New Start

Sunday, June 19, 2011

LD Assistant 2011 Release News

When It's Your Design That's On The Line, Why Settle For Less Than The Best!
Design & Drafting is completing beta testing of LD Assistant 2011, the World Standard in Entertainment Lighting Design. This new release offers more FX to Entertainment Lighting Design and Event Planning than any other CAD program on the market.
Other companies claim to push the boundaries of CAD, but we must ask, do they have 3D Audio, LED Screens, Fireworks, Smoke, Fire, Ice, Water, Wind, Real-Time Video Playback or a built-in Real-Time Visualizer so you can connect your console to the CAD program?
With LD Assistant you get NO HYPE, only real tools to help you win more jobs.
"If you can find a CAD program that has all the same features that LD Assistant offers for under Twenty Thousand Dollars ($20,000), we will buy it for you," says Rufus Warren of Design & Drafting.


LD Assistant Ac11 has a list price of only $2,895.00 USD.


LD Assistant 2011 Pre-Order LD Assistant 2011 and Save $300.00 On New or Upgrade Versions
Pre-Order and reserve your copy of LD Assistant 2011, the most advanced Lighting and Event CAD program ever offered!
When you pre-order, your credit card will NOT be charged until the program is shipped.
LD Assistant 2011 is slated for release between June 15 and July 15, 2011. Be the first to have this superior program ORDER NOW.
This offer is ONLY good until LD Assistant 2011 starts to ship. 
Click here to pre-order LD Assistant 2011 and SAVE $300.00!



New Features and Enhancements in LD Assistant 2011


3D Environment
For over twenty-five years, Design & Drafting has pushed the boundaries of CAD with the most advanced features found in any Entertainment Lighting Design program. With the release of LD Assistant 2011, Design & Drafting has once again raised the bar for other CAD programs to emulate. The completely seamless 2D and 3D worlds of LD Assistant make it the most powerful Entertainment Lighting Design program available.
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3D Tools - Too many 3D tools to show here! Click on a picture below to see a short movie of a few of our 3D tools.


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3D Audio - The Cool Factor
Walk your client around in a fully rendered environment with 3D audio. As you walk from one side of the room to the other side, you will hear the change in audio level. Walk from the stage where you hear the speaker or band playing to the back of the room and hear people talking ... or walk from one room into another and hear different music playing. When it come to the WOW FACTOR, LD Assistant is the ultimate CAD program. The options are endless!
Click here to see and hear a demo. Design & Drafting pushes the boundaries of CAD once again! 


snd1LED Video Screens - Way Cool
With an easy-to-use dialog box, users can control how a movie is being played back on any screen or block. Now for the first time you can walk your client through the show with LED screens. With LD Assistant's LED VIDEO you can control LED Cell Size, LED Cell Gap, Edge Sharpness, Color Brightness, Color Contrast, LED Luminance or you just use the Default Data. Designers can also assign a LED playback to a lighting fixture as a gobo, and see the movie play during a walkthrough or moving creation.

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Pyrotechnics - Breathtakingly Cool
Because wooing clients is more than plucking down a 2D drawing, Design & Drafting has added Pyrotechnics to LD Assistant 2011. With the click of the mouse, designers now can show their clients what an event would look like if pyrotechnics were added. By giving your customers more real-time walkthrough visuals, your company will offer more than your competitor's 2D drawing. Once you and your client decide on a design, LD Assistant 2011 - using the same drafting tools used by 9,000,000 designers - will produce the cleanest 2D drawing on the market.
A simple dialog box sets the height of the rockets and the size of the sphere radius. Click here to see a demo

Curved Text - Rather Cool!
Place text along a polyline, rectangle or circle. Draw a polyline and click on the curved text tool and type away. LD Assistant 2011 adds an easy-to-use dialog box to simplify the job of added curved text to your drawing.

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GrandMA Console Support
LD Assistant 2011 is an ALL-IN-ONE CAD program, and we have added the MA Lighting GrandMA protocol to LD Control. LD Control sends and receives DMX or SACN. With built-in Ethernet and USB support, LD Assistant again leads the way in CAD for lighting design. Includes support for Art-Net, ENTTEC, Pathport and SACN.

New High End Animation
Draw a polyline and LD Assistant will roll the camera, recording video along the path. Designers can also have the camera point at an object as the camera rolls along a path, capturing the lighting, video and pyrotechnics effects.

