there's no mention of anticompetition measures in the eula, and all my autodesk products work fine after a day and a couple of restarts. I think that's a bit of an extreme (and poorly thought out) measure by one company to manage licenses, and I really don't think it's widespread. one thing I am worried about, though, whenever I install any new viewer for any file format is whether it hijacks the default app for opening file extensions. for example, install windows media player after, say, winamp, and wmp will try to take over .mp3, .wav, etc. files as its own. SE 2d didnt do this.
so first impressions so far:
(a word on my qualifications: I'm employed as a draftsman, I've worked in Autodesk Inventor for a few years, with past work in Solidworks, Solid Edge and Pro/E. I have done some 2d drafting, mostly as support for 3d modeling, generally in Acad.)
I was able to open a number of different formats including r14 dxf, acad 2002 dxf, various 2d dwgs. It failed to open 3d microstation drawings (for obvious reasons: its a 2d program!). I found a dwg with some 3d solids in it, missing xrefs, and it opened it without complaining about the xrefs, and converted the model into 2d polylines.
on the existing drawings I opened, everything seemed to be in good shape with a few minor issues. On one drawing a revision cloud shrank and would need to be redrawn. That, to me, is the kind of thing that's typical.
They provide a number of templated drawing border/titleblock combos. A through E, with some architectural and metric ones thrown in. they didnt have an E size provided. I'll look into customizing this in a minute. They do offer about 40 standard sheet sizes from monarch (index card) all the way up to E. I didnt see a limit on custom sizes, so I made a 100'x100' sheet and it worked.
it works like most cad that I've used, with a workspace and a paper space. you sketch up the part and then annotate it on a sheet. the sketch commands are complete and intuitive. They call snaps "relationships". They also autodimension during sketching, which I like. Parametric commands are available, and fairly easy.
file export I havent tested, but I am looking at the options. dwg and dxf save as gives you options for acad version and several for mapping layers and translating borders/title blocks/dimensions. then there are options for linetypes, weights, colors, and sheet scale.
saving as microstation dgn also has options for most of these.
I was able to import a jpg (actually a side view of a knight twister from
www.steenaerolab.com , I love their site) and resize it to an approximate scale and trace over it easily. curves are bezier splines.
it only came with 2 tutorials - a getting started for sketching and dimensioning and one for schematic diagrams. they were good, but I wish they had another that covered basics like setting up and managing titleblocks and templates, parametric sketching, etc.
Time to work. anyone have any questions about it? anything else modeling-specific that should be tested? I spose I should figure out how to get an airfoil into it.
-b