Mike Allen

Thank You!!!

Thanks for releasing this! I'm looking forward to fewer crashes. The readme page is a bit confusing - "In order to install Hotfix #3, you must have Hotfix #1 and Hotfix #2 installed first." - I thought that Hotfix #2 incorporated Hotfix #1 (If it doesn't, where can I get HF1?) Secondly, once I have HF3 installed, I don't see the new option to save the Scene Browser state on the Tools>Options>Interactions tab. Is there something else I need to do for it to appear?

Are you using a mouse pad? I had the same problem for a while - it started when I started using my IronCAD 10 mouse pad, which has a slightly shiny surface. It had me stymied for a while, since I didn't make the connection at first. Then I did some searching on the topic of pointers spontaneously moving to the corners of the screen & came up with a connection between optical mice and reflective surfaces. Stopped using the mouse pad & my pointer stopped running away from home.

Dolly In & Zoom Out is how I have always widened the perspective in the past. I was sort of hoping that these tools would be a combination of the two.

On the Camera Advanced toolbar, I'm having trouble seeing the difference between Perspective Wider/Narrower & Zoom in/out. Perspective Wider makes the image larger in the window, but doesn't seem to change the relationship between foreground & background objects. The effect seems to be identical to zooming in. And once the image goes outside the bounds of the window with the Perspective Wider tool, I have to zoom back out to fit the image inside the window - which seems to put me back exactly where I started. Any clarity as to the difference between these tools & zoom would be greatly appreciated.

Downloading & installing the latest "Quadro Graphics Driver" seems to have taken care of some of the problems (I'm not sure which version we started with - "performance," "application," or "partner certified" - our IS department set it up). I still have a problem with things being selected in the scene that don't show as selected in the scene browser & things highlighted in the scene browser that aren't selected - but selecting parts in the scene is much better. Still interested in hearing from other Quadro FX1500 users regarding which settings give the best visual performance. ********** I got curious & went to download all the other driver types & it appears that "graphics" & "performance" are the only two available for the Quadro FX1500 ("application" & "partner certified" are in the list, but don't turn up anything when I hit the search button.)

We just got a computer upgrade, with new Quadro FX1500 video cards & now IronCAD 10 doesn't seem to visually perform as nicely as it did with our old Quadro FX500 cards. So far, we've tried the default setting and the specific IronCAD application setting. In both cases, we get parts highlighted that aren't selected & parts not highlighted that are selected. It's very confusing to use. Any help from the community would be greatly appreciated!

Speaking of crashes - after every few crashes it's a good idea to check your C:\Documents and Settings\..\Local Settings\Temp\ directory for leftover files. IronCAD writes files there while it is running & deletes them when it shuts down correctly. A crash that doesn't allow IronCAD to shut down and delete its temp files will leave them behind. Too many files in this directory will impact your system performance.

http://www.3dcadbrowser.com/ "Free" if you upload a model to trade. (It took several days for them to evaluate the models I uploaded & then only accepted one. But there was only one model that I needed to download, so it worked out fine.)

To my way of thinking, the sketch is the only thing that would be in the scene. Everything else would be created in the drawing (dimensions, notes, architectural elements.) It isn't a perfect solution for things out of the 2D catalogs, since they would be associative to the view only - you couldn't attach them to features in the view. Maybe they would require a scene catalog of architectural elements done as 2D shapes. You can change the properties to the dimensions in the drawing - even if you dimension the sketch in the scene. Granted, you won't see feet/inches when working on the sketch, but the drawing output could still be feet/inches. I think I'd be tempted to break the sketch into modules - for instance, a room at a time (or even a wall at a time), to keep from having one giant sketch that might be lost if there is a crash before saving. All the modules could be grouped into assemblies. I don't know what to do about the last point. Carlo has the best solution - just work with 3D extrusions. There's almost no difference in IronCAD between a 2D sketch and converting that sketch to a 3D extrusion. You could work almost entirely in plan view, but gain the benefits of the TriBall, etc.

If I can remember back to my initial CAD training in the early 1990s (after we passed the initial board drafting skills), we worked in AutoCAD's 3D model space at 1:1, even if we were only doing 2D work. The 2D paper space was only for title blocks (and maybe dimensions.) I don't see any reason why it should be any different today with IronCAD. Work in the scene (with either 2D shapes, or full extrusions.) Then create a drawing to view their sketch. They can dimension in either the scene or the drawing. No need to make a drawing sheet any bigger than can be printed.

Here's one that I did, using parameters to drive the height of a part. Tips_and_Tricks_05_07.pdf

Brian isn't at work today, but I can confirm that text references in version 9 drawings do update correctly in version 10 with the hotfix. Text references in version 9 drawings that were saved in version 10 before the hotfix don't all update (the Last Saved Date reference needs to be clicked into edit mode before it will update) - but as far as I can tell, all the other references update correctly.

For the Projection Direction, try 0, 1, -1 & for the Up Direction, try 0, 1, 1. They are vectors, so at 45º, the values should be equal (any numbers should work in this case, as long as they are equal.)

There is an upper limit to the number of sheets you can have in a drawing. We discovered this the hard way - by creating a drawing with too many sheets. You may want to try opening your drawing file on another machine (one with more memory). If you can get it open, delete some sheets from one end or the other & save as a new name. Then open the original file again & delete sheets from the other end & save as a new name. We generally don't do much more than 20 sheets per drawing file. The file we learned our lesson on had 45 sheets. Before I saved it the last time, things started going wrong (text not showing up, annotations disappearing, etc.) & performance became really slow. This was a long time ago (IronCAD 6, maybe?), so I don't remember exactly, but it might have crashed on a subsequent save. I do remember that I was able to open it on a machine with sufficient memory, but was only able to delete sheets & save. (It's been a very long time since I've seen an IronCAD drawing file actually become corrupted if it crashes during a save. Usually, when you open the file again, it reflects the previous version - probably, IronCAD is writing to a cache until the save is complete & then replacing the file.)