LD Assistant Now Open For 3rd Party Plug-ins
Design & Drafting has opened up LD Assistant to allow Plug-ins to run inside one of the most advanced CAD programs in the world using LISP. LISP is based on the LISP programming language, which is simple to learn and very powerful. LISP applications are stored in ASCII text files that you can edit. Before you can use an LISP application, it must first be loaded. You can load LISP routines each time you run LD Assistant 11. Click here to start learning more about programming in LISP. Create and sell your LISP plug-ins at LDAssistant.com.
Visit cad4theatre and download your first two LISP programs free of charge; one will rotate attributes, and one will perform channel sequencing. Each are courtesy of David Ripley.

LD Assistant's DWG NOW On iPhone, iPad & Android
Open, Edit and Save Using WS Mobile App on iPhone, iPad or Android. View, edit, draw and markup LD Assistant DWG files. The next time you're on site and need to make changes to your plot ... just open your iPhone, iPad or Android. Make measurements, add text or draw using the built-in toolbar. You can share drawings with other WS App users for online viewing, editing, and downloading.


June 2011 - Featured LD Assistant Rendering

If a picture is worth a thousand words... then here's a few thousand! 
Special thanks to Kevin Denzel for allowing us to show some of his work. Renderings are copyrighted © by Kevin Denzel.


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June 2011 - FREE LD Assistant DWG CAD Blocks

Created in LD Assistant by Rufus Warren of Design & Drafting. Download them and enjoy courtesy of Design & Drafting. Click on the picture to download. Don't own LD Assistant? Visit LDASSISTANT.COM to learn more about this unbelievable CAD program.


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June 2011 - Articles and How To

AutoCAD WS App for iPhone or iPad - view, edit, share DWG files, Red Villanueva of Hagerman & Company, Inc., YouTube
How to: LISP for the Non-Programmer - writing LISP code in Notepad, Dan Shrader, The Kung Fu Drafter
Hardware for the CAD Professional, Part 1 - Base Requirements Are the Starting Point, - Part 2 - Defining Workstation Categories, - Part 3 - Processors, Cores and Background Processing, - Part 4 - RAM: How Much is Enough, by Ron LaFon
AutoCAD for Mac Content Palette - select block, drop into drawing, icon size can't be controlled, blocks tracked easily, by Lynn Allen
Parallel Osnap - use of AutoCAD drawing aid explained, Christopher Fugitt
Create a Scaled PDF of Your Drawing - plotting to PC3 file in AutoCAD, saving layout setup, Ellen Finkelstein, AutoCAD Tips Blog
AutoCAD and Windows 7 Tips - use classic theme, turn off Aero glass, default screen color depth, more, LT is Still AutoCAD
Creating PDFs with the DWG to PDF Driver - virtual plotter driver in AutoCAD creates PDF with useful features, Russell Martin, Cadapult
How Strong is the NVIDIA Quadro 5000M Graphics Card? - up to 5x faster for triangle calculations, 8x faster for simulation, John Evans
Dell Precision T5500 is a Power-Packed Tower - dual Intel Xeon X5680 six-core CPUs, up to 72GB of RAM support, offers great performance at affordable price, David Cohn, Desktop Engineering

Monday, May 23, 2011

May 2011 - Featured LD Assistant Rendering

If a picture is worth a thousand words... then here are a few thousand! 
Special thanks to Kevin Denzel for allowing us to show some of his work. Rendering are copyrighted © by Kevin Denzel.


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May 2011 - Featured News


LD Assistant Files - NOW On iPhone, iPad & Android Using AutoCAD WS
AutoCAD WS App for iPhone or iPad - view, edit, share DWG files, Red Villanueva of Hagerman & Company, Inc., YouTube
AutoCAD WS for Android Tutorial - opening, editing drawing, commands on draw toolbar, markup toolbar, Autodesk




FREE LD Assistant/AutoCAD Blocks
Created in LD Assistant by Rufus Warren of Design & Drafting. Download them and enjoy courtesy of Design & Drafting. Click on the picture to download. Don't own LD Assistant? Visit LDASSISTANT.COM to learn more 
about this unbelievable CAD program.



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NEW... ATOMIC WEB Wall
web


After nearly a year of development and rigorous testing, Atomic Rental is proud to offer its latest modular product the “Web”. Easy up, easy down, this modular is versatile, flexible, and adaptable. Go ahead, build it your way - in, out, or mix it up with alternating squares, rows or columns - it's totally your call. Front light, back light, you'll be amazed at how well shape and color transform this product!
For Specifications click here!



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The Diamond is one of Atomic Rental's many versatile products. The modular design allows the product to adapt to even the most unusual space constraint and instantly add dimension and depth to any event.
For Specifications click here!



