ACIS R16 Major Kernel Update
Integrated ACIS R16 SP4 from Spatial. The new ACIS build represents over a year of maintenance work by Spatial relative to the R15 build used in version 3 including hundreds of issues addressed including blending, shelling, faceting, booleans, and local face operations. This also includes updates to the IGES, STEP, PRO/E, and CATIA v4 translators. The PROE translator now supports reading Wildfire version 3 parts and assemblies.
Photo Rendering with Lightworks 7.6
A number of new color and displacement shaders have been added to the release, including the ‘Paving” color shader and ‘Roof Shingles’ displacement shader which further extends photo rendering of procedural materials for the building industry.
In association to the paving color shaders, 12 new paving materials were added to the drag and drop render library. They are located in the Masonry category. Six of the paving materials use a matte finish and six use a satin finish. These new materials are all 3D procedural shaders providing a high level of detail and parameter customization.
Preview Drawing for Photo Rendering Material Exploration
The Rendering Material Settings dialog box was enhanced to support rapid material previews for photorealistic rendering. The Preview menu now supports a Drawing option which updates attribute settings on the object in the drawing window. This new feature allows the ability to quickly view changes in attribute settings directly on the object in the drawing window.
Click on image below to see demonstartion of the new material preview feature.
Faceting Improvements
Normally the facets surrounding the poles of spheres are narrow and sometimes unnecessarily too numerous. The new version reduces the number of facets near the poles of spheres, ensuring an aspect ratio that is more consistent with facets near the equator of the sphere. In addition to improving the quality of the display, these changes have positive impact upon outputting mesh/facet data to stereolithography, DXF, DWG, and Electric Image
Importing Paper Space and ViewPorts
Concepts now supports paper space and viewport entities imported from DWG and DXF files. DWG/DXF files support two drawing areas which include model space and paper space. All modeling is typically done in model space. Paper space is an area normally used to organize and annotate data for printing. The paper space sections of a DWG file may contain title blocks and annotations that are associated with the model. Paper space also contains ViewPorts which define a viewing region and orientation of the geometry located in model space.
Entities in paper space are imported as layers and sublayers which preserve the same name and organization as in the original file. Each paper space may contain one or more viewports. Viewports provide the ability to view specific regions of model data. Viewports are precisely preserved through the Concepts draw view entities.
Exporting Paper Space and ViewPorts
Paper Space and ViewPorts are somewhat unique to AutoCAD. Many applications are unable to support their complex definitions. To broaden our ability to share this data with other applications, Concepts automatically explodes viewports into entities typically supported by most applications. This unique implementation means it is now easy to share paper space data through our Adobe Illustrator export.
Improved Cursor Snapping
Feedback and responsiveness for cursor snapping was dramatically improved for large files, especially those with groups and drawing views.
Saved Views
The saved view command now stores the viewing region along with the viewing orientation. Clicking on the view name to restore, will now restore using the saved view region.
