DataCAD 11

This product review continues with the "Alternative CAD solutions" series I had started in my Cadence AEC Tech News. In that series, I explored and reviewed a number of alternatives to AutoCAD, including CADopia's IntelliCAD, Intergraph's SmartSketch, Microsoft's Visio, and Ashlar-Vellum's Graphite. In this review, the lens turns to DataCAD 11, a product that celebrated its 20th anniversary last month. Since this is my first review of DataCAD, I will focus on the capabilities of the product as a whole, rather than exclusively on the new features in the latest release.

Let's start with an overview of the application, and then look in more detail at some of its key features.

Overview of DataCAD

DataCAD is developed by DataCAD LLC, a company that focuses on software for AEC professionals. In addition to DataCAD and its trimmed-down version, DataCAD LT, the company also develops o2c_Interactive!, a 3D viewing and presentation program that allows designers to explore design scenarios in 3D on the fly and present them to clients over the Internet using the highly-compressed o2c format (see my review of o2c_Interactive! in the April 2003 issue of Cadence).

Given the focus of the company on the AEC industry, DataCAD is an unusual application that is somewhat difficult to categorize. It is a CAD application that is, however, not general-purpose like other CAD applications such as AutoCAD, MicroStation, IntelliCAD, and so on, used across several design disciplines. Instead, DataCAD is customized for building design by having several tools for specifically creating walls, doors, windows, roofs, framing, etc. However, the objects created with these tools are purely geometric entities and do not carry any real-world attributes or semantic information. Thus, DataCAD cannot even be categorized as an object-based CAD application, let alone a building information modeling (BIM) application. A separate category has to be created for DataCAD, say AEC-specific CAD, of which it is the sole occupant.

The focus of DataCAD on the building industry is evident even in its file name extension, which is ".aec," starting from version 11. With this focus, and given its 20 year old history, it is not surprising that DataCAD is a popular application among architects. DataCAD LLC estimates that there are over 250,000 installations of DataCAD worldwide.

Interface

DataCAD has a unique interface that is distinctly different from most other contemporary design applications. It is designed to maximize the drawing area as much as possible, and to do so, it relies on a compact Menu window located by default to the left of the drawing area, as shown in Figure 1. Most of the application's commands and their options can be accessed in this window, where they appear as nested menus. The two main menus at the top of this nested hierarchy are the Edit menu, which contains the commands for creating and editing objects and text, and the Utility menu, which contains the commands for organizing the drawing and changing system settings. All nested commands and their options appear as submenus in the drawing window. While all the commands are also available in toolbars that can be made visible if desired, having access to all of them in one location helps reduce the toolbar clutter so common to most design applications. It does take some time, though, to get used to this nested menu system, and some would even find its text-based nature antiquated. Also, I did miss the traditional dialog box in which all the settings for a tool can be viewed and specified together. It was somewhat tedious using the Menu window to individually specify, for instance, the sill dimensions, glass thickness, jamb width, etc., for a window object, and it was inconvenient not being able to see all the current settings in one place.

The other components of the DataCAD interface all contribute to making it compact, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing. The Navigation and Projection toolbars located below the Menu window allow for quick navigation and change of views. Compactly arranged below the drawing area are the Attention, Message, and Coordinates/Hints toolbars that display system alerts, input requirements and fields, and coordinate information, as well as the SWOTHLUDFB toolbar that allows you to quickly toggle various display and plot settings on and off. Since DataCAD includes 3D capabilities, different 3D views can be created and saved, which can be seen simultaneously by opening them up in a number of MultiView windows alongside the main drawing area, as shown in Figure 1. The Status Panel toolbar above the drawing window provides quick access to color, layer, line type, scale, selection sets, saved views, and input mode. In addition, other toolbars can be made visible and positioned as required. Particularly noteworthy is a Context toolbar that automatically changes to present related tool icons based on the selected menu command.

Basic Drafting and Documentation Capabilities

DataCAD has the standard repertoire of tools for drawing and editing 2D objects, adding annotations and dimensions, creating and managing layers, referencing external drawings, inserting images into drawings, and various printing and plotting options. And yet, in many respects, it is quite unlike other CAD applications. Let's look at those aspects of DataCAD that work differently from traditional CAD for basic drafting and documentation.

