Does ANYONE know how to use AutoCAD properly anymore?!

[Hazdaz]

I am just kind of venting here... but feel free to add any of your experiences.

 

We have an intern that is graduating from school, and I am blown away by how many things she does not know about AutoCAD. And I honestly can't blame her - she tells me all the time that her instructor told her to do something this way, even though that way is totally wrong or a way longer/more complex way than it should be. It was bad enough that she actually called me from one of her classes the other day to ask me a question - even though there were 40 other students in there and an instructor and none of them knew the answer.

 

Similar deal with this other employee we have - nicest guy in the world, but when it comes to CAD skills he is a C at best.... yet even he is 10x better than the guy we had before him that he had to let go cuz it took him a whole day to do something that should have taken maybe 15 minutes.

 

The last company that I left, they went through 3 other guys in the spam of 2 months before they settled for this one guy to do drawings.

 

Who is teaching people how to do CAD and what exactly are they being taught?!?

 

Ugh.

[Jeff Mottle]

I've since left production, but during the 10 years I was, I think I can count on one hand the number of competant CAD operators I've seen. I doubt you are alone. I think it comes down to two things. Most people who teach were never in production or have been out of the industry for too long, and second there are not a lot of CAD operators who like their jobs enough to really be pationate about the work they do. They don't seek to better themselves or want to know how to do things better or seek excellence in their work. I think that could probably be said for most professions and jobs. I would hazard a guess that only a small percentage of people view their job as anything but something to pay their bills.

[John Martin]

Now this is a thread I can relate to. I have only recently begun to do visualization work and have been using Autocad since version 10. I definitely am one of the people that Jeff talks about that is passionate about CAD work. I absolutley love to do production work, and even more so since I recently started using Revit. I also love Viz stuff, as much as I do production stuff.

 

I am recently retired US Air Force so I am not sure how thing work on the outside yet, but when I was in our schooling was FAR better than anything I saw on the outside, and we got a lot of training if we asked for it. The problem was that our upper management was not always receptive to paying for it, but most often they did. I took some classes during my last assignment (AF Academy) since I was not in CAD at the time just to keep my fingers and right mouse button lubed up. What was being taught even in upper level classes was a joke. The instructor did not even know how to modify the PGP file nor did he know what that was. CAD 101 stuff in my opinion. I would not know what to do if I could not use my "non-standard" stuff.

 

My 17 yo son has recently begun taking CAD classes in high school and I find it is the case there as well. I got good at Autocad, and Microstation as well, by taking some free time to READ the book and help files thoroughly. That can make all the difference.

 

One last note, we could get more qualified CAD guys/gals if instructors went less by the book and more from PRACTICAL knowledge, as well as DISTRIBUTING knowledge and not keeping trade secrets to yourself. Most people I have trained in the military got good because I needed their help and WANTED them to get better. But as always, a good supervisor makes for a good troop one day

 

Anyway, Hazdaz, be glad that she is asking or help because when they stop asking you probably need to worry.

 

 

John

[Brian Smith]

I can't agree more with the comments so far. Unfortunately, many CAD drafters (especially CAD managers) will be damned before anyone can tell them that there is a better, more efficient way to their work. They tend to be very stubborn to change.

 

Those of us that got started with the DOS versions of AutoCAD, i.e. without icons, benefited from better fundamentals like using keyboard shortcuts and less powerful machines that required very streamlined files and good file management. I remember the days of watching screens refresh one layer at a time where it could take a full minute or more to do a simple zoom extents.

 

Like many jobs, you usually can't be really good at it if you aren't passionate about it, because if you aren't passionate, you won't spend any time learning new ways. I still spend no less than 10% of my work week exploring different ways to do things.

 

When I left my drafting job as a CAD manager long ago, my boss asked me to spend the last 2 weeks writing a standards manual for others to use after i was gone. It's about 30 pages and I'm thinking about including it in the Int/Adv Max book coming out later in the year. There's also going to be a couple Insider articles on this subject next month.

 

My biggest advice for anyone just getting started in 3D is to take a good drafting/architectural type class before doing anything 3D related.

[CADclips]

Hello All,

 

Great thread. I really think the problem lies with the CAD instructors out there in the colleges and universities. They tend to be civil servants with absolutely no ambition to advance their own CAD skills.

