The Lite version was functional but felt clunky. For example, there was some sort of residual grid snap. There were various other pesky little bugs that didn’t make it un-useable per say, but did make me push it off to the side. Believe me I wanted it to work. Their Lite version supports AutoLISP (which I absolutely love to program with) and they even have a built-in LISP debugger (GstarCAD just added one but I haven’t tried it yet). I bet they’ve actually fixed some of the issues I was having since the last version I used, but (and this is another thing that erks me), they can’t even be bothered to publish a list of known/fixed bugs… so who knows.
Other things got to me as well, like error messages on start-up, and the fact that the program changed my “default program” settings even though I specified not to. I also experienced slightly more crashes compared to AutoCAD. But slightly less compared to GstarCAD.
The reason I had to switch from GstarCAD to BricsCAD was the former’s handling of PDF and image attachments (and the draw order). I’m not sure if this was fixed in later versions of GstarCAD. BricsCAD handled PDF’s great… sort of… as long as you don’t need to print them. There were graphical glitches… basically a dithering affect filling up white space areas on non-vector PDF’s. So printing (without the result looking terrible) was not an option. I had to come crawling back to Autodesk unfortunately. There were other reasons too but I’m reliving too much of the trauma.
I wish that they’d (or anyone for that matter) would just focus on making a good solid CAD program. That’s why BricsCAD was so great in the past. I suspect that the FOMO on the “BIM” craze prompted them to invest too much of their resources into their BIM module and neglect their core program.
I love AutoLISP and I hate all non-Lisp languages.
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Yes . It’s very important to love something and hate everything else.
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I hate all bad ideas, including bad software, but I believe that all physical things (chemical elements, species, etc.) are useful. If they seem to be useless, it means that we do not understand them.
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Sure, nothing is really useless. But my feeling is that many tools are nowadays developed to create a problem in the first place. The majority of CAD user’s I personally know, are still using very basic CAD functionality on their daily base. Maybe I just know the wrong people. But I would claim, the most used functionality was invented 30 years ago. Things like drawing poly-lines, making curve offsets, hatches, extrusions… this sort of functionality. Things you don’t know, are out-sourced or simply not done. Things like (visual) scripting, optimizations, speed-forming, pattern creation, ultra-realistic rending etc… All this is a niche application. So in that regard the most valuable (=good) CAD for the majority of businesses, is something which does the basic things reliable and with ease. And of course, depending on your profession, this varies. But in that regard, a bad CAD application is something which doesn’t help you in getting the job done.
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It’s still widely in use after like 12+ years of absolutely zero development. I think having (at the time) a relatively advanced editor/debugger, a very low barrier to entry, and essentially being “hot reloadable”, it really suited the conditions. For general 2D stuff I can get my code up and ready way faster than any other system out there. I think that behind the scenes, AutoLISP actually carries out a lot of the “boring” workload.
I don’t recommend that anyone learn it today, unless you’re sure it’s what you need. I found the transition from AutoLISP to C# to be really challenging. Far more than say, Python to C#. It’s also unfortunate that there’s no intellisense or something similar. There are great help resources online. I would actually say that the online help for AutoLISP is way better than most languages simply because there’s less garbage to sift through to get to the good stuff. There’s not much but it’s all very high quality (and either very cheap or free).
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Well, I think I have posted something similar to this before, but I’ll take the liberty of posting again…
IMO, most of what you are going to be doing when programming Rhino is not native to the programming language you are using, but rather diving into Rhino-specific functions (RhinoCommon). Yes, the syntax for accessing those functions varies between C#, Python and .Net, but once you have accessed them, the basic OOP structure is the same.
So my simple premise here is for most of what you are going to do, it doesn’t really matter what language you use for the most part, you still have to jump through more or less the same set of hoops.
There are certain things about Python accessing RhinoCommon that are a bit annoying because it’s not a strongly typed language, for example programming overloaded methods - the classic for me is Brep.Split(); if you don’t do something special, you get the dreaded “Multiple targets may match” because it can accept collections of curves or breps and it can’t figure out which. But for that I have my couple of lines of ‘boilerplate’ code to copy and paste that solve the problem. And don’t forget that with Python one also has access to rhinoscriptsyntax (that one can mix with RhinoCommon), which makes programming certain simple things much simpler.
So I put forth a challenge a long time ago:
Find some relative simple task to do on some geometry in Rhino that can also be accomplished in Autocad. Define the task clearly (with an example file) post the AutoLisp code to do the task, and someone here will post an equivalent in Python (or perhaps also C#).
I am doing this because I am just curious to learn what/how one can do “better” with AutoLisp/AutoCAD, as opposed to say Python/Rhino and have no judgement either way.
There will obviously differences in how one accesses objects etc. in AutoCAD and Rhino, but I’m mostly interested in what AutoLisp itself brings to the table, not how the program is hooked into AutoCAD - which IMO does not have anything to do with the language itself.
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Siemens released free edition of SolidEdge with all the features of commercial version named as SolidEdge Community Edition- there are some limitations - file created in this free edition cannot be open by commercial version, the drawing has a watermark
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Probably the biggest difference between Lisp and non-Lisp code is how easily you can see what the program does. Lisp code is very terse because you can squeeze entire program on a single line. Nobody does that, but minimizing white space to squeeze entire program on a single page is reasonable, especially if you have big monitor. If you double monitor resolution, you can display 4 times more Lisp code on a single page, but only 2 times more non-Lisp code. When I used Lisp (over 20 years ago), one quick look was enough to understand what the program does. When I used C, I was scrolling the code down, and up, and down, and up, and I was totally confused.