As mentioned earlier, DataCAD is customized for AEC, so if you are using it for building design, you would rely on its Architect toolset for drawings walls, doors, and windows rather than on its standard 2D drawing toolset. A wall object can have 2, 3, or 4 lines. Additionally, you can specify its width, justification options, and a Clean option that automatically cleans intersections as you draw the wall (see Figure 2). To draw a wall of a specific shape such as a rectangle, polygon, circle, arc, and so on, you would use the corresponding 2D tool (located outside the Architect toolset) in the Wall drawing mode as opposed to the Line drawing mode. It is a little confusing switching between the different toolsets depending upon the kind of wall you want to draw; it would have been easier if all the wall-related tools were in the same location.

Once you have created a wall object, you can insert door and window objects in it with specified dimensions, styles, and other settings. I found that the actual process of inserting a door or window involves quite a lot of steps and was somewhat tedious, in contrast to most other object-oriented CAD applications where door and window insertion is usually a one-click process. For instance, inserting a door in DataCAD requires the selection of four points: the hinge side, the strike side, the direction of the door swing, and finally, a point indicating the outside of the wall. Once a door or window is inserted in a wall, it automatically makes a cut in the wall. Making a copy of the door or window, however, does not automatically cut the wall where the copy is placed. Thus, even if you have a series of identical openings, they will each have to be created separately for the wall to be cut. This indicates that DataCAD is not a true object-based application, as emphasized in the Overview section. Walls, doors, and windows are semi-intelligent geometric entities, but do not carry full object attributes and behaviors. Also, I found that the door and window tools only work with linear walls, not with curved walls.

Once the basic floor plan has been created, it can be detailed by adding text, leader lines, dimensions, hatching, and symbols, as shown in Figure 2. All these commands work well, and are straightforward to use. I was particularly impressed with the ease of the use of the Dimensions tool. You can create a string of dimensions, and then simply click on the Overall command to place an overall dimension of that string line. Further, there is a neat Auto-Dimension feature that automatically detects and dimensions the points along a selected line. Also very handy is DataCAD's extensive symbol library containing different categories of furniture, fixtures, lights, casework, ducts, and so on that can be conveniently added to the drawing from the Symbol Browser. Additionally, it is possible to create your own symbols and reuse them in other drawings.

With regard to editing capabilities, the verdict is mixed. There are no grips for easy repositioning of objects. If you want to apply an editing operation to a wall, door, or window, you have to select it using the Group mode; the default setting of Entity will apply the operation only to the individual lines and curves that make up the object. The Move tool does not retain any associations between the objects—for instance, moving a door will not move the corresponding cut in the wall as well—so the Move tool is not very useful. The main editing command that retains associativity is the powerful Stretch command. You specify a distance and a direction for stretching, and then simply select the area to be stretched (see Figure 3-a). All the elements within the selected area are moved, retaining their associations with related elements. As shown in Figure 3-b, even the dimensions get automatically updated, and the hatch gets redrawn to maintain the original pattern.

Other noteworthy features for drawing and documentation include the ability to define several new layers in one step; easy switching of the active layer by simply pressing the TAB key; the ability to quickly switch between five different types of coordinate input modes; and a built-in calculator that allows an equation to be entered when specifying a distance or an angle, and supports the commonly used pi.

On the flip side, I found my drawing ability somewhat hampered by the lack of convenient object snapping options. There are no separate snapping tools for different entities such as endpoint, midpoint, intersection, dividing point, center, and so on. Instead, all the desired snapping choices have to be activated in a menu; then, to subsequently snap to any one of these points, you have to move the cursor to that point and click the middle mouse button (if you have one), or press the N key on the keyboard. The snapping points are not highlighted before selection, which is usually a basic feature in most CAD applications. An advanced snapping option called Get-Snap, which lets you input distances relative to other objects in the drawing, is only available to those who have a middle mouse button.

3D and Other Capabilities

Most of the objects created for drawing the building plan that were described in the preceding section are actually 3D objects. Switching to an axonometric, isometric, or perspective view allows these objects to be seen in 3D. As shown in the upper left frame in Figure 4, the model at this stage is far from complete. To start with, the door and window objects cut the walls all the way through. This calls for separately modeling the wall sections below windows and above windows and doors, which is quite a tedious process. It would have been a great time-saver if the wall cuts had been correctly made to begin with. Also, the door and window objects that were inserted in 2D are not fully detailed in 3D. DataCAD provides separate 3D door and window objects that can be used instead. But these have to be re-inserted again in the wall openings, following a lengthy 3 to 4 click procedure similar to the insertion of 2D doors and windows described in the last section. Adding a 3D roof, however, is relatively straightforward, with the choice of several different roof types: Gable, Hip, Boston, Mansard, and so on.

