AutoCAD

Get a Sneak Peek at Upcoming AutoCAD Features!

Sep 21

The AutoCAD User Experience Team is hosting its annual AutoCAD Sneak Peek events over the next couple of weeks. These are free half-day events held in a few different locations, and they’re a great way to get hands-on experience with in-progress features and give your suggestions and feedback directly to the team designing those features. This year the team is running two events that focus on different functionality. To sign up, click one of the survey links below.

Web & Mobile Sneak Peek

This sneak peek highlights features for people who work on AutoCAD from multiple computers or different locations — such as using different workstations, or switching between the office, home, or working out in the field. CAD Managers and day-to-day AutoCAD users of all levels are welcome to attend.

Locations & Dates:

San Francisco, CA – September 22
San Jose, CA – September 28
Denver, CO – October 4-5

Model Documentation Sneak Peek

This sneak peek is geared toward people in the Mechanical/Manufacturing industry who use AutoCAD, AutoCAD Mechanical, and/or Inventor, and who create and annotate model views (such as section, detail, and projected views) of 3D models (mechanical parts, components).

Locations & Dates:

San Francisco, CA – Sept 23
Portland/Lake Oswego, OR – September 29-30
Fullerton, CA – Sept 29-30

If you have questions or want to learn more about the events before signing up, contact Shari Nemerovski, shari.nemerovski@autodesk.com.

Tip of the Week: Changing the Background Color

Sep 06

Until now, the default color for your Model space background was black while Layout and the Block Editor had white backgrounds. The latest release of AutoCAD WS lets you choose the color you want for each background so now you can match up the look of AutoCAD WS with your copy of AutoCAD.

When we ran a poll back in May about which colors we should add, the leading alternative to black or white was gray. Now you can choose the precise shade of gray that suits you or any other color you prefer.

To change these you must first open any drawing in AutoCAD WS. Then, in the View tab, click the Select Background Color button. From here you can choose any of the backgrounds you want to change and select a color. You can choose from one of the available colors or enter RGB values for a different color.

For now you can only change the background color from within the web version of AutoCAD WS. Once you have changed the background color, your change will be reflected for every one of the drawings you open in AutoCAD WS on any platform. That means you can change the background to your preferred color on your PC and you will see the same background when you open any of the drawings in your online account from your iPhone or Android phone.

José from Puerto Rico Asked for Layers Support – We Delivered

Sep 01

José Sánchez working hard with AutoCAD WS

We get feedback every day from you, our users. People write us emails (feedback@autocadws.com) or they leave us messages on our Facebook page or our Twitter feed.

It’s important to us to read all the feedback we get and we use it to help decide what we’re going to include with each future release.

José Sánchez is one of several people that wrote to us requesting that we add support for layers to AutoCAD WS. Once we knew that this feature was going to be included in our last release, we wrote back to José to ask him about working with AutoCAD WS and why layers were so important to him.

Name: José Sánchez

Title: CAD Manager/Designer

Company: GC&A Architecs, Engineers and Environmental, San Juan, Puerto Rico

José’s Story

Thank you for a good product. I’d like to tell you that AutoCAD WS is amazing!! I have been talking to friends and co-workers about it.

I have been working with Autodesk products (specially Autocad) for 11 years and I know the importance and advantage of working with layers in Autocad and how they can improve Autocad WS.

I work for a engineering/architecture company where we receive multidisciplinary CAD files and it’s important to note this because this is where layers make my work easier. If I need to show utilties only for a client, I just isolate that layer, without the need of bringing more than one CAD file to the meeting. When you use one xref to insert in both architecture and civil engineering drawings it’s important that civil elements dont show in architecture drawings.

Layers gives control of your work, without it, AutoCAD is not AutoCAD :- )

Even if you dont have a standard for layers in your company, you will use them for individual control of your work. Sometimes you need to lighten areas on your plans (existing structures in a project) to differentiate them from proposed structures. Just make a layer, change it to the color with less screening and magic happens in the middle of a meeting in less than a minute.

I know that AutocCAD WS is a work in progress but I will be more than pleased to use layers in this amazing tool.

If you or your company would like to be featured in a future post, get in touch through any of the usual channels and let us know.

José using AutoCAD WS on his laptop and iPod touch

Command Line, Hatch, Insert Image Added to AutoCAD WS for Web

Aug 22

It’s been a busy week for AutoCAD WS. Not only have we launched the AutoCAD WS for Mac app on the Mac App Store but we also update the AutoCAD WS mobile app on the App Store and the Android Market.

But we’re not stopping there. We are proud to tell you that we have also added some key functionality to the AutoCAD WS web app that you can access through your browser from any PC or Mac at www.autocadws.com.

Command Line

We have added a Command Line to the web app enabling you to use all your favorite AutoCAD commands with WS. Now you can work with your mouse and your keyboard together just as you did when you first learned to design with AutoCAD.

Hatch

The latest version of the AutoCAD WS web app introduces a new Hatch Tool button under the Draw tab which opens the new Hatch Creation tab. You can either Pick Point to select the area surrounding your point or Hatch Select to choose one or more objects for hatching.

Then you can select:

Hatch Pattern
Color
Scale
Angle

and hit Enter to apply the hatching to the areas chosen.

Attach Image

The ability to Add Image has been added to the Insert tab.

To attach an image you must first upload it to your online account like any other xref.

Click Attach Image. Click Upload New Image to browse your hard drive for image file:

JPG
JPEG
GIF
PNG
TIF
TIFF
BMP

Once the image has been uploaded (to the root directory) you can attach it to one or more drawings.

Set Background Color

You can now set the color of your background independently in the Model space, for Layouts and for the Block Editor.

The colors available are the standard colors plus any colors that were included with the drawing when it was uploaded. In addition you can select a new color by entering the RGB details. Your defined color will be remembered thereafter.

Multi-Select

We have raised the number of objects that you can select in one go from 30 to 200.

Edit Dimensions

You can now edit a dimension after you have placed it in a drawing.

Please note that this function will not work retroactively. You cannot edit dimensions that were added to drawings that were uploaded in previous versions of AutoCAD WS.

We hope you like these additions we have made to the web app. Let us know which ones you are using and how they have changed your approach to AutoCAD WS.