On Sep 26, 7:52 am, Airbus wrote:
In article ,
says...

I am a bit wary of AutoCAD. I remember back in the 1980's that its
popularity seemed to have more to do with its accessibility on a PC
than its stellar modeling capabilties.

Yes, AutoCAD's huge success was based simply on the fact that it could run
on a PC instead of a mini or a workstation. Because it was the first, it
became an entrenched standard.

This was my suspicion.

It was designed by software programmers and not engineers so the interface
was never very intuitive. It began it's life as a 2-D drafting platform
and evolved into 3-D, so the early drawbacks of the system were just buried
in the core architecture of the software.

I can't comment on current CAD systems as it's been many years since my
involvement, but in the old days AutoCAD was considered quite mediocre
compared to newer systems.

AutoCad has continued to improve over the years, and it would be an error to
say it is poor or weak compared with its competitors. However its competitors
are not the parametric, 3D modelers you need for complex, fluid-form
mechanical models. You need one of the others mentioned for that.

For project management and building trades, AutoCad is very standard - You
can bring twenty contractors into a room and 19 of them will be running
AutoCad and can (and do) exchange files throughout a project.

It's perfectly possible to do 3D modeling and rendering with AutoCad and its
add-ons, and the latest versions have pushed this functionality further - but
it is not intended or well suited for 3D mechanical, beyond simple tasks.

This is why I became suspicious.

The last time I fiddled with AutoCAD was in 1987, 20 years ago, and
even back then I just assumed that complex 3D modeling was standard.
I never actually knew.

It is a bit hard to swallow that what was aguably the leader in CAD
design for PC's at one time has still not "going all the way". On the
other hand, as I said, I'm clueless, so maybe if/when I get into it,
I'll find that I'm worried about nothing. I'd rather someone just
tell me.

I did take a look at X-Plane, per John Smith's suggestion, and at 1st
glance, it seemed to be too high-level for what I'm looking for. I'd
almost rather the tool not know that I'm trying to make a (very) small
airplane, or if it did, that knowledge would be a result of libraries.

-Le Chaud Lapin-