AutoCAD Course for Microstation Users
This week has been a very satisfactory day, I've been teaching an AutoCAD course for Microstation users, as a continuity to Topography course Which we had given a few days ago using CivilCAD to generate the digital model and contour lines.
The main reason why we have done it has been because although we have always used Bentley software, we cannot close the work horizon because out there the opportunities that can be closed for not knowing how to use the most popular design software in our environment. Most of the students were users who have only used Microstation, one of them with a good command of ArcView 3x, another with great experience in ArcGIS and Territorial Planning, one with a good command of CivilCAD although not so much AutoCAD, a few who have seen Manifold GIS and a Peace Corps volunteer for whom the topics had to be translated into English. Of all 18, only three girls and in ages ... from 23 years to bordering 50.
The focus of the course has been on the criterion:
"How to do with AutoCAD what we do with Microstation".
For this reason, we've avoided Ribbon complications and used the classic look to focus on only 32 commands, Method that I used before Although with more hours and with a focus of constructive planes that did vary at least some 8 commands:
- Construction bar 11 (Draw): Line, construction line, polyline, circle, rectangle, make block, call block, point, hatch and multiple text
- Edit Bar 10 (Modify): Copy, Parallel, Rotate, Scale, Trim, Extend, Break at one point, Break at two points, Round with zero radius and Ungroup
- 5 that we have used from the keyboard: List, dist, lengthen, area, divide
- 7 additional utilities: Print, size, call reference DGN, call reference raster, layer manager, properties panel and snaps control.
In addition, we have shown other complementary tools to understand the seemingly "poor" AutoCAD being just a drawing board.
- Google Earth to refresh the geodetic theme between UTM coordinates And geographic.
- CivilCAD 2010 to explain routines already done for the cadastral and engineering area
- PlexEarth to display the Interaction between AutoCAD and Google Earth
- And a couple of Geofumadas templates to teach the possible tricks of the Concatenate function.
What they did not like about AutoCAD
Being users who come to use Microstation it was obvious that at the beginning they felt uncomfortable with the different logic, also because the basics of the course did not allow to use Lisp routines of those who are on the Internet. Although if it had been an AutoCAD 2012 course, some of your dissatisfactions would not have been necessary:
- To be with one hand between the keyboard and the Esc key
- See below what the command asks, and why have to be saying the same thing or enter, enter, enter for each command, instead of having pop-up windows. The dynamic input only confused them.
- That from time to time hang the mouse scroll wheel to be interacting between zoom / pan
- You can not drag on the layers to turn them off or on from a side panel, either the same file or the reference at the same time
- That you could not see the layers that had information in a different tone than the empty ones
- That in raster handler support very few formats and are inserts boxes that you have to be sending back so that they do not hide the vectors
- That there is no tool to limit course and distance of a stroke, without having to use an oblique sizing command
- That the Fence command does not exist for multiple operations to a specific zone like export or cut in bite.
- That the text command does not allow to stretch and to shorten to the taste
- That you could not import points from a txt listing
- There was no incremental text to enumerate the parcels
- That the commands are interrupted with basic interface routines (such as zoom or minimize), or that the Undo is considered actions like zoom
- That the commands are so scattered in toolbars or ribbon tabs
- The way to write the bearings in the form @dist
- Having to be entering commands manually, like list, dist, lengthen, area, regen. The biggest problem was that my AutoCAD was in English, theirs in Spanish and hence the shortcuts did not always work, the underscore more than once did not accept the command in English. Also somewhat uncomfortable having to call the commands with unusual names (such as offset to offset, presentation to layout ...)
- That he did not calculate area from internal fluid and had to resort to the boundary
- That the size of the point, thickness and line type are not dynamic and it is necessary to use the redraw command
- The comparative slowness, though it ran pretty well on portable notebooks Dell Inspiron Mini, in those with 1 GB of memory, the snap would hang or every moment it would raise a panel that said it was necessary to regenerate. It is clear that these mini are not for AutoCAD, but it was what the boys had and with which they had not suffered problems using Microstation
What else did you like about AutoCAD?
As the course progressed, they found things that were in good taste:
- Being able to paste concatenated coordinate lists into Excel without having to use a txt file
- The panel of properties where you can make filters by particular features and with much better functionalities than the panel of V8i, among them the creation of sizing style to taste
- The command break at a point, which does not exist in Microstation and would solve a lot for vertex topological segmentation
- The construction line (xline), which in Microstation does not exist and solves a lot for strokes that we made with the 4H pencil on the table
- The printing layouts, which seemed simpler than the management of models in Microstation.
- The wizard to generate layouts for printing, which far surpasses the Sheet Composer of V8i, although they missed the options of scale in meters because AutoCAD only brings millimeters and inches by default
- They found interesting Fit and Spline functions of the polyline, to draw contour lines
- The package of blocks available in the Design Center and the simplicity of storing blocks in files and not necessarily in a library .cel shared
That changed the perspective
From the second day we were looking at CivilCAD tools, as one of the students has an acceptable command of that tool. Seeing this and PlexEarth served to exemplify the model of CAD platforms, whose -questionable- Success is based on simplifying the drawing board to a minimum, so that other solutions and companies have the opportunity to do business on your API. Among the things we saw about CivilCAD, which helped us to understand this issue:
- The labeling of parcels incrementally
- The labeling of the boundaries of the properties. We had spent almost an hour working on setting dimensioning styles, and seeing how it is simplified with CivilCAD was good.
- The calculation of the area with option to enter a factor and place the text inside the property without being polyline
- The subdivision of plots in percentages, specific areas and number of plots
- The automatic construction box with various templates
- The grid generator in UTM and geographic coordinates
- The inversion of the course in a line
It has been an interesting experience, in which the collective contributions have been more useful than what I had to give them. Some of them are smarter because they have a good command of the mapping and also because they know that they have the responsibility of replicating the training to other technicians ... and others because of the opportunity they see to do jobs that in this context are called "iguanas".
It has also been a good time to reflect on how valuable it is to include the rule of not pirating software, as a rule of honesty, for this we have shown the functionalities of the Autodesk educational licenses As an alternative to using AutoCAD without going unlawful, also the benefit relationship that exists in buying PlexEarth for a price less than what the average mobile phone costs in the room.
To me, it reminded me of the times of giving AutoCAD courses, identify the evolution and versatility that can be found in interface changes. I have also learned much more from me than they did. Seeing what CivilCAD does has convinced me that it will be a frequent topic in the coming months, especially since being a Mexican software it adapts a lot to the routines that we require in the Hispanic context. Very similar to Softdesk, it does Civil 3D routines much faster and with less confusion, although in the future it may be worth a comparative course between Bentley PowerCivil with CivilCAD or AutoDesk Civil 3D.
There is a lot of practice and follow some advice that filtered through the lines, many of them outside the CAD theme.
