Friday, April 07, 2017
What’s New in AutoCAD 2018? Object Selection Enhancements
AutoCAD Blog | Autodesk: I’ve been with Autodesk for many years (two and half decades, in fact) and, during that time, I’ve helped launch 21 releases of AutoCAD! I’ve seen big, innovative, new functionality such as 3D scanning and printing integrated into AutoCAD, as well as many, many small enhancements to existing functionality. One thing I’ve learned from you, our customers, over all these years is that it’s often the small tweaks that bring the biggest smiles. Here we’ll take a look at AutoCAD object selection enhancements. Support for off-screen selection is a perfect example!
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6 comments:
Thanks for a great article.I appreciate your idea. I have learnt a lot from it.
Thanks for a great article. i appreciate your idea. I have learn a lot from it. I like your Post.
Fx TecH
This is pretty neat. Despite the fact that I am someone who doesn't understand nearly the full capabilities of AutoCAD, and doesn't nearly use it to it's full functionality, it is still a great feature and enhancement of a powerful program. The line type snaps, for me is a great enhancement and feature. I had noticed this not working a few times, so I'm glad this will be fixed. Overall, this seems like a great update to the program. However, it is not something I would upgrade to if I was paying--the new feature set offered by AutoDesk is not nearly compelling enough to upgrade to, and I am surprised that they expect people to pay to upgrade to this new version. But overall, since I get the program for free, I would be willing to upgrade to operate the new version, since this is a compelling feature set.
I am so glad they are fixing the off-screen selection thing. I say thing because I don’t know how to properly name it, but I understand exactly what they are fixing because it screwed me over enough times. It took me forever to understand why CAD wouldn’t select the entire wall. I eventually figured out that it was because I was panning. I feel like this is less of an issue for users who are native to AutoCAD opposed to Vectorworks because I get confused about how selecting objects works at points, so if one is native to AutoCAD then they might not utilize this feature as much as I would as I am scared to use more than one large selection to select objects. And then if I want to select more my brain wants to hold down shift to add them, but then that just deselects things and it's a bad time.
I'm not really sure based on these descriptions what issues AutoCad 18 will be fixing in terms of object selection. I was never aware that this was something people had a problem with. Teaching people about the finesse of object selection is complicated and some people don't get it at first, but after a few weeks everyone gets the nuances of the click/drag and direction that determines how you select objects. You can already just control which layers are active and use that function to make minute selections. It' requires preplanning, but you should already have different objects or even line types on layers. And why would you want to select offscreen, that command just seems like your asking for trouble. What if it selects things you don't want selected? Then you have to start all over again. Better to just stick to the layer controls or multiple selections. What I would like to see AutoCad do in their next update is the allow for later subcategorization. I would love to have a single component on one layer and then sub categorize the smaller parts or line types of that object. That way you can control what you select, but you can turn off the entire unit at once. I imagine it will help with those 150 layer arwuitectural drawings. Imagine if you could turn off all electrical layers with one click instead of finding all 15 layers containing electrical.
While I am relatively new to drafting using AutoCAD I would say that one of the most frustrating experience for me while drafting is making sure I properly select the objects to make different edits to them, well that and trying to print to the plotter. Seeing that they have taken steps towards making this to be a better interface makes me pretty happy. Add to that improvement the tweaking that they are doing with the object snapping tool, where they are improving the open space snapping which I think could really help with dimensioning. While these are not the huge sexy improvements that are easy to market to the public and say "hey here look what cool new toy we have for you." While these improvements aren't huge I do think that they are going to have a great impact on the usefulness of the program. Looking forward to more new add on's to AutoCAD.
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