Friday, February 24, 2012
Check out the Self-Paced Guide My First Plug-in
Between the Lines: Are you an AutoCAD® power user with an interest in becoming even more productive? Would you like to automate or extend the capabilities of AutoCAD, but are new to computer programming? If so, then this guide is designed for you.
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2 comments:
Autodesk does a great job of providing tools for its customers. I am continually surprised by their new products and how they seem to cater to every niche. Over the course of my undergrad, I used a whole host of programs - some of them good, some of them bad. If I wanted to learn how to use a program not covered in a class, I always felt like I ended up digging through an obscure blog. This is not true for Autodesk products. They really do have some great tutorials and their reps are constantly here teaching classes or giving seminars.
Our industry uses very little of the functionality in AutoCAD indeed. There are a lot of customization options, ranging from more advanced use of blocks (dynamic blocks and data takeoffs have both proven huge timesavers to me this year on drafting for CMU productions), and AutoLISP takes tasks that we know how to do manually and makes them much faster, e.g., for things like automatically numbering blocks or generating cross-sections of particular stock. It is absolutely possible to write an AutoLISP routine that automatically draws flat framing based on the flat size, although given the limits of my current knowledge of AutoLISP I would need to be drawing a lot of flats before that became a timesaver.
As for writing a plug-in, even with this tutorial that scares me, but the plug-ins that other people write excite me. Ben was talking about one that converts an AutoCAD solid to G-code... that would be great to have!
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