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Versatile 2D/3D CAD solution
DesignCAD™ 3D Max is an intuitive 2D/3D CAD software ideal for beginners, hobbyists, makers, and DIY enthusiasts. With DesignCAD, you can create high-quality designs, simple renders, and animations effortlessly. The latest release of this award-winning software supports AutoCAD® drawing files, introduces new 2D drafting enhancements, and offers expanded 3D printing capabilities and interoperability.
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DesignCAD™ is available in 2D and 2D/3D versions. DesignCAD™ 2D Express offers an intuitive interface and hundreds of 2D drafting and design tools, while DesignCAD™ 3D Max is also great for beginners, it is powerful enough to create high-quality designs, simple renders, and animations.
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.
Intuitive yet sophisticated editing tools, advanced geometric construction capabilities, customizable keyboard shortcuts, and comprehensive layer management make 2D drafting effortless. Streamline your workflow:
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:
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:
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.
DesignCAD™ comes with over 10,000 2D/3D symbols to quickly drag and drop into your 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.
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.
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.
View the internal structure of a group and any subgroups, and reorganize contents without exploding it. Group editing options include:
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.
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.
DesignCAD™ 3D Max supports importing and exporting drawings in the SKP format, compatible with SketchUp versions 3.0 to 2022.
Import and export 3D models in STL format, one of the most widely used file formats for 3D printing.
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.
Reduce all faces of a Solid Surface object to triangles, simplifying conversions to other formats such as OBJ, DWG, DXF, STL, and SKP.
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.
DesignCAD™ supports various image formats, including BMP, TIF, JPG, TGA, PCX, PNG, and GIF, providing flexibility for incorporating raster graphics into your designs.
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.
Users can now select the entire drawing simply by selecting any portion of it. The "Select right to left" functionality has been updated to automatically select the entire object if any part of it is within the selection area. The "Select left to right" behavior remains unchanged, ensuring that objects are selected only when fully enclosed within the selection box.
A new medium icon size (24×24) has been introduced via the Icon slider in the View Options dialog. This addition complements the previously available small (16×16) and large (32×32) icon sizes, providing greater flexibility for customizing the interface.
DesignCAD™ now includes support for 4K screens, ensuring clearer and more legible viewing on high-resolution displays.
Nine pre-defined views have been added to DesignCAD™, offering users quick access to essential perspectives for their designs. These include Front View, Top View, Bottom View, Right View, Left View, Perspective View, Isometric View, Parallel View, and Trimetric View. The option to select these pre-defined views is now available in the View tab of both the Classic and Ribbon Menus, streamlining the drafting process.
Similar to the Classic Menu, the Ribbon Menu now supports saving edits while in Block Editor mode. A dedicated group for Block Editor/Insert Manager has been added to the File Tab of the Ribbon, providing easy access to save and exit options once block edits are complete.
The loading time for importing very large files in 3D mode has been significantly reduced, decreasing from approximately 20 seconds to around 6 seconds in some cases.
and AutoCAD® 2023 file formats, expanding its interoperability with popular 3D modeling and CAD software.
DesignCAD™ now supports import/export compatibility with SketchUp® 2022 expanding its interoperability with popular 3D modeling software.
Numerous critical issues have been resolved, improving overall stability and user experience with over 50 important bug fixes.
DesignCAD® is delivered in a 64-bit version to fully utilize your hardware’s available memory for loading, processing, and rendering CAD files.
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.
1 Gigahertz (GHz) or faster 64-bit (x64) Intel processor.
Note: ARM processors are not supported.
Mouse Pointing Device (wheel button recommended).
Important Notice to Subscription Customers: Subscriptions require an active Internet connection in order to maintain the subscription license.