forum.datacad.com

Somebody sometime back on this forum had mentioned I look at Autodesk's Impression program...well, I finally did.
It's really awesome.
I downloaded the trial version...fully functional for 35 hours of actual work time.
I exported some design drawings from DataCAD to DWG and began learning...after watching the video tutorial.

The results for a zoning presentation in New York State are posted below.



To purchase is $495...however, it appears that once Impression 2 comes out later this year, that it will not be offered as a standalone product, so I will be buying soon to add to our array of software.

I forgot...

This took about 4 hours total.
I set it up to be on a 24x36 canvas at 1/8"=1'-0" scale.
I generated a JPG and inserted that into a DataCAD AEC that had a titleblock and drawing titles.
Then I printed to a PDF (which was 22MB's...ouch) and sent to reprographics for printing.

Well...as if I needed another reason to despise Autodesk, they have gone and omitted Impressions as a standalone product long before they indicated they would.

So, that's it...unless you spend $4000 + subscription cost for AutoCAD you can't get your hands on Impression anymore.
I was too slow...
If anybody knows of a similar product, please let me know.

Hello Ben,

The image you posted could be done pretty easily in DataCAD itself. I've done very similar images in DataCAD, using color fills and a few bitmaps.

Yeeaaahhh...

I was pretty dissatisfied with a few attempts of accomplishing this in DataCAD.

If SBF bitmaps were tile-able then it might be a decent solution, but I'd have to agree with Ben as to the ease to do an 2D illustration like this within Datacad directly. Going via O2C requires a 3D model which would work pretty good to get you a base image, but editing on the fly would be limited and require recapturing the image over and over and would require the model in the first place. But Datacad is not really designed to do this type of illustration in the first place.

Hello guys,

The only thing that is in that image that can't be easily done on DataCAD is the background gradient color. I'll try to find the images that I did a few years back in DataCAD...

Neil Blanchard wrote:Hello guys,

The only thing that is in that image that can't be easily done on DataCAD is the background gradient color. I'll try to find the images that I did a few years back in DataCAD...

Well, you can't tell in that low-res JPG, but I would argue there are several features that DataCAD can't touch...easily that is.
You can assign either watercolors, pencils, or markers to any entities.
Assign penstrokes with pencil, ink, etc...for hand-drawn flair.
The landscaping is just a sample of what is achieveable.
The grade line looks like it was done with a marker.
Bitmaps were applied by just using the paint bucket...boom, boom, done.
Anyways...I don't mean to be argumentative...just annoys me that Autodesk is alienating an entire potential market.

Neil,
Impressions does things that DataCAD simply can not do - at all, and it is MUCH faster at coloring images. It's truly amazing, and TRUE TO FORM Autodesk has made the wrong desision to essentually KILL the product by linking it to AutoCAD.

The software applies color, image textures, strokes...etc. to a layer. Order influences the output. Once you've established a structure for a particular type of drawing (floor plan, elevation...) you can apply it to a CAD file (imported into the software) at will.

One the the BRILLIANT features is that there is a "refresh" command that will re-load the original image and re-apply the coloring to the CAD line work. Now client changes can be done much faster, most of the time nearly instant.

It's a great little package, the only shame is that (1) it's AutoDesk and (2) it's now bundled with a software package that ADESK even admits is a dead end product. Go figure.