I need an appreciation of VariCAD.
Francisco Colaço
Is varicad any good? Or am I to keep drafting on Windows + any kind of
Windows only CAD?
I need all the opinions I can get to make a judgement.
Francisco
--
Francisco Miguel Colaço
Rua Alexandre Herculano, 9 | fco...@spider.fis.uc.pt
P-3080 Figueira da Foz |
Portugal | Phone: 351--936--309468
| 351--33--29191
dnaden
On Fri, 03 Jul 1998 16:50:34 +0100, Francisco Colaço wrote:
: Is varicad any good? Or am I to keep drafting on Windows + any kind of
:Windows only CAD?
:
: I need all the opinions I can get to make a judgement.
:
: Francisco
:
:--
:Francisco Miguel Colaço
I have just purchased a copy (actually you just get a small unlock file and
keep using downloaded demo), and my first impressions are satisfactory. I am
not an AutoCAD user (I use Cadkey7 and some ProENG) so I can't compare it
directly, but some of the VariCAD features are _cool_. Some of the more
impressive ones (to me) are:
-object under the mouse changes color dynamically to let you know it is
'pickable'
-all object main points you are close to with the mouse (endpoint, midpoint,
tangency etc.) pop-up with their first letter on the screen as you pass them
-very good-looking 3D capabilities (don't know how compatible with any of the
universal formats yet) and proENG-like zoom-in and 'panning' mouse moves
-does a decent job of importing ~1 Mb .DXF file made in cadkey7 for WinNT
-relatively small memory footprint. Not a memory and/or resource hog at all
-relatively fast redraws, very fast in 3D demo files provided with the demo
(BTW, I run XFree86 3.3.2 in 32 bit mode, 1152x864)
Please take these comments as they are, my _personal_ opinions. You may not be
as impressed, but it doesn't cost you much to download (about 4 Mb) and play
with the demo as you see fit.
HTH
damir
P.S. I'm not their employee.
Daniel Robert Franklin
> Is varicad any good? Or am I to keep drafting on Windows + any kind of
>Windows only CAD?
> I need all the opinions I can get to make a judgement.
Download the demo and see. From what I saw, it looked pretty good (and
they never spam like the "linuxcad" people, which btw is crap). I believe
it understands Autocad DXF format.
- Daniel
--
******************************************************************************
* Daniel Franklin - 4th Year Electrical Engineering Student
* dr...@uow.edu.au
******************************************************************************
Erik Rossen
>
> Is varicad any good? Or am I to keep drafting on Windows + any kind of
> Windows only CAD?
>
> I need all the opinions I can get to make a judgement.
>
>
> --
> Francisco Miguel Colaço
>
> P-3080 Figueira da Foz |
> Portugal | Phone: 351--936--309468
> | 351--33--29191
I got my Linux Journal in the mail yesterday and I saw a blurb in the
new products section for VariCAD at http://www.varicad.com
I checked DejaNews and found a few people already discussing it for a
week now in comp.os.linux.misc.
I downloaded the demo version of VariCAD for Linux this morning and I've
been skimming the menus and online help a bit.
I'm pretty impressed so far, considering the cost (about US$300 with no
support) and I will probably be buying it. I am a bit worried that
their price list is "introductory, for a limited time only". I hope
they are not planning to screw everyone after people have switched to
their system.
There are a few things about it that bug me, but maybe I just haven't
experimented and read enough:
- I wasn't able to get the volume calculator to give me a reasonable
result; the volume of the forklift tire in demo8 was a few cubic
millimeters(!)
- they are using those goddamn Red Hat rpms to distribute the package OR
a set of 5 uncompressed tar files. A bit clueless and I wonder why...
- I wasn't able to increase the fineness of the facet generation on
curved objects. I was able to make it coarser, but not finer.
- VariCAD does wireframe and shading (reasonably fast, all things
considered), but there is no output for rendering, although I suppose
one could convert .dxf or .igs files in POVLAB (?) If only it outputted
.pov files...
- there is no script language for programming it. Macros, yes, but not
even a little LISP-like interpreter like SIOD in GIMP.
I repeat again that above comments are rough impressions after about 2
hours of playing around. I'd be interested to hear what you think.
Cheers,
Erik Rossen.