CAD Programmes

[Elliott Hopkins]

A recent interview has drawn to my attention my lack of CAD experience.

What is the industry standard program? What is the cheapest and easiest way to learn it?

Thanks.

Elliott.

[Stu]

Auto-Cad is widely used, easy to use for simple drafting, layouts, blah, blah.

There are many other products also, depends what your field is as to what else you would look at, especially if you are doing solids rather than just 2D stuff (allthough Autocat is a 3D).

[gps3300]

It depends what industry you're looking at. *Very* generally speaking, aerospace uses CATIA V5, the electronics industry tends to use PRO-Engineer & automotive was IDEAS but is now swinging towards CATIA. A professional course for any of these is going to be a week long and cost around £1K

[josh_smaxx]

Ive got the manual for an old auto-cad (release 8 IIRC) and its huge, like 1000's of pages read the first 40 odd and gave up, still got auto-cad 2000 though.

[LEGEND]

At the school i go to there is a program called 'Pro Desktop' where you can create all sorts e.g camera's, cars, wheels, nuts, bolts, computers. You can make almost anything you can think of. And it is very easy to use as-well.

[Stu]

Pro-desktop is a freeware program from the makers of Pro-engineer. It's a nice little thing for training and the makers promotion, but not really an industry standard.