 

As a professional CAD trainer and autodesk AE of 15+ years I know this first hand. I am so passionate about CAD training I have a web site www.CADclips.com where by I provide Video Training Tutorials for AutoCAD, REVIT and ADT to people all around the globe.

 

I fear that the instructors who are putting out these students are people who took a basic class from me about 15 years ago in AutoCAD 12 or 14 and that is where they stayed. Line, arc, circle trim and block. No xref's, no paperspace, no dimscale, definately no 3d and no real world application.

 

www.CADclips.com offers all AutoCAD video CADclips completely free. No login or registration is required. I suggest all AutoCAD students (and instructors) download the AutoCAD stuff and learn it because chances are they won't get it from school.

 

DG

[John Martin]

Brian somewhat hit on something I forgot to mention. Having been military for the last 20+ years I grew up "on the boards" and only switched to CAD once it became the norm in the military. You gain an appreciation for getting it right the first time when you are doing drawings on vellum or mylar because erasing and re-drawing was a PITA. Efficiency was a prime factor in everything I did. I once walked in to my office as a young airman probably 19 years old only to find my boss at the time ERASING my drawing. His reasoning: I freehanded a couple of small breaklines on the drawing. Could he tell by looking at it? He said no, but he saw me doing it earlier in the day so he knew I did. Damn was I mad. Did I ever freehand again. Not a freaking chance. Should he have done that? No, but I learned a hard lesson and passed on my experience to everyone I trained.

 

Being a 2-handed draftsman has made me so much better. Trying to teach a new CAD operator to keep one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse is like pulling teeth. I don't like icons, never have, so it is going to take some getting used to in Revit now that we are switching over. My PGP file and LISP routines are conveniently located on the left side of the keyboard with none longer than 3 characters. Some of them do not even resemble the command the refer to, but I know them so that is all that matters. It is all about efficiency for me, especially in a production environment.

 

John

[BrianKitts]

B My PGP file and LISP routines are conveniently located on the left side of the keyboard with none longer than 3 characters.

John

 

I really think our cad managers should start teaching that as well in house. They are making a huge push to tighted up drafting standards.. but I've been hearinng complaints about effecincy as well.

 

I have limited cad skills I don't do cad production at all at my current employment, but I was lucky enough that my first job that did teach me autocad, they didn't use hardly any tool bars. As I walk around our office, I see half the people using nothing but tool bars, they might as well be sitting on their left hand. It kind of annoys me to see it.....personally I'm surprised I haven't broken more keyboards they way I use mine....

[AJLynn]

Good point - firms need to teach this stuff in house or get their people trained. A lot of firms hire people out of architecture school assuming they know cad or will pick it up, and these same people get promoted or hired by other firms later never having learned properly. Heck, I never learned it all that well and I taught it as a grad student and have been on the cad committee at 2 firms and was cad manager on a project.

 

The problem is with the assumption that schools teach cad. They don't. Unless the degree program is in cad drafting. Architecture schools teach academic topics and design theory, building systems and structural theory, and usually some kind of drawing, but if they teach cad it's not on the level you guys are talking about, and it probably shouldn't be.

[Hazdaz]

I think one of the biggest problems is that even teachers don't know jack about CAD in general, but AutoCAD specifically. And in the workplace, supervisors usually don't know anything either.

They might see a pretty drawing (and think that the person did a good job), but don't have any idea (and might not care) if it was drawn correctly or it is even remotely accurate, and never think about if the file was organized properly to allow easy updating in the future.

 

And AutoDesk themselves can be blamed for much of this - after all, lets be honest here, AutoCAD is a VERY deep and wide program... lots of command with lots of options and tons of different ways to do the same thing. Years ago, they should have consolidated many of their commands, but never did. Then they added icons for this and that, and many n00bs just pick and poke for "the little icon with the squiggly line" and don't really know all the other options available to them when using the keyboard, they just go for the easiest option.

 

And I do have to mention something - which honestly might offend some of the people here - but people coming from an architectural background are much worse than people that come from a mechanical/engineering background BY FAR. I can not count the number of times that Arch people have either no clue at all about 3D or simple things like viewports and setting dim styles. I first learned AutoCAD back in highschool - within a few months I knew more about the program than my teacher, but one of the best things about that class was that we still had drafting boards with *GASP* paper and pencil. I am so glad I was forced to draft that way because I learned so much in thinking ahead and general drafting guidelines. Kids these days don't have to deal with those issues and the limitations we had, so they don't care if they don't purge their file, or do other very messy things to their geometry.