Click here to visit ATOMIC.tv


NVIDIA Unveils Online 3D Vision Community
3DVisionLive.com is an online community where NVIDIA 3D Vision technology users can enjoy and share a broad range of 3D content on their PCs. It allows them to stream 3D movie trailers, music videos, sport clips, and video shorts, as well as post and view high-quality, high-resolution 3D photos. Click here to keep reading.
NVIDIA Announces "Project Denver" to Build Custom CPU Cores Based on ARM Architecture
NVIDIA plans to build high-performance ARM® based CPU cores, designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers. Known under the internal codename "Project Denver," this initiative features an NVIDIA® CPU running the ARM instruction set, which will be fully integrated on the same chip as the NVIDIA GPU. Click here to keep reading.
Autodesk to Acquire Blue Ridge Numerics for $39M
Autodesk announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Blue Ridge Numerics, Inc., a leading provider of simulation software, for approximately $39 million in cash. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in Autodesk’s first quarter of fiscal 2012 (which ends on April 30, 2011). Click here to keep reading.


May 2011 - Articles and How To

Plot Raster Images - printing high resolution images in AutoCAD 2011, This is a tip for printing drawings with high-resolution images or multiple aerial photographs. We have found a couple of settings (which apparently were added in the 2007 version) that affect how AutoCAD handles memory when dealing with raster images, Hayden Clarke, Cadalyst
Working on LAYOUTs - Using Modify Commands On Viewports AutoCAD VIEWPORTs are basically AutoCAD objects. VIEWPORTs define the frames through which you’ll get a view of your model. It gets highligted when you select it and a “Quick Properties” window appears. It really is an AutoCAD object. Orhan Toker, Daily AutoCAD
Masking with AutoCAD Hatch - If you read CAD Notes tutorial on dynamic blocks, we use wipeout to automatically ‘trim’ objects. Very useful for placing a door on a wall or for schematic drawings. Edwin Prakoso, CAD Notes
Overlay 2D AutoCAD DWG on Google Maps with AutoCAD WS - One of the not well known features in AutoCAD WS is to place your AutoCAD drawing on top of Google Maps. First for those not familiar with AutoCAD WS we need to bring you up to speed on this free collaboration tool used by hundreds of thousands of people since it's launch. Shaan Hurley, Between The Lines
Create a Custom Function in AutoCAD's Calculator - QuickCalc solves complex coordinate problems, use LINE command, generate custom functions, EllenFinkelstein.com
Masking with Hatch - wipeout for masking object, activating hatch, creating proper white balance. If you read CAD Notes tutorial on dynamic block, we use wipeout to automatically ‘trim’ objects. Very useful for placing door on a wall or schematic drawings.Edwin Prakoso, CAD Notes

Mac 3D Graphics Performance Comparison - engine model rotation for Rhino, NX, AutoCAD for Mac, Deelip Menezes
Change Text Orientation - using TOrient command for orienting text in AutoCAD 2011, 2 keystrokes,
 insertion point unchanged, Bob McCue, Cadalyst
I Shared DWG, What Will They Get? - AutoCAD WS is secure alternative to sending files via email or using FTP,

 no need to have account or register, Iris Shoor, AutoCAD WS Blog

Friday, April 15, 2011

April 2011 - Featured LD Assistant Rendering

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April 2011 - Featured News

FREE LD Assistant/AutoCAD Blocks
There's nothing better that a few free blocks. 
Both the LED-Video G 78.74'' X 39.37''V and
LED-Video G 78.74'' X 39.37''H were created in
LD Assistant by Rufus Warren of Design & Drafting.

Download it and enjoy courtesy of Design & Drafting. Click here to download.

Send us an email and let us know if you would like to see more free blocks in our next newsletter.

Don't own LD Assistant? Visit LDASSISTANT.COM to learn more about this unbelievable CAD program.



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NextComputing Announces Mobile Workstation for CAD Users
NextComputing, a leader in high-performance portable and small form-factor workstations and servers, announces a new solution for CAD users looking for a powerful workstation computer to run their demanding applications, but have been dissatisfied with the limited options available in laptops.

