Drafting Evolution: Smart Investment on Your Hardware

Drafting, well known as technical drawing in many industries such as mechanical engineering, architectural, electrical, interior design etc. Also considered as production drawing.

It's combination of act and discipline of composing plans that visually communicate how something functions or has to be constructed (wikipedia.org: technical drawing).

Source: Wikimedia.org

I personally live in Indonesia and was graduated as a mechanical engineer. However, since my 2nd year in university, I began to work in CAD environment, in early 90's. It forced me to know more about other industries such as architectural, interior design, electrical, civil & construction, and even animation.

Being a member of a small team that had huge impact on a market development of a popular CAD software in Indonesia, had given me the insights about the market attitude, at least for nearly 1.5 decades.

In early 90's, most engineers and designers in Indonesia were using manual drafting in order to achieve and generate technical drawings. After they were being introduced to a more powerful tool known as CAD (Computer Aided Design), they started to migrate in using computers, slowly. But, I could still recall, engineers saying that "You couldn't have the real feeling when drawing with keyboard and a thing that you call mouse. It's a drawing table and all those necessary tools that you need to accomplish a technical drawing. I don't want to remember all those commands. It's easier to just draw a line using a pen instead of remembering commands." Yeah right. However, those persons were way left behind when their friends were moving away from manual drafting.

In time, CAD softwares evolved and more choices surfaced. Next, we're in 3D world. However, observing those engineers, architects, designers and so on, when they are using CAD software now, ... they were just using small numbers of features available in the CAD softwares. Mainly, they use it to create:

1. Objects (lines, curves, dimensions, texts, hatches, etc.)
   
2. Blocks
   
3. Layers
   
4. References
   
5. Technical drawing hard copies.
   
6. Sharing DWG files.
   

And many of them are forced to buy licensed copies of the CAD software, then again, only use a small part of its features which would not justify the price they pay.

Some CAD Softwares, offer better pricing which they claim to be compatible with DWG file format. Eventhough this option is available, they still think that pirating the software would be the best investment, until they got caught by law enforcer and forced to pay even more during legal process. It's just a game of hide and seek between users, and law enforcer.

The question remains the same: "If we're just a common CAD software users, do we have to pay premium price for my CAD software?"

Well, gladly, not anymore. If your goal is just to create a 2D technical drawing and in the end, you want to share your drawings with your colleagues and or distribute them for production/construction, then you need to consider DRAFTSIGHT. DRAFTSIGHT is an application, developed by a leading company that develops software to create aeroplanes, helicopters, spaceships, cars, and even more amazing state-of-the-art masterpieces. DRAFTSIGHT comes from Dassault Systemes.

DRAFTSIGHT is a FREE professional grade, powerful, 2D drafting software, that generates and edits DWG files. Creating objects, blocks, layers, references and other things that commonly "need to have features" by drafters are built inside DRAFTSIGHT. It saves your investment for software, so you could concentrate the investment to go for the best hardware, such as HP Workstations.

Imagine this: you need to purchase a CAD software ranging from US$ 1,000 to 3,000. Once you're done with the purchase, you are almost out of budget to get a proper hardware to run the CAD software it self. Worse to come: every year, you are being recommended to change your hardware, because your paid software license upgrade requires higher hardware to run it.  It will multiply your investment without you knowing the ROI clearly. Your next choice is to get a gaming/business computer to run your paid CAD software with high risk of failures and hicups.

DRAFTSIGHT Screenshot

Now, consider this: your investment on your CAD software is US$ 0.00. That leaves you a huge room to play with your investment on hardware. Particularly on the reliable ones: HP Personal Workstation or HP Mobile Workstation.

What I like about DRAFTSIGHT is, its intuitive interface that every single CAD user being familiar with a popular CAD software, will fly with DRAFSIGHT as there are similarities in it. Dassault Systemes doesn't abandon the people who would like to try DRAFTSIGHT. At their website, they provide a comprehensive learning materials as well. So, new users may learn how to use DRAFTSIGHT in no time.

DRAFTSIGHT comes in different Operating System support: Windows, LINUX and Mac OS. It's one of the biggest advantage of DRAFTSIGHT.

So, it's your choice now. You're free to try, and even use DRAFTSIGHT as your main CAD software FOR FREE! And it's legal. Simply go to www.draftsight.com, and download the version you need. ENJOY.

A good quote from a friend of mine:
"There's nothing extraordinary from things that were created using full features tool. But, it's clearly extraordinary when those things were created using common and limited tool." - Aditomo Soedarsono