CMU School of Drama


Friday, April 05, 2024

Activity Insights and Improvements to Hatch Are Here: AutoCAD for Mac 2025

AutoCAD Blog | Autodesk: AutoCAD for Mac 2025 and AutoCAD LT for Mac 2025 are here! We’re excited to share the new enhancements and features that provide time savings, collaboration options, and efficiencies for you to get the most out of each and every session.

8 comments:

Carolyn Burabck said...

I like learning about different commands and features of AutoCad because I think my biggest weakness with computer drafting is my lack of knowledge of a lot of commands that could probably save me time. I think the new hatch feature is nice not needing pre-existing borders to select as sometimes it’s irritating to find that a shape isn't closed due to a mistake in a corner so you have to get out of the hatch to continue the line and then go back in. I also like the new interface of the opening screen. I think it’s more intuitive to someone opening the software. Sometimes my AutoCad runs very slowly and I think I need a new computer but maybe I will use the other articles on this web sight to find a cheaper solution.

Gemma said...

AutoCAD 2025 is on the horizon! It’s always interesting to see what new functions and commands developers edit, remove and/or include for each new release. The start tab reminds me a lot of the opening screen for Vectorworks and how it functions, and I find that useful in that program so I’m excited to see it move to AutoCAD as well. It’s nice to be able to see a summary of projects to figure out what you need to continue working on. The new hatch feature is exciting and seems like it will eliminate one of my larger grievances with how AutoCAD works in that area of drawing, removing the ability for AutoCAD to misinterpret a boundary that you’re trying to hatch within and hatch literally everything else (something that has absolutely never happened to me before). Overall, it does seem like some new, good changes are coming for AutoCAD 2025, and I look forward to seeing it in action in the near(ish) future.

Ella McCullough said...

I am just beginning to feel comfortable with CAD. I think one of the reasons it took me so long to catch on is I was being taught on windows while working on a mac. I definitely do not have the knowledge to understand why the two are so different but it is incredibly frustrating. I feel like there are probably reasons the two are different but I feel like they could be more similar. I am excited to see new updates. I am not totally sure I understood what they are and I will definitely wait to update to the new version but hopefully it fixes some issues. I wonder if it ever gets frustrating to constantly have to learn new things when the software updates are always changing and adding new things. It may not be that big of a deal but it is something I often think about.

Joanne Jiang said...

I accidentally downloaded AutoCAD 2025 on another computer when borrowing someone else’s computer to work on, and it definitely surprised me when I first opened it and worked with it. There are a few different elements, like the starting page, as well as some parts of the interface and parts of the commands. I am still trying to find my way around AutoCAD, and to be honest, its constant updates does not help a beginner like me. The new hatching seems so cool, and I’m not sure when I would be using it, but I might be playing around with it to explore different elements I could use. AutoCAD has too many elements to me to grasp, and even though I’m pretty good at hand drafting, I struggle really hard with AutoCAD. I’m not sure if its the Windows to Mac transition that I’m struggling with, or I’m just bad at technology, but its taking me a while to understand it.

Abigail Lytar said...

I have just started using Autocad this past semester, and have been enjoying learning it. While I much prefer hand drafting because I find it easier and more personal and faster to complete a draft, autocad is a lot more efficient. While I hate the fact that Autocad is more practical, it is what it is. I am always interested to see what is updated in a software when a new release comes out. If it is like the Madden games where they release the “New” game but it is the exact same game as the last or if it is an actual update to the software. While I do enjoy a good improvement to a platform it also really annoys me because everything is always rearranged, and nothing is in the same place and all the buttons have been relabeled for no apparent reason. AutoCAD 2025 seems to have some good updates to the hatch, but I assume it will be buggy for a while and does not have enough of an improvement from 2024 to make it a worthwhile download for me right now.

Claire M. said...

Finally! I've been waiting for activity insights ever since I've started drafting in autocad. It is incredibly helpful for me as a beginner to be able to go back in the history of an autocad project and see exactly what changes I made, and it makes it more clear why I've made those changes. I think that this could also be a good teaching tool, because people could learn some of the ideas behind drafting simply looking at a log of the changes made. I also enjoy the new changes made to the start menu, and would really wish they would add a dead simple way to template files that doesn't involve me having to copy a file each and every time. I think that autocad is moving in the right direction, but is still behind some really cool tools like vectorworks and other 3d designing software. Autocad need to figure out what it wants to be, and settle into that niche.

Ellie Yonchak said...

I have heard that this is an update that changes a lot of things about how Mac and AutoCAD work, and I am interested if these changes will help or hurt AutoCAD. On one hand, the new features and more streamlined, typical start screen will be helpful to anyone not familiar with CAD on a Mac, but on the other hand, it may become more difficult for longtime CAD Mac users to use CAD, as they don’t understand the new layout, or it may interfere with muscle memory. I think that activity insights is an interesting thing to expand as well, however I am not quite sure I understand the finer details of how these insights actually are saved, or when they take note of activity, as I think that logging every single stroke somewhere would take up a lot of processing space. I do wonder if this is being set up for some sort of collaborative feature of CAD down the line, as it so heavily emphasizes working with collaborators and seeing what they did in the .DWG.

Sonja Meyers said...

As a big fan of the hatch tool in AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2025 seems like a pretty major win for all of us HatchHeads (official name for the autocad hatch command fandom). It’s incredibly frustrating to be hatching something and see that little red circle pop up and have the computer tell me that the area isn’t enclosed or whatever and my drafting is going to explode if I don’t fix it. The ability to just jump straight to the awesome part (the hatching) without doing the not awesome part (creating the boundary lines for the hatch to go in) seems like a great way to speed up the drafting process for relatively simple hatching paths. In all honesty, I don’t think I’ve ever really been in a situation where drawing a simple hatch pattern of a specific width by following along a path would be wildly life-changing, because when drafting in autocad, all I really end up hatching is sections of walls and such, which already have to have the boundary lines no matter what. Regardless, it’s quite exciting to see such an impressive update for one of the best tools in autocad (in my honest opinion hatch is beat by offset, but still wins over line), and I hope HatchHeads everywhere are as equally excited as I am for this update. Happy Hatching!