[AJLynn]

Right - all the more reason not to teach AutoCAD to architecture students.

[John Martin]

I agree. Left us draftsmen/women do the drawing and not the engineers/architects. After all, a GOOD draftsman should anticipate the needs of the architect/engineer and be able to produce with little interaction past the original concept talks. It has been my experience that the best architects started out as lowly draftsmen that decided to advance, not BETTER, their career by getting the education that goes along with the PRACTICAL knowledge.

 

John

[AJLynn]

Or let the firms provide training.

[e-YELLOWCABS.COM]

What is the purpose of a cad sofware???

 

Hi all

 

I'm quite surprised by so much "surprises" about what a teacher can teach !

Learning Cad is like learnig to drive a car, that's all !

After few years of practice, you won't be abble to race in competions, it takes time. No way to say that the driving instructor was bad, he just gave the basics...

Second point, NOBODY knows completly the possibilities of autocad, for instance. A cg architect will think to know it well, but a mecanic ingenner will think that this stupid cgarcitect knows nothing at all ! A question of purpose, I say.

I know some artists who uses cad only for what it is: an electronic way to reach an other step of creation.

And then?

You could be the best cad monkey, but if you do not sense photoshop, like painting and artitstic sketches, you'll be a bad 3d artist, cad is a pen, no more, no less.

pierre:eek:

[david hinton]

Your comments about the teachers and their knowledge of autocad is correct in most instances. As an Instructor and user of Autodesk products for twenty-plus years, I have witnessed so many incompetent instructors. And it's not just them, it is the book authors and publishers as well. I have been saying for years, almost every book published about Autocad is wrong. A common problem that I have found with every student I have taught that have prior experience from a highschool or another college is that they draw everything on layer zero first then move them to the correct layer afterwards. I found that it was the text that was advocating that method. If you review any acad book, you will find that the first chapters tell you about the capabilities of the software, then the setup process then they start you creating basic shapes,but most books do not address layers until five or six chapters later.

 

We have instructors from the highschools to the universities that teach from books, chapter by chapter,assignment by assignment, and you get students that can only do what the book has addressed and how it was presented. This matter of when and how to use layers and Xrefs,and creating working drawings never mind teaching students how to use a metric scale or even an imperial scale is lost. We simply have the blind leading the blind.

 

I personally do not use a text, though I request that they have a text for command reference only. I use my experiences as a contractor and I invite outside professionals from all disciplines to share their experiences and their problems with my students. I allow them (the professionals) to have a heart to heart talk with students without me in the room. I still start every student with basic drafting processes and show how it relates to today's cad processes and how some companies continue to use both.

 

I give students assignments from many disciplines that are not complete, so they have to think and ask questions. I have started developing scenerio-based assignments based on some of the most

common situations in cad production cycles, such as Project planning, which plotscales,dimscales,ltscales to assign based on the client's requirements. Also the planning of details,sections, and elevations. The use of 3D and animation in the preliminary design and the marketing aspect.

I hire only applicants that have real-world, hands-on experience and are currently employed in the field, but they must have knowledge of how all disciplines use cad and can demostrate it.

[Frosty]

Like AJ, I taught many architecture students while I was in grad school. I taught all variants of software - 2D Cad drafting, 3D modeling, raster graphics, vector graphics, page layout, vdieo editing, and web design. I always tried to remain metaphorical while teaching any particular software. I always spoke about the logic behind any particular problem and multiple methods of finding a solution. I felt this methodology allowed students to become critical thinkers about their given task. They wouldnt become experts in any given software but they could reason their own way past most problems by understanding how the software worked.

 

Some students didn't like that I didn't teach a click by click course. However, most excelled and became software chameleons able to use what ever was given to them. Not every office uses software X and its incredibly important to for a student or even architect to be comfortable using anything to get their design out. Yes, even a pencil.

 

Oh, and I was also a stickler for hot keys, often giving pop quizes on things like CTRL-C, V, X, Z, A, S. It always amazed me how few people knew very simple tricks.

[Geoffc]

Ive been on cad for 15 years, since r10.

 

And one thing has never changed: consultants are always 5 releases behind, both literally and skill wise.

 

And yes, I'm referring to engineers, landscape architects, civils, etc.

