DesignCAD 2022

Versatile 2D/3D Solutions for Every Project

DesignCAD™ 2D Express and DesignCAD™ 3D Max meet all your design needs, from easy-to-learn and use 2D CAD programs to versatile, general-purpose CAD tools. DesignCAD™ 2D Express provides an intuitive interface to access hundreds of 2D drafting and design tools, allowing you to quickly and easily create precise, true-to-scale designs - ideal for architectural drawings, engineering layouts, and more. Meanwhile, DesignCAD™ 3D Max provides the flexibility to create precise, high-quality 2D designs, 3D models, renderings, and animations. Whether you are designing furniture, decks, floor plans, architectural drawings, engineering layouts, electronic schematics, plats, maps, elevations, or even hobby toys, DesignCAD™ gives you the tools and ease you need to bring your ideas to life.   

Easy to Use 2D Drafting & Design

Intuitive yet sophisticated editing tools, advanced geometric construction capabilities, customizable keyboard shortcuts, and comprehensive layer management make 2D drafting effortless. Streamline your workflow:

• Usability Tools: Increase productivity with user-friendly features tailored for efficiency.
• Workspace Tools: Customize your workspace to suit your preferences and project needs.
• Macros: Automate repetitive tasks and save time with pre-defined macros.
• Drawing Tools: Access a wide range of tools for creating detailed and accurate drawings.
• Editing and Measuring: Precisely edit and measure elements within your design.
• Dimension Tools: Add professional dimensions to ensure clarity and precision.
• Groups, Blocks, Symbols, and More: Organize your designs efficiently using groups, reusable blocks, and an extensive symbol library.

Precision 3D Modeling

Unleash the power of 3D modeling with a complete set of primitives, including boxes, spheres, hemispheres, pyramids, cylinders, cones, and tori. Shape your 3D parts effortlessly with Boolean operations such as solid add, solid subtract, and slice. Enhance your designs by applying realistic materials to create presentation-ready models. Key features include:

• 3D View Settings: Customize your viewing experience with adjustable settings for optimal visualization.
• 3D Primitives: Easily build complex models from basic shapes.
• 3D (Solid) Editing Operations: Modify and refine your 3D objects with precision.
• 3D Visualization: Explore your designs in stunning detail with advanced visualization tools.

Realistic Visualization and Lighting

Bring your creations to life with lifelike colors, materials, textures, and texture maps. Render your 3D models with transparency, fogging, shading, and dynamic lighting effects for added realism. Standout features include:

• Shadows: Enable shadows to ground your objects naturally within their environment.
• Procedural Textures: Incorporate realistic textures like marble, wood, cement, grain, Perlin noise, brick, cells, and extended wood patterns into your designs.
• Image Fills: Use custom images as fill patterns to add unique visual elements to your projects.

Animation & Walkthroughs

Engage your audience and showcase your designs with animated presentations that feature dynamic walkthroughs of your 3D models. Bring your creations to life by simulating motion and interaction to effectively communicate your vision.

2D/3D Symbols

DesignCAD™ comes with over 10,000 2D/3D symbols to quickly drag and drop into your design.

3D Model Content for Easier Architectural Design

Access 600 editable 3D models to quickly drag and drop into your architectural designs. Each colorful, fully texture-mapped symbol can be modified to your exact specification.

• 129 Structural Models: Doors and hardware, windows and window treatments, fireplaces, wood moldings, and more.
• 234 Kitchen Items: Cabinets, appliances, faucets, sinks, counters, and more.
• 52 Bath Items: Tubs, faucets, sinks, vanities, and more.
• 134 Residential Items: Furniture, lighting fixtures, and home décor.
• 51 Office Items: Desks, file & storage cabinets, tables, shelving, and more.

Smart Menus

DesignCAD™ offers smart menus that are initially presented with a shortened list of available menu commands to help reduce screen clutter. The menus can be expanded to show all items by clicking on the double arrows at the bottom of the menu. Great for learning, this option can be enabled or disabled depending on the user's preference.

