DataCAD Plus Drawing Board Edition.(DataCAD's CAD software)(Software Review)(Evaluation)

Touchscreen-optimized intelligent CAD

Some market-driven software vendors give their products grand-sounding but uninformative names. Others with a more straightforward style adopt nomenclature that actually describes what the product is and what it does.

An example of the latter is DataCAD's new DataCAD Plus Drawing Board Edition. Parsing the name, "DataCAD" identifies one of the widely used stalwarts of the architectural CAD industry. "Plus" denotes significant additional functionality grafted onto the DataCAD core. And "Drawing Board Edition" announces a new CAD input/output alternative to the ordinary keyboard/mouse/monitor interface.

DataCAD was one of the first architecture-specific CAD packages to come to market, harking back to the early 1980s. Although updated from its DOS ancestry to full Windows functionality, the DataCAD bloodline was getting a bit thin. So, through a corporate marriage to its distant cousin, Spirit (sold in Germany by Software GmbH), DataCAD has spawned DataCAD "Plus."

This addition to the family integrates DataCAD's traditional ease of use and 2D drafting productivity with an intelligent 3D modeling system called ZAC, for Zone-based Architectural Construction. ZAC provides an abstract mode that underlies both the 2D and 3D representations of a building, organized by zones (which loosely correspond to stories). Because ZAC provides automatic links between 3D architectural models and corresponding plan, section, and elevation orthogonal drawings--and vice versa--architects using DataCAD Plus will be able to focus more on "drawing" their buildings support than on drafting their "drawings."

Consistent with its name, DataCAD Plus manages the properties of all ZAC elements in a database, which supports external links to cost-estimating services, building product catalogs, and so forth. Beyond its integrated 2D, 3D, and database capabilities, Plus adds significant new visualization and rendering tools, including extensive libraries of drag-and-drop textures and entourage elements (trees, cars, street furniture, people, and so on). Also, paths through or around rendered models can be saved as animated "walk" files.

Among the other plusses of "Plus" are large collections of predefined building components, such as Andersen windows, comprehensive stair-building and roof-creation modules, and up-to-date import/export compatibility with AutoCAD's DWG file format (via the industry-standard Open-DWG translation utilities). The Plus version also enables users to merge and manage raster image data, such as aerial photos, in the same drawing with architectural CAD vector images.