Blows me away that 15 years later, many are still not aware of paperspace or xrefs. Ask them for their CTB file, and you might as well have asked them for an explanation of nuclear fission.

[Hazdaz]

^^ You mention the CBT file - see that is one of those instances where I think that AutoDesk is heavily at fault for a lot of the confusion. There should be NO good reason that those "support" files can't be embedded into the file itself. I admit it, when it comes to CBT or STB files, I rarely remember to send them along when I have to email a file out. And since I heavily depend on my CBT file to make my drawings look good, anyone else printing my file will not get the same result.

 

Similar deal with xRef files... but there I believe that AutoDesk has a Pack-n-Go tool that lets you save all those file together, but even with well over 12 years with the program, I admit that I have never used that command.

 

Of course any semi-serious AutoCAD guy should at least know what a CBT or STB file actually is.

[Frosty]

one of those instances where I think that AutoDesk is heavily at fault for a lot of the confusion.

 

I dont think this can be stated strongly enough. One of AutoDesk's major flaws is that their software still tends to work like something from 1980. There should be no such thing as "pens" in a modern cad file. Modern users should not be faulted for not immediately uderstanding the need for this. I dont think any other cad program uses and archaic methodology such as this. As far as I'm aware, EVERY other cad program uses visible line weights i.e. .25mm, .5mm, 1mm. I do understand that the paper space / model space workflow impacts this, but I think AutoDesk can greatly improve in this area.

[John Martin]

As far as I'm aware, EVERY other cad program uses visible line weights i.e. .25mm, .5mm, 1mm.

 

And so does Autocad. There is a nice little button at the bottom labeled LWT that visibly shows lineweight.

 

And one thing has never changed: consultants are always 5 releases behind, both literally and skill wise.

 

This bugs me as well. I really hate saving DOWN to allow consultants to use our drawings. I just upgraded to V2008 and still have consultants that use V2004.

 

John

[STRAT]

i'm on 2004 (ADT 2004) and have no intention of upgrading.

[John Martin]

Strat,

 

And I would not expect you to. If you were working with us I would save down because getting the job out is more important than what I feel about it. I understand that some folks may never upgrade. It really has a lot to do with the size of the firm as some of the smaller 1 or 2 man firms may feel like it is not in their best interest, but if it were me it is always worth it. But that is just me.

 

Autodesk has solved this dilemma for the most part with their DWGTrueConvert utility, as I can send the 2008 file to you and you could change it to 2004 on your end. It save me a step but adds one for you. Always a give and take isn't there.

 

 

BTW, do you think there will continue to be a strong enough market for ADT now that Revit is really starting to come of age?

 

John

[STRAT]

ADT is basically autocad under the hood. well it is for those of us that only use it as autocad. in work we use ADT and 2004. i only choose ADT because i find it more stable (nothing in it really, but perhaps it suits our systems more). so, ADT will stop (if it already hasn't) being supported by autodesk. but autocad wont. and like all other cad products, revit will never rival autocad's market share.

 

this means i'll then use 2004 instead of ADT in work. no great shakes. if my office upgrades then fine by me. makes scense as the lower acad versions wont be supported. But in work we're not in a major hurry to upgrade. peeps here aren't too happy with A.D.'s subscription schemes nor their lack of usability in the latest releases.

 

on a personal note, nope, i wont be upgrading at home for those last reasons listed. besides, i can think of a whole lot of other things more usefull to spend a few K on which i cant afford in the first place. 2004 does everything an AutoCAD system should do for me BIM and intelligent modelling AEC style systems have never been in my own working system.

 

getting back on topic though, i wont even get started on peeps who cant use acad properly.

[Hazdaz]

^^ Save your cash - there is honestly little reason to upgrade past AutoCAD 2002 really. Every release since then has been teeny tiny changes - up until 2007, and I am NO fan of that release. Like was mentioned above about AutoCAD being still a product of the 80's and tries to (sort of ) hide that fact by dumbing-down way too many things. It's quite aggravating for people that actually know how to use the software.

 

In all honesty there is no way to take AutoCAD into the 21st century. It would break too many old commands and LISP routines and pretty much every add-on program every written for it. To get something modern, the answer is Inventor (or I guess for you Arch guys, Revit, which I admit to not being too familar with).

[AJLynn]

Three words: Sheet Set Manager.

[Geoffc]

Actually, 07 is great for us blacksheep that model in it...