Civil Survey DTM Features Introduced in progeCAD 2019

Sydney, Australia  09 May 2017 - CADDIT Software announces the second major class of new features to ship with their upcoming progeCAD 2019 release. progeCAD is an affordable, robust general purpose CAD system used by designers, architects, builders, engineers, civil survey and government planning offices for over ten yeas in Australia and New Zealand. progeCAD requires little or no learning curve for AutoCAD users because of its compatible interface and command structure.

Along with thousands of general-purpose CAD drafting features such as AutoCAD-similar drawing commands, full native DWG format read-write, PDF import and export, direct 3D modelling and realtime and advanced rendering, extensive block libraries, 3D architecture, tables and data extraction, new 3D model translation from STEP IGES and STL-mesh models as well as countless other tools, progeCAD 2019 will introduce a new suite of civil survey functions.

This new suite of DTM functions offer civil engineers, landscapers, environmentalists, builders and other land-development professionals an easy-to-use set of basic land survey tools for generating terrain profiles and slope lines. Some of the new civil survey commands include:

AUTOSECTION - generate full section detail views with full annotation from drawing contours
SECTIONLINE - create a profile path to be used by AUTOSECTION
CONVERTLCURVES - convert SPLINEs into 3DPOLY usable by AUTOSECTION
SLOPEBLOCK - generate normal or "slope" lines along a single polyline
SLOPEAREA - generate normal or "slope" lines between two polylines

To gererate a new civil section view simply create a new SECTIONLINE through your drawing like so and then select it using AUTOSECTION:

progeCAD 2019 can create DTM section views directly from LINE, 3DPOLY and 3DFACE. SPLINE need to be converted into 3D polylines first, using the "convert level curves" tool (CONVERTLCURVES)

 AUTOSECTION begins with a comprehensive dialog which allows you to customize your new DTM section view or click OK to accept prior defaults. After clicking OK your terrain section view will be generated like so:

 CADDIT is pleased to announce that starting 15 April 2018 all new and upgrade progeCAD 2018 orders from that day will be entitled to a free upgrade to 2019 upon its release on CADDIT.net. For a free 30-day trial of the current 2018 release of progeCAD or for more information about affordable CAD software, visit our website at www.caddit.net.

progeCAD 2017 Graphics and GPU Review

Sydney, Australia 05 October 2016 - With the recently available progeCAD 17.0.8 service pack, the CADDIT team has revisited last year's review of CAD hardware. As stated in the update announcement on CADDIT.net, progeCAD is a low-cost general-purpose 2D/3D CAD system with very tight compatibility to recent versions of AutoCAD. Since the landmark progeCAD 2013 release several years ago, our development team has been spending considerable effort to improve our use of OpenGL hardware acceleration commonly employed by CAD software  like AutoCAD and Geomagic. OpenGL is essentially a machine language for sending commands like draw and shade directly (in a process sometimes called "direct rendering") to an OpenGL-speaking graphics card for display on the screen. These commands are often wrapped inside other languages like C++ for callable use by developers to tie into their software - like CAD, games, many video players and other highly-demanding graphics applications.


The inner workings of OpenGL per diagram from Wikipedia

This year we began introducing two significant hardware assets for graphics testing in our labs: Dell XPS Laptops (15 inch series) with Nvidia GTX 960M series GPU, now with a "game-ready" driver update version 372.90 (free update from NVidia.com).  I really like the XPS and have taken one for use myself. Other legacy systems tested are an HP Pavilion running Windows 7 on a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2,4GHZ processor with Nvidia Quadro K1200 GPU and a new Asus with Intel i7-3770 @ 3.40 GHz Windows 10 PRO x64 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti (working at 1680x1050) - both with updated Nvidia v372 driver updates as well.

This year we again employed the FRAPS graphics utility for our performance analysis. Combined with results from the previous year, average speed on all systems all measured between 20 and 30 refresh frames per second (FPS) with the shaded ISS 3D test drawing, with the Dell XPS and HP Pavilion with the Quadro having slightly higher (smoother) graphics performance than the others. Results were similar when loaded with mid-sized 2D drawings roughly 12 - 14 megabytes in size, with the new progeCAD 2017 64 bit handling of larger files somewhat better than last year's version.

Early year observations of regular crashing on systems using Nvidia Quadro graphics seem to all but completely disappear with updated Quadro drivers from nvidia.com and installing the latest progeCAD update from caddit.net. We also notice the same improvement when updating the Intel business graphics drivers on systems like the Surface Pro 3. Unfortunately we were unable to make similar comparisons with legacy systems equipped with ATI 7470M Radeon graphics because the new ATI driver sent an incompatible signal voltage to the LED backlighting of the screen.  Based on last year's problems and comparatively poor performance of the ATI card, we really didn't feel like buying another one. We have heard remarks that OpenGL support on the ATI FireGL series is somewhat better, however.

In conclusion, we repeat last year's recommendation of intel CPU / NVidia graphics for progeCAD when possible. Using the latest progeCAD service pack (currently 17.0.8) and recent Nvidia device drivers is highly recommended for best results, although users should double check any possible incompatibility that newer drivers might have with their own hardware.

TransMagic R8 sp3 Released in Australia through CADDIT

Vendor-neutral design collaboration over the network, CAD model repair and healing, cross-platform solid model translation, model analysis and measurement, batch translation, perspective rendering - these are just a few features enhanced by the latest release of TransMagic in Australia / New Zealand by CADDIT. TransMagic converts CATIA, SolidWorks, Unigraphics, JT, Pro/ENGINEER, Inventor and many other 3D formats.

TransMagic R8 sp3 enhancements include:

• TransMagic is now fully supported on both Intel 64-bit and Windows 7 systems.
• Drastically improved rendering performance for re-rendering geometry changes. The rendering engine now intelligently determines only what has changed and re-renders only that vs. re-rendering the entire scene after small changes.
• New "Show Un-Repaired Geometry" dialog that gets launched when appropriately during the Auto-Repair Wizard
• TransMagic now offers two different methods for stock size calculation "bounding box" - precise and fast.
• CATIA V5 Environment now created on a per user account basis - allows any account type to establish the TM V5 Environment automatically without any user rights issue.
• Siemens Unigraphics JT Facet Resolution can now be one of five settings for "normal deviation" and correspond to the following settings: Lowest accuracy (fastest) = 45 degrees, Low = 30 degrees, Normal = 15 degrees, High = 10 degrees, Highest accuracy (slowest) = 5 degrees
• Added JT assembly output types: Single File Assembly Entire assembly in one file. Typical Assembly Assembly JT files + part JT files. Typical Assembly w/Directory Typical assembly JT file + directory. All Assembly Files Each assembly is a JT file including parts.
• Upgraded to JT Open 5.3.
• More enhancements to stability, speed, command-line interface and batch mode CAD file translations.

TransMagic native 64-Bit permanently changes the landscape for large CAD file translation by solving this common manufacturing problem. TransMagic reports that the new platform offers 10-20% better performance and a tremendous increase in CAD software file size capability. Translating multi-gigabyte files on a single computer is now a reality, with TransMagic 64-Bit.

TransMagic users with active maintenance can upgrade to SP3 free of charge. TransMagic 8 sp3 can be downloaded directly from CADDIT in Australia HERE. CADDIT can be contacted about options for TransMagic 64-bit, batch mode and command-line translation enterprise solutions HERE.