Nemetschek North America had a limited press event yesterday detailing the upcoming release of the Vectorworks 2010 product line. The new CAD/BIM software will feature a new Unified View technology that allows users to work fluidly in 3D space while maintaining Vectorworks’ existing class and layer structure setups for users. Further to this, the new superb snapping technology that came to Vectorworks 2009 in 2D is now present in 3D space, enabling users to have much more robust 3D snapping with cursor queues and automatic guide and extension lines.
A Fully 3D Environment
The Vectoworks 2010 developer is touting that the program is now a fully 3D environment but with the outstanding unique ability to continue to lead in 2D drafting and graphics capabilities. A new Planar Graphics technology enables the projection of all 2D information (lines, text, drawn objects) to be seen in 3D space with or without adjoining 3D information.
Also important in Vectorworks 2010 is the new DCM (dimension constraint management) integration. The new DCM allows users to control objects that have been dimensions by typing into the dimension text field and changing the length figure.
Overall there are over 80 new key features in Vectorworks 2010. The company said that it has been continually re-engineering the foundations of the program in unison with the work on new features. This more modern underpinning began in earnest with Vectorworks 2009 with the integration of the Parasolid modeling kernel from Siemens PLM Software.
As a result of this re-engineering Vectorworks 2010 is getting faster than previous versions as it taps into the strength of modern multi-core processors and graphics chips. Dr. Biplab Sarkar, CTO of Nemetschek North America, also told the press that the Mac version on Snow Leopard has been shown to be faster in internal testing than Windows Vista and Windows 7 version of Vectorworks 2010.
Vectorworks 2010 will be available later this month. Architosh will be publishing a series of features on Vectorworks 2010 in the coming days.