Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums Modifications Audio ? about Autocad

Is Autocad a free internet based program like winisd, or is it a program bought off of store shelves?

It's about $1200, I have never seen a place that actually keeps it on their shelves. You could copy it from someone else but that is illegal of course

i work at compusa and we sell it...its in "lockup", its a super special area of the store thats behind 15 inches of concrete, steel bars, 4 cameras, motion detectors, alarms, and one 4 inch solid steel door, lol. it is extremely expensive though, and you have to pay out the nose for more than one license. Although it is THE most powerful program for CAD design and rendering jobs. never used it, but i know that is the industry standard that all others are measured by...sounds a lot like what photoshop does for the graphics gurus.

I am a mechanical designer/drafter, and have used just about every program out there. Autocad is an inferior product compared to almost any product out there. As for availability, you can purchase any drafting software out there at Journeyed.com. But, I believe you must have a student ID. If you know someone in college or that works for one you can buy anything on their site. If you are looking for a good program that is easy to use I suggest Inventor, an Autocad product but not at all as limited as Autocad, also SolidWorks is a very good program. If you want the best and have time to learn get Pro/ENGINEER. But, be aware this is an extremely difficult program to learn! Also, Journey does sell books that teach you how to use all of these products. If you have any questions just PM me. Hope this helps. Any of these programs can be purchsed for under $300 US. Even Autocad if you like.

AutoCAD is good for 2D drafting for the casual user. That's about it. When I learned CAD in college, we learned on AutoCAD 11, and solid modeling was stupid. Not a bad program to put on a PC for an engineer in a plant who uses CAD occasionlly, but the serious drafters generally won't touch it. My old school started using I-DEAS to teach after I had the class (I think that's the acronym) and it was super cool. IIRC, Ford used Pro-Engineer for their product designs. Our facilities engineers did use AutoCAD for the plant layout (2D).

Exactly! AutoCad is used 75% of the time for 2D drafting; however, there are a few companies that use it for simple solid objects.

I for one uses it for plant layout as I have industrial engineering duties, but for my products that I cover, I only use Pro/Engineer.

Sometimes, I hate being a multi-versatile engineer because I want to spend alot more time with fixture and product designs, but I cant complain since the pay compensates my work overload.

AutoCad 11 did not have good solid modeling. The newer versions are somewhat better. Even better than Pro Engineer is CATIA. They used that to design the 777.

Also, many of the inexpensive copys of autocad have hardware locks.

Pro-E is the way to go.
It is very widely used,
can be converted to many, many formats.
Is compatible with many other programs, like Flotherm for example.

A cheap down version of AutoCAD, called OrCAD can be purchased at many college campus bookstores for about $55 with manual.

I-DEAS is evil and was created by Satan!! I like PATRAN and FEMAP much better. However, these 3 programs are pre/post processors for FEM, not drafting tools.

For Solid Models Inventor R5 is AWESOME!!! made by autodesk so its easy to learn for people trained in 2d autocad