Layers

DesignCAD™ utilizes layers that can be independently switched on and off for better visibility of the drawing. For example, if you just need to see the outline of a component, switch off other layers containing center lines, dimensions, etc. DesignCAD™ can also lock layers so they are visible but not editable, preventing accidental changes. Some features of objects, such as color or line style, can be controlled on a per-layer basis.

Group Editor in Info Box

View the internal structure of a group and any subgroups, and reorganize contents without exploding it. Group editing options include:

• Move highlighted group members or entire subgroups to a different layer.
• Remove individual objects or an entire subgroup from the topmost group (Extract).
• Move objects between subgroups of the topmost group (Move To).
• Collapse an entire group hierarchy to a single-level group (Unnested).

Drawing Compare

Select two DesignCAD™ drawings or BMP images, and the Drawing Compare feature will perform a visual comparison of the two. This tool is invaluable when working collaboratively on a project or when revisiting an older project to assess updates. Use it to compare a design with an As-Built drawing to identify where changes have been implemented.

Added Flexibility When Sharing Your Work

• Print Section: Print only a specified region of the drawing for focused output.
• Print Scale Options: Choose from a standard set of print scale options or create custom scales tailored to your needs.
• Enhanced Print to PDF: Print multiple panels to PDF format, creating multipage PDF files for comprehensive documentation.
• User Notes: Add notes directly to any drawing for better communication and record-keeping.
• Save for Sharing: When saving a drawing, all externally referenced files (textures, symbols, images) are saved to a subfolder bearing the host drawing’s name, ensuring all dependencies are included.
• Paper Space Mode: Create a view frame and select a specific scale or define a custom view frame scale for precise layouts.

Interoperable & Extendable

AutoCAD® DWG/DXF Compatible and More

Work seamlessly with the latest AutoCAD® files. Import/Export AutoCAD® files from R12 through 2020, enjoying excellent compatibility with AutoCAD® layouts, paper space, layers, line styles, views, and blocks in both DXF and DWG file formats. DesignCAD™ also offers limited support for architectural objects, recognizing and exploding them into DesignCAD™ equivalents.

Import/Export SketchUp Files

DesignCAD™ 3D Max supports importing and exporting drawings in the SKP format, compatible with SketchUp versions 3.0 to 2022.

STL Support for 3D Printing

Import and export 3D models in STL format, one of the most widely used file formats for 3D printing.

Import/Export OBJ Files

OBJ files serve as a common means of exchanging 3D models and are compatible with many CAD and solid- or surface-modeling programs. Note that DesignCAD™’s OBJ capabilities are limited to geometry only; materials and texture mapping are not supported.

Triangulate Surface Command

Reduce all faces of a Solid Surface object to triangles, simplifying conversions to other formats such as OBJ, DWG, DXF, STL, and SKP.

More Vector Formats Supported

In addition to the formats mentioned above, DesignCAD™ can import WMF, HPGL, and XYZ files and export or save to WMF, HPGL, RIB, VRML, WPG, and PDF formats.

GIF Image Support and More

DesignCAD™ supports various image formats, including BMP, TIF, JPG, TGA, PCX, PNG, and GIF, providing flexibility for incorporating raster graphics into your designs.

Extendable

Leverage the built-in BasicCAD scripting language or OLE Automation—or combine both—to add custom tools and enhancements to DesignCAD™, tailoring the software to meet your unique workflow requirements.

DesignCAD^® is delivered in a 64-bit version to fully utilize your hardware’s available memory for loading, processing, and rendering CAD files.

Operating System

Microsoft Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8* 64-bit, Windows 7 (64-bit) - 4 GB RAM, 750 MB free Hard Drive Space.

Note: DesignCAD^® is designed for desktops or laptops that meet these requirements. Windows RT technology for tablets is not supported.

Recommendation: Your experience with DesignCAD^® will be greatly enhanced with a newer generation, higher-speed CPU, with 8+ GB RAM.

CPU Type

1 Gigahertz (GHz) or faster 64-bit (x64) Intel processor.

Note: ARM processors are not supported.

Other

Mouse Pointing Device (wheel button recommended).

Important Notice to Subscription Customers: Subscriptions require an active Internet connection in order to maintain the subscription license.

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