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AutoCAD Release 11 is Here!

AutoCAD is a powerful drawing tool which allows for easily made corrections or revisions to drawings as well as giving accurate and neat final drawings. AutoCAD provides you with a set of entities, such as line, circle, and text, to create your drawing to your specifications. The new Release 11 of AutoCAD provides you with even more entities to improve and enhance your drawings.

The AutoCAD Release 11 was installed in November, and it is available to anyone who has a SUN account. ECN has purchased 20 floating licenses for the SUN 4 terminals and 5 floating licenses for the SUN 3 terminals in Electrical Engineering. Therefore, a total of floating licenses are available on a first come, first serve basis. Agricultural Engineering has also purchased 8 permanent licenses, which are installed on the SUNs in room 105 of Agricultural Engineering.

If you would like to access AutoCAD 11, you must first set your environment. If you use a Bourne shell (sh) or korn shell (ksh), indicated by a $ prompt, then you will add the following lines to your .profile file:

          ACADSERVER=ups.ecn.purdue.edu

          export ACADSERVER

If you use c-shell (csh), indicated by the % prompt, then you will add the following line to your .login file:

          setenv ACADSERVER ups.ecn.purdue.edu

If you do not put this into your .profile or .login files, then you will have to execute this from the command line each time you wish to access AutoCAD. However, it is only necessary to execute this once per session.

Once you have set the environment, the path to open AutoCAD Release 11 is

          /usr/unsup/acad11/acad/acad

Some of the new tools available on AutoCAD 11 are

• stand alone or network environments
• multiple viewports from different angles of the drawings
• locking files
• audit command to correct errors in the drawing
• ddedit allows editing of text attributes
• option of model space or paper space, previously only model space was available
• new zoom command, 'vmax', to zoom to current viewport's virtual screen
• shading
• additional layer commands
• external references for blocks which upgrade the inserts when blocks are upgraded
• associative dimensions can be edited with object it defines
• increased options from the pull-down menus
• additional big font text styles
• simplified aliases for basic commands i.e. a=arc l=line z=zoom
• the "tilemode" command, which enables Release 11 to act like Release 10

The most important of the new tools available with Release 11 is the Advanced Modeling Extension (AME), which all of the AutoCAD 11 licenses include. The AME gives AutoCAD the capability to create solid, three-dimensional objects on the computer screen. You can define an object's physical and material properties allowing for their analysis as well as editing the shape to create new designs. This tool allows you to view shaded renderings, which aid in visualizing three-dimensional designs. The AME also assures that your creation is informationally complete and that you have not missed anything when it is time to create or build the design.

There is a whole manual on AME, entitled Advanced Modeling Extension. In addition, there are also other manuals available on AutoCAD, which are located in the Siegesmund Engineering Library in Potter Center and in room 105 of Agricultural Engineering. There is also a tutorial to help you learn the new release capabilities in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step manner.

If you are interested in learning more about AutoCAD, there will be two short courses offered in the beginning of the Spring semester. The first will be a lecture, "Introducing the Basics of AutoCAD." It is scheduled for January 31 from 9:00-10:30am in MSEE B12 and those attending may sign up for a hands-on course offering an opportunity to practice and experiment with AutoCAD. The second short course will be a "What's New" lecture on some of the updated tools offered in the new Release 11. This class will be on February 7 from 9:00-10:30am in MSEE B12. This course is for those people who understand the basics and wish to learn about some of the new tools.

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