Very nice job on the new splash screen! I especially like how it changes the image each time you open IronCAD. Overall, the new interface is very nice - and performance on big models is quite fast I'm sure I'll have more comments later, but I just wanted to let you know that my first impression is good!

Each new configuration starts as a copy of the current configuration. You may just be missing the correct options. For most purposes, the Create Configurations dialog box should look like the attached image: New parts added in other configurations will be suppressed in your new configuration & your new configuration will store the positions of your parts/assemblies. If you have holes or other intellishape features that need to be suppressed/unsuppressed in your new configuration, check the second box. Change the positions & suppressions of your parts after you create the configuration. The positions/suppressions are saved when you leave the configuration. Your Default configuration should normally show everything - unsuppressed & in the correct position. From there, you can create a new configurations and modify the position & suppression of your parts/assemblies. Subsequent configurations can either be made from the Default, or another configuration. Just remember not to make changes until after you create a configuration. Adding parts to your scene after you have created configurations usually requires a decision. Parts added to your Default config won't show up in any of your previously created configs. But parts added to any other config will show up in the Default config (in the orientation of the config in which they were created.) Sometimes you have to weigh the options: adding parts to Default & modifying other configs, adding parts to Default & deleting other configs, so you can re-create them from the Default or adding parts to a config & moving them in the Default.

You might consider keeping a catalog for the purpose of getting parts & assemblies from one scene to the next. That bypasses the anchor issue with parts in assemblies, since it doesn't rely on the windows clipboard, but instead uses IronCAD functionality. Just select your part or assembly, drag it into your catalog, go to your new scene & drag the part or assembly out of the catalog.

How will you account for waste? Usually, when you cut up a sheet of plywood, there is a certain amount of sawdust generated. The divide tool would have to be able to take into account the thickness of the cutting tool and estimate how much of the original material will end up on the shop floor.

I tried Wink - and the output is very good. If I were putting together a presentation, I think it would work very well. I'll have to work with it some more to see how well it can output a quick & dirty video, without any annotations. (Since it wants to animate between key frames, rather than record continuous motion.)

Hi Tom, The idea is to insert the artwork from Illustrator into an IronCAD drawing, while keeping the same sharp edges. Rasterizing to a bmp doesn't quite yield the results we're looking for. (Plus raster images of a high enough resolution to look good when printed take up a lot of space.) We've tried saving as pdf & importing, but that rasterizes at too low a resolution and angled lines become jagged (text can become unreadable). In the past, we've used Freehand to insert detail vector illustrations into IronCAD. In general, we'd create a new Freehand object in IronCAD, which opens a blank file (as Brian described above.) We'd open the Illustrator file in Freehand, copy & paste into the blank file, then "exit & return to IronCAD." The result is a clean, sharp illustration that is virtually indistinguishable from an IronCAD line drawing. Plus, the object is scalable, so it doesn't get jaggy when it's very large. Unfortunately, everyone uses Illustrator & nobody uses Freehand - so we chose to upgrade Illustrator to keep up with the newer file format. That creates a problem when we try to get the Illustrator file into Freehand. Ideally, we'd like to have a simple, one-step solution for getting Illustrator files into an IronCAD drawing, without losing the sharp edges of the vector artwork.

I have a powerbook G4 (at home) & I believe all you need to do is turn on File Vault, which is built into the operating system (I think it's under "security" in System Preferences.) Then every time you shut down, if there is fragmentation (usually after deleting or moving files), it will ask you if you want to reclaim the space.

They are evidently relying on Internet Explorer to make the SWF files look right. If you use the automatically generated html file to view the flash in IE, it looks pretty good. If you use the auto-generated html file to view the flash in Firefox, you get a blank screen. (They post a workaround to fix the html, so it also works in Firefox. The auto-html has incorrect size information, which IE evidently ignores.) If you simply run the flash file in your browser, it resizes with the window & looks pretty bad most of the time. So it looks like the capture region could be set to any arbitrary size, as long as the file is played with the accompanying html. Still it works pretty well for the price (but I wish there was more control over the flash output.) I suppose the only way to really use it, as is, would be to always play through correctly formatted web pages.

Using all the defaults provided less than satisfactory results with SWF. The flash output resolution seems to be fixed at about 940 x 704, so that's what I set my region to. Also, under Options>Record to Flash Options, I checked "Display conversion options before generating SWF" - which allowed me to modify the default flash settings & change the color mode to 32Bit. That makes all the difference in the world & you don't get the blocky look around moving parts of the image (I don't know why they have the default set at 16Bit, since it gives such poor results.) test.swf I also set the Video quality to 100 percent, since I don't care how big the initial AVI is. I've been playing with the Flash compression - PCM (no compression) doesn't seem to create much bigger files than APCM, so I choose PCM.

During beta testing, I've been trying a lot of different screen capture programs to create movies of what is happening on my computer. Most of the free ones are less than effective. Then I found CamStudio - http://www.camstudio.org - which is a very nice open source (free) program. It includes a module called SWF Producer, that compresses huge AVI files into tiny SWF files (I started with a 73MB AVI and end up with a 643KB flash file.) Just thought I'd pass it along.