AutoCAD 2010 Is Finally Unveiled

I hope many of you were able to view the Autodesk 2010 Product Release Webcast today. If not, Shaan Hurley has posted a link to the webcast on his blog. The webcast was recorded and can be viewed by anyone willing to provide your name, company name, email address and accept the privacy statement. There will be another webcast on Friday, February 6, at 9:00 am PST. Details can be found on Shaan's Between the Lines blog. This second webcast will cover Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Utilities, and Geospatial.

Today's webcast showed some of the great new features of AutoCAD 2010. Some of these features were available to Autodesk Subscription Customers with AutoCAD 2009 such as PDF overlays and 3D printing. Since the majority of my work is with a vertical (Civil 3D), I was unable to enjoy these cool new features. These features are now fully integrated into AutoCAD 2010 and that means they will also be included inside of Civil 3D 2010.

My two favorite features of today's webcast are PDF's created by AutoCAD and parametric drawing constraints. I know we've been able to plot to PDF for several releases now via either an AutoCAD pc3 file or third party applications (both free and paid versions). However, let's see those third party applications do what AutoCAD 2010 is doing with their PDF's. Here's a list of a few things you can do with PDF's created by AutoCAD 2010 that were shown in today's webcast:

• Create PDF's that include layer information
• Overlay PDF's in a manner similar to images or DGN's
• Change the transparency of the linework shown in a PDF overlay
• Snap to geometry points of the linework shown in a PDF overlay
• Change the visibility of the linework shown in a PDF overlay
• Clip the PDF overlay similar to xclip with an attached drawing
• Modify the clip boundary on a PDF overlay
• Invert the clip boundary on a PDF overlay
• Lines merge or lines overwrite option
• Text can now be embedded into the PDF so you can search for text
  

Now honestly, I'll bet you can't wait to go check out AutoCAD 2010 for yourself. Be sure and keep your eyes on the CAD media, because there are more things being unveiled in the upcoming days.