The end users benefit by having products that are both more capable and easier to use.Īs I was producing this roundup, Actify was updating its entire product line and sent me a prerelease version of Actify SpinFire Professional 8.0. As applications evolve, usability features such as this one provide a path for vendors to distinguish their product from others. Forward label viewing results in the dimensions reading correctly-not backwards-when viewed from the back. If you've viewed and rotated a 3D file that includes dimensioning information, you'll note that when viewing the object from the back the dimensions read backward-often making it difficult to get the information you need. For example, the new Actify SpinFire 8.0 software has forward label viewing, which I saw in beta release. A significant number of products were prerelease versions, indicating that viewers definitely are not a static segment of the software industry.Īt the upper end of the viewer spectrum, I found remarkably useful features. The overall quality is very high-you'll have to determine which is appropriate for your intended usage. By using the feature table that accompanies this article at you should get some idea of which viewers will meet your needs. What may be an A+ viewer for one user might be considered a C viewer for another. With the variety of viewers in this roundup-11 vendors responded to Cadalyst's invitation-it was impossible to include a report card. Something for Nothing Free Viewing Software from Adobe, Autodesk and SolidWorks And they do work well-very well-based on my findings from this roundup. Expand this situation for many file formats, each with its own history of variations, and it's sometimes amazing that viewers work as well as they do. You may well need to view and work with files that go back a number of years, so even a single format such as DWG has numerous variants-some of which may contain components that are not supported by a particular viewer. Take AutoCAD files as an example and note the number of changes that have occurred to the DWG file format over the years. I was impressed with the overall quality of the viewers and their nimbleness in handling a variety of files.įile formats, both 2D and 3D, change frequently. I ended up testing each of the viewers with a variety of file formats, including specific files that I knew would be problematical based on past experiences. As it turned out, the scope was broader than I expected: some excellent viewers supported only a few AutoCAD file formats and no SolidWorks formats, and other viewers supported more than 400 different file formats. Do you work in just 2D, or is some of your work 3D? What do you need to do with the drawing files? Is a simple viewer enough, or do you need to control layers, view attributes or view cross sections? Do you require markup and redlining tools? Are you working alone or do you need an enterprise-wide viewer? Does the viewer enable easy navigation within both files and directory structure? What is the cost of the application compared with the feature set? Lots of questions, but fortunately there are many capable applications from which to choose.įor this roundup, our original intention was to test CAD 2D/3D file viewers with both AutoCAD and SolidWorks test files. When deciding which viewer is appropriate for your needs, the first question is whether the viewer supports the file types you use most commonly. Your needs might extend to showing models to clients, in which case you may need more-sophisticated viewing options than suffice for in-house use. A small, AutoCAD-only design firm has different requirements than a large design house that might use SolidWorks, Inventor and CATIA in addition to AutoCAD. In the viewer market, no one-size-fits-all application exists. Whether you need to find a particular design in a set of files or mark up and communicate data with your design team, a drawing viewer of some sort is essential. Cadalyst Labs Review: View Masters 30 Apr, 2006 By: Ron LaFon New 2D/3D viewers for CAD drawings
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