AutoCAD 2016 Review
Posted on : Mar 27, 2019
“Longest Journey starts with a Single Step”; a small start-up company started its journey by releasing small CAD tool in the year 1982 in fact the nomenclature of tool was also small “Micro CAD”. Yet here we are after 34 Years that small CAD tool is still going; in fact the tool has undergone series of updates all these years to ensure Designers work gets as easier as possible. This year AUTOCAD 2016 marks the 30th major release of the most popular CAD system in the world. Most of the Designers were apprehensive about what new features Autodesk would have added in AUTOCAD 2016, as industry experts we say quite a few!
We list some of the features that we found interesting not only with Designer’s perspective but also as per the system and our esteemed client’s perspectives.
Firstly with the launch of AutoCAD 2016 the users were greeted by a new welcome screen called New Tab which got renamed as the Start tab. Essentially start tab contains two different frames: Learn – providing tools to learn the software and Create – to start creating new drawing or updating the existing one. Start tab in the new software remain active (on top of the drawing area) all throughout the session, Designer can click this tab to easily navigate back to the start tab.
We have also observed many interface updates in the new software like inclusion of redesigned Status bar consolidating common tools, also now tools such as Lock UI which earlier was only available by typing out and Isolate objects can be added to the status bar; if in case the status bar becomes too loaded with tools it now automatically wraps onto the second row.
AutoCAD 2016 is now able to fulfil some of the top wishes on AUGI (Autodesk User Group International) firstly by allowing designers to snap to the center of polygons and other closed polylines by either typing GCE at the command line or access it like any other object snap; secondly by granting ability to add a text frame or border to any Mtext object and finally the new revision cloud now contains polyline-like grips on corners to help with edits. Also several new dimensioning enhancements are added in the new software like a default layer for all dimensions and dimensioning options visible from the DIM command.
Some of the other enhancements in AutoCAD 2016 includeXref enhancement i.e.as the variable XREFOVERRIDE is set to 1 all Xref objects behave as their entity colour was set to Bylayer. Zooming and panning with an attached PDF is much faster now along with an extended support to Navisworks files in either NWD or NWC format. Dynamic UCS in AutoCAD 2016 now works with point clouds when segmentation data is indicated in the properties palette also Designers can define the state of certain system variables and shall be notified if they are changed.
Most of the updated features of AutoCAD 2016 like interface enhancements, text and dimensioning improvements and the new revision cloud tool are also included in AutoCAD LT 2016 also Autodesk continues to offer AutoCAD as part of various design suites.