Configured for engineers and designers running computing-intensive 3D CAD software, the diminutive Radius LE workstation takes up no more desktop real-estate than a notebook computer, yet offers the features professional users need to work quickly and efficiently, including: Quad-Core Intel Core i7 2.80 GHz processor - ATI FirePro graphics with up to 2GB GDDR5 memory - Integrated 17-inch high-resolution (1920x1200) display. Click here to keep reading

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What The Effect of Autodesk's Registration of DWG as Trademark Means
Autodesk expected to succeed in attempt to trademark DWG, users may benefit with less confusion, more effects on industry, Owen Wengerd, WorldCAD Access. Click here to keep reading
Autodesk Issues Update 1 for AutoCAD 2011 for Mac
The following features have been updated to fix issues identified using incoming Customer Error Reports (CER): •2D Display •3D Selection •File Navigation •General UI •Graphic System •Hatch •Install •Layers •Open/Save •Properties Inspector •Quick View Tools •Start-up - Click here for more information
Autodesk Up 16% in 4th Quarter
For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2011, ending January 31, 2011, revenue was $528 million, up 16% compared to the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010. For all of fiscal 2011 revenue was $1.95 billion, up 14% compared to fiscal 2010. Click here to keep reading

April 2011 - Articles and How To

Scalable Viewports - As you may already know, using LAYOUTs in AutoCAD when printing has numerous advantages. One of these advantages is the ability to scale viewports in LAYOUTs. Orhan Toker, Daily AutoCAD
Creating Planar Surfaces in AutoCAD 2011 - Learn how to create a planar surface. In this super quick video, Heidi describes the new Planar Surface tool including the option to create a planar surface from an existing closed boundary. Heidi Hewett, AutoCAD Insider
AutoLISP Exercise: Using Block and Conditional If - CAD Notes, Edwin Prakoso
60 AutoCAD Tips in 60 Minutes - there's bound to be one or two even the veteran AutoCAD user does not know, Lynn Allen, Autodesk
Blending Surfaces in AutoCAD 2011 - creating blended surface that automatically updates as you modify the associated defining surfaces
Trimming Surfaces in AutoCAD 2011 - powerful combination of surface trimming, surface associativity, Heidi Hewett, AutoCAD Insider
Is Teamwork the Key? - shifting expectations for upfront analysis from individuals to team, engineering-matters.com
Using the Navigation Bar in AutoCAD 2011 - Learn about the tools on the Navigation bar that help you navigate around and through your models. In this video, Heidi describe how to display the Navigation bar and introdusce you to many of the navigation tools including the SteeringWheels and 3D Connexion support. Heidi Hewett
Default Keyboard Shortcuts in AutoCAD for Mac - According to the official definition of Autodesk – “Shortcut keys (Keyboard Shortcuts) are key combinations that start commands. For example, you can press Ctrl+O to open a file and Ctrl+S to save a file, which is the same as clicking Open and Save on File menu.” With Keyboard Shortcuts you can control switching of System variables and Drafting Settings (Ortho mode, Osnap mode, etc.)
Extruding Surfaces in AutoCAD 2011 - Learn how to create extruded surfaces. In this video, Heidi will introduce you to the Extrude tool and describe how to create an extruded surface versus a solid. She covers basic extrusion options including the ability to specify a direction or select a path. Heidi Hewett, AutoCAD Insider
Isolating Objects in AutoCAD 2011 - Learn how Object Isolation tools in AutoCAD lets you control object visibility independent of layers. In this video, she demonstrates how to isolate selected objects so that all other objects are hidden. Heidi also shows you how to hide selected objects and how to end the object isolation so that all hidden objects are, once again, visible. Heidi Hewett, AutoCAD Insider
Using the 3D Gizmos in AutoCAD 2011 - Learn how the 3D gizmos can help you create and edit paths and profiles for 3D models. In this video, Heidi describes how to use the 3D Move, Rotate and Scale gizmos to constrain editing operations to a specified axis or plane. Heidi Hewett, AutoCAD Insider
Tips & Tools Weekly Vol 15 No. 43 - open sheet sets without AutoCAD; move, copy, rotate and scale with 1 command, shift to reverse, Cadalyst
Adding Color to Your B/W Drawings - If you produce construction documents, chances are the majority of your work is produced in black and white, for eventual printing and/or reproduction on a monochrome printer. If you use color dependent plot styles, then your default CTB file may be set up so that all of the ACI colors (1-255) plot black. RK McSwain, CAD Panacea
How To Create Annotative Text Style - Draw space, click on annotation scale button in AutoCAD, run text style, click on new button, mark annotative tick box, activate text style by hitting set current, The Annotation property makes text objects appear the same size on printouts of different scales. This comes in very handy when printing out drawings. For example, the title of a 1:50 drawing is the same height as that of an 1:5 drawing. Similarly, description texts are uniform in size regardless of the drawing scale. Normally, we would have to change the sizes of all text objects for every scale of printouts that will be made. Gokalp Baykal, Daily AutoCAD
Editing Dimension Objects Using Grips - AutoCAD objects can be modified using GRIPs, dimension value will be instantly updated as you move end points of dimension lines, Orhan Toker, Daily AutoCAD
How to