Direct Modeling In Bricscad V12 – Part 3

<< Part 2

Here is a short video showing the use of the Bricscad V12 quad cursor.

As you can see in the video, by default the quad is placed towards the top left of the current mouse position. If it comes in your way of selecting an entity or blocks your view you can move it around and place it anywhere in the graphics window. To do that click the central button and drag mouse to the desired location.

As with all beta software this direct modeling functionality is still a bit quirky. But it gives a good idea of where Bricsys is headed with all this.

I began this series by talking about how the AutoCAD clone developers have been blindly following what Autodesk has been doing to AutoCAD. So the question is whether Bricsys copied the  quad cursor concept from AutoCAD. The answer is no. You cannot do what I did in the video above in AutoCAD. At least I don’t know of a way. AutoCAD has a command called presspull. But that allows you to only pick faces of solids or bounded areas to press and pull. As far as I know there is no way to pick an edge and create a fillet or chamfer like I did above. If I absolutely had to do this in AutoCAD I would need to pick the solid, click “Edit in Fusion”, wait for a minute to Fusion to start and load the solid, do my push/pull there and then return back to AutoCAD. Utterly pointless.

The best part is that Bricscad didn’t lose any compatibility with AutoCAD by implementing the quad cursor. The geometry definition has remained the same. Only the way you work with it has been greatly enhanced. This proves my point. As I said in part 1 of this series, there is absolutely nothing stopping the AutoCAD clone developers to make their software look and work differently or better than AutoCAD. Unlike other AutoCAD developers who make cosmetic changes to their software, Bricsys has made and I guess will continue to make fundamental change in the way their customers use their software.

Of course, Bricscad is still an AutoCAD clone and I guess will remain one for some time to come. People wanting to move to an AutoCAD clone often ask me to recommend the one that I think is the best. My reply has been to try out Bricscad along with products of the other two code bases (IntelliCAD and ARES). The way Bricsys implemented direct modeling in V12 makes me want to lean more towards Bricscad.

There are many new features in Bricscad V12. But to me direct modeling using the quad cursor stood out the most.