BricsCAD V15 - What's New?

Barcelona, Spain

Hans de Backer, Head of Product Development at Bricsys kicks off Day 2 of the conference with a presentation of all that is new in BricsCAD.

BricsCAD V15 is packed with a lots of new features and fine tweaks that improve usability, enhance productivity.

• BricsCAD now sports a ribbon user-interface also. Click here to see how V15 ribbons  look like. Configurable for 3rd party applications!!
  
• Workspaces: now allow you to setup your UI components for 2d, 3d, Mechanical & look-and-feel
• Material Density property for components: It is now possible to assign a material density to the entire component. A new command called BMMASSPROP now generates mass properties for the entire assembly. Earlier, this was possible only at the part level.
  
  
• ASSEMBLY DESIGN: introduced parametric components. Parameters defined in a component file can be changed in a higher level assembly maintaining the link to the source component definition.
  
  
• HOT KEY TIP: a QUAD-like assistant widget provides options controlled by Ctrl Key. Controlled using the new 'Tip' field in status bar.Ctrl key. The assistant widget appears to make sure this interesting feature does not go unnoticed.
  
  
• Dynamic blocks now can be edited in-place using following grip types:
  
  
  1. Point
  2. XY
  3. Linear
  4. Polar
  5. Rotation
  6. Flip
  7. Visibility
  
  
  
  RR comments: I like this feature. It has been requested by a number of users.
  
  
• New commands: HIDEOBJECTS, ISOLATEOBJECTS and UNISOLATEOBJECTS
  • HIDEOBJECTS: hides the selected objects.
  • ISOLATEOBJECTS/ISOLATE: hides all but the selected objects.
  • UNISOLATEOBJECTS/UNISOLATE/UNHIDE: unhides objects that were hidden.
  
  RR comments: We had this in CADPower since a while. Going by the huge number of Lisp routines offering visibility control to CAD entities, this was long overdue. Good to see it as a native command in BricsCAD.
  
  
• A REPEAT option has been added to the COPY command. This allows you to make one copy of selcted entities and repeat the copy operation in the same direction automatically.
  
  
  
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• Multiple drawings can now be displayed in tabs.
  
  The ShowDocTabs setting controls whether a tab is displayed for each opened document. Its location can be specified as well.
  
  
  
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  RR comments: Previously this feature was only available on Linux and Mac versions, now a Windows implementation based on Daniel Marcotte's DocTabs utility has been added.
  
  
• The DMEXTRUDE command now has a Taperangle option to create tapered extrusions.
  
  
  
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• Dynamic dimensions added to the RECTANGLE, MTEXT, BOX, CYLINDER, SPHERE, AI_SPHERE, WEDGE and CONE commands.
  
   
  
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• One of the hidden gems in BricsCAD is the ability to have fine tuned control of the program using a whole lot of BricsCAD-only system variables. V15 extends this further by adding a number of additional variables.
  
  
  1. ANTIALIASRENDER and ANTIALIASSCREEN system variables control the amount of anti-aliasing during rendering.
  2. DELETETOOL: system variable to control whether 'tool' entities ( subtracted entities ) used during the SUBTRACT command are deleted or retained.
  3. DMEXTRUDEMODE: system variable which determines whether DMEXTRUDE and DMREVOLVE commands create new solids or do boolean union when their 'Auto' option is used.
     
     
• Using real-world materials in rendering has gotten significantly easier. The New Render Material Library offers a palette of hundreds of materials that can be downloaded on demand.
  
  
  
  The MATBROWSEROPEN command provides easy access to the Materials library. In general, using Materials is a lot more easier now.

 

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