- Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)
- 9 Aug 00
Macs do well
at CAD Shootout!
This year's CAD Shootout at AEC Systems was again covered by ArchitecturalCADD
with detailed
coverage of the jury's comments and screen shots. The detailed
comments of individual jury members is very interesting in that
it reveals important details about each team and its software and
the hardware involved.
Notable this year was the appearance of VersaCAD,
a favorite CAD application from the Macintosh's past. VersaCAD 2000
was used along side its sister application 3D Joy, and the new VersaCAD
team apparently did pretty well for a first time event. The most
interesting news was that the VersaCAD team did there work on two
Macintosh PowerBook G3s
and used the infrared ports to achieve networking—a required
feature of the competition.
Where are those Power Mac G4's?
Longtime Mac CAD leaders VectorWorks chose to use two networked
Power Mac G4s, fully
loaded and decked out for rip roaring performance. In addition,
they were apparently working on Apple
Cinema Displays. This, unfortunately, provided some problems
for the team because they were unable to project their work onto
the large audience screen due to no analog output ports on the all
digital TFT screens.
The VectorWorks team also did well at the CAD Shootout, as they
usually have over the last several years. Be sure to read our detailed
interview article on VectorWorks
CAD and Mac OS X.
form-Z Team
Perhaps the most unique feature of this year's event was the appearance
of a form-Z team. And the good news is they did quite well. The
form-Z team did most of the 2D and 3D required elements in the competition.
As one juror put it:
Going into this challenge, we knew that
FormZ is a powerful 3D modeler. What we didn't know is how good
would it be at doing a whole building project. It was interesting
to see how quickly the FormZ Team had a great appropriate frame
building.
While the form-Z team used Wintel hardware, specifically a Pentium
III machine with NT running on it, this great software—like
so much else in the computer world—was developed first on the
Macintosh and continues to be Mac-focused product. FormZ, which
has always run on the Mac, will be coming to OS X as well.
Conclusions and Wishes for Next Year
It was good to continue to see Macintosh at the 2000 AEC Systems
CAD Shootout. In the past teams such as ArchiCAD and MiniCAD/VectorWorks
have used Apple Macintosh computers to race against time and other
teams in a competition that reveals the virtues of both individual
hardware and software packages. What a delight it was to see the
return of VersaCAD, at one time of the most important CAD applications
running on the Mac. Even more delightful was their choice of two
PowerBook G3s with infrared networking as their choice of hardware
for this event.
But why network with infrared when you can have AirPort?
Next year it would be nice to see all of the Macintosh software
running on Macintosh hardware using AirPort networking. If this
was to happen, the team of ArchiCAD, VectorWorks, FormZ, and VersaCAD
would all be on Power Macintosh. That would be quite a scene, fifty
percent of the shootout for AEC pros on Macintosh!
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