Once the basic 3D model is complete (see the upper right frame in Figure 4), it can be viewed from different directions. You can display it in shaded mode and save the resulting images. You can also display the different elevation views, remove the hidden lines from the display, and save each elevation view in a separate layer, as shown in the two lower frames of Figure 4. A separate 3D Sectioning tool is available to create a 2D section from a 3D model. These automatically generated section and elevation drawings can subsequently be detailed with symbols, hatching, text, dimensions, and so on.

DataCAD includes many additional building-specific 3D tools for objects such as floor, wall, and roof framing, stairs, structural members, site terrain model, linear and curved window bays, and so on. Most standard building models can be created by the exclusive use of these building-specific 3D tools. DataCAD also provides generic 3D objects such as slabs, block, cones, cylinder, spheres, and so on, and the tools to create meshes and surfaces of revolution, which can be used to model non-standard forms. However, there is no interactive 3D modeling interface where you can switch to any kind of 3D view, set the construction plane, draw the base shape, and indicate the object height interactively. Thus, the 3D modeling lacks fluidity and intuitiveness, and cannot be compared to the 3D modeling capabilities of dedicated visualization applications.

For creating sheet layouts for printing, DataCAD does not provide separate layout tabs that are differentiated from the model space, as in AutoCAD. Instead, it lets you create "go-to views" that can capture different views of the model, each with specific layer display settings. Thus, you can create separate go-to views for each floor plan, elevation, section, detail, and so on. You can then use the Multi-layout print option to compose several such views, each at a desired scale, on a single sheet, as shown in Figure 4. One DataCAD file can contain up to 255 sheets. Any change made to the drawing automatically updates the contents of the sheets. All the sheets in a drawing can be batch plotted to a device, file, or PDF document.

Other capabilities include the ability to walk through the model, clip the model to view only selected entities, define and place up to seven light sources and specify ambient light settings, define materials for rendering and assign them to specific colors (see Figure 5-a), and subsequently view the rendered model in the built-in o2c-based Object Viewer from where you can also save the rendering as an image file (see Figure 5-b). A wide range of export options are available including DWG, DXF, DWF, o2c for export to o2c_Interactive!, VRML, and STL for use with rapid prototyping machines and 3D printers. Starting from version 11, PDF files created from DataCAD can include drawing layers (see my recent review of Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional for more on PDF and its support for CAD file layers). And finally, DataCAD has a wide range of customization options for the interface, tools, and miscellaneous settings.

Analysis and Conclusions

At a list price of $995, DataCAD is a very cost-effective alternative CAD solution for building design that includes a broad repertoire of tools for 2D drafting and documentation, a fairly sophisticated print layout system, and a decent set of capabilities for 3D modeling and visualization. A big plus also is that its system requirements are relatively modest, compared to other CAD and BIM applications: Windows 98 or later or Windows NT 4.0 or later, 128 MB RAM, and 100 MB disk space for a standard installation. This means that DataCAD can be used without being forced to carry out expensive upgrades of hardware and operating system.

Because DataCAD is customized for building design and has dedicated tools for drawing and modeling common building objects, it is faster and more efficient compared to a general-purpose CAD application. However, because it is not a true object-based CAD application in that the objects lack semantics, attributes, and behavior, it does not reach the intelligence and ease of use of object-based CAD and BIM applications. DataCAD is in the unique position of being somewhere in between these two extremes.

With regard to overall intuitiveness and user-friendliness, the application has several useful features and smarts that speed up certain operations. Yet, other operations are somewhat roundabout and need several steps for execution. In particular, the incorrect 3D representation of the walls, doors, and windows that were placed in 2D, which subsequently has to be fixed rather painstakingly in 3D, is a major limitation. The system takes time to learn and master, and the lack of a concise and interactive overview of the application is keenly felt. The only documentation that is currently provided with the application is the full system manual, which at 744 pages long, takes substantial time and effort to digest.

In conclusion, it would be fitting to ask what the future of an AEC-specific CAD application like DataCAD might be once building information modeling becomes the norm in the AEC industry. Will DataCAD's biggest plus point—its low price—still render it a viable alternative to a BIM solution? The answer to this lies not only with the speed with which the industry transitions to BIM, but also in how DataCAD evolves in response to the BIM phenomenon. If DataCAD can start to include some intelligent object-based behavior in its entities now, it could, over the years, potentially grow into a BIM solution in its own right.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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