Two Thoroughbreds
The 1938 match race of Seabiscuit vs War Admiral has been called the greatest sporting event in American history, the greatest match race of the century. Two legendary horses running side by side at the Pimlico Special, just the two of them. The ’Biscuit and the Admiral raced into history.
That’s where PowerCADD and WildTools are today. So completely in a class of their own that all others are irrelevant. Both all alone and away up yonder, ahead of them all. But in this case, the only winners are the riders. And if you’ve enjoyed the trip so far, cinch up your saddle. It’s going to be a wild ride.
If you’re a AutoCAD user, are you tired of an inelegant operating system with too many reliability problems? Do you love your system the way PowerCADD users do? Are you weary of an unresponsive CAD company and exhorbitant upgrades? Do you feel like you’re riding a mule? Send the old nag to the glue factory. Get a race horse.
There are literally hundreds of new features and refinements. Many are important, much-requested enhancements. Many are subtle, fine-tuning improvements. And some are things that go beyond the scope of any reasonable expectations and will come as a complete surprise to experienced users.
If you want to win at the races, bet on a race horse.
Climb into the Saddle
Have you ever wanted to set things up the way you like them and have them stay that way? Your own pen sizes, colors, arrows, dimension styles, custom hatching and other office standards. And when someone sends you a drawing from another office, you still want things to be set up your own way. Don’t mess with my drawing board.
Welcome happy morning, Global Attributes is here. Your Attributes menus are always the same, from drawing to drawing or all around your office. And it doesn’t change a thing in your current drawing. It’s an elegant way to implement office standards with the same set of attributes on every machine, and by using one file it is portable from system to system.
Into the Starting Gate
Immediately at hand is the new Attributes Window, a rich and full-featured floating window with a complete set of choices for pen color, pen pattern, pen transparency, line weight, arrows, dash, fill color, fill pattern, fill transparency, hatch and hatch origin.
ATTRIBUTES & TEXT ATTRIBUTES
All of the object and text attributes can be set in these two floating windows. Use the sliders for pen and fill opacity.
The Defaults Window is still available if you want to use it, but the Attributes Window is great for large screens where the choices can be spread out. And if you want to mix your own colors, the System Color Picker is right there for you.
Whoa Nelly! Transparency! Did somebody say transparency?
That’s right. You can control the transparency/opacity of every object, group or even whole layers to create exactly the look you desire in your drawings.
GHOST RIDERS IN THE SKY
Overlay multiple transparent images. In this case, the horse and the Manhattan skyline are photographs with the opacity set to 25% to desaturate the images.
Image credit: A section study by Julia Miner and Phil Loheed, who can’t be blamed for the horse.
Select the object and adjust the opacity sliders in the Attributes Window to get the transparency just right. Or double-click the layer in the Layer Window and play with the opacity slider for the entire layer. Transparencies work with text as well. Yes, the opacity of a gradient fill can be adjusted. And, of course, the opacity is blended by the Blend Objects tool.
You can use opacity for more than see-through transparencies. Suppress part of a drawing to tone them down. Desaturate a photo to put it in the ‘background’. Wash a graduated tone across your drawing with a transparent gradient fill.
IT LOOKS LIKE FADED PAPER
but it’s actually a transparent gradient fill that produces the subtle color change.