DesignCAD 3D MAX V.20

If you have many years of CAD drafting before you perhaps you need AutoCAD. When I started my career this DesignCAD competed with AutoCAD.AutoCAD won after some years becoming the standard. By then I was pretty good doing architectural work. Friends, this is way more than a simple CAD program.Because I started so early I still have five hundred page instruction book and many other learning aids. Mostly I do not need them and can draw anything I want from any view pretty fast. That said, if you want to do CAD and do not plan to work for someone else in a large office where AutoCAD is required this will do anything you can imagine and a lot you can't until you have useed it for a very long time. You can draw things with ten decimal precision with any color, line weight, line type you desire. You can draw with a hundred layers on ONE page. Imagine what could be helpful and this can likely do it.Never found any limitations. The price baffles me. For this kind of CAD power I would pay well over five hundred. All that said you need to appreciate that all this power takes many months of all day work to learn. Good part is the more you learn the faster you learn more. Work all day everyday, five days a week, and in a few months your output will really take off.Once you get over the initial learning concepts you will love this program. It is extremely powerful. My last project had over eight million key strokes to draw fourteen 2 x 3' pages for a residence earning about eighty an hour. This is a serious program.

DesignCAD 3D is not an Autocad command-line clone. It does not use the opensource clone engine, as would the D'Assault Systemes's DraftSight. As such, the interface was different enough to give me heartburn; that is, until I gave the package a chance. Okay, I can't as easily develop drawings in Microsoft Excel, save them in Notepad, and then run them as command-line scripts, but I can draw objects outright far more easily than I could using DraftSight.There are excellent tutorials available, and an even better user community. There's not much I haven't been able to achieve with this inexpensive drawing tool...it is well worth the money invested!

I bought DesignCAD 3DMAX in hope of rendering a mechanical drawing I'd made in PhotoShop of a flying saucer into a 3D image for my novel's book cover. I had no clue whether I could do this with the DesignCAD. I had no experience using CAD software, but I do have expertise in PhotoShop, and all that goes with years of taking just about any client file/artwork and turning it into something computer usable.The the price of DesignCAD was a fraction of what it would cost me to have a professional graphic artist do the work. I decided to trust my computer literacy, and bought the software. I had little to lose and much to gain. I'd always wanted CAD software, and the independent reviews encouraged me.When I got the software, I suspected the task might be impossible due to the incompatibility of PhotoShop files to DesignCAD. With absolutely no previous experience in CAD software, the tools were like a foreign language. However, I just plunged in to it.The first three days were a series of frustrations and dead ends. I kept working at it. However! In less than a week, using only my experience in working around file transfer problems, and the Help of the software and provided reference manuals (totally inadequacy for learning how to use the software) I managed to get enough clues to finally render my flying saucer drawing into a perfectly satisfying 3D image. I consider that a wild success!I can't guarantee your experience will be the same. All I can say is that I am very happy I purchased DesignCAD 3D Max.

I have used Design Cad for twenty five years, fifteen of those years very intensively designing components and complete buildablemechanical and fluid power machines as well as complete system schematic's. What a time saver vs the old slide rule and drafting aids on a table. Design Cad is very easy to learn and this version is even easier because the help menu and pop up (guess what) queues are very functional and therefore give you the CAD Drafter better and quicker tools to be able to manipulate your drawings.It only requires stick to it ness.

I will start by say that I have never used a CAD program before. None the less, this software is advertised as being for novices and I am quite computer literate and I have done architectural drawing for many years.My main criticism is that the tutorials, such as they are, are appalling bad. I find steps left out, multiple methods of doing the same thing which only serve to confuse, and clumsy, daunting instruction. Given that this is DesignCAD's product, you would expect the company to provide at least basic instruction in a comprehensible manner. Such is not the case.I did discover that YouTube does have videos that give very different methods of approach that work quite very. I have only started to use them so I can't say how helpful they will ultimately be, but I don't appreciate having to search the web to find second hand instruction to learn what is advertised a simple to use, basic drawing program.

As a retired engineer and electrical contractor, I have occasional need to develop a 2D sketch for a project or program. Not wanting to part with the cost of one of the main line CAD programs, finding DesignCAD on Amazon.com was a Godsend. While I haven't used its 3D capabilities, I can vouch that its 2D features are more than adequate for average layout work. It's sort of like the mainliners without their bells and whistles (which you usually can't figure out anyway). I haven't found anything I couldn't do with it yet, and the depth of DesignCAD's capabilities never cease to amaze me. Its ability to output to a system printer makes hard copies easy.

A useful CAD program, but it was far more than I needed at this time. I won't delete it, but all I was needing was a simple architectural design program that would allow 3D layout of complex room structures. Its utilities were far too complex for that simple an application. I can still use it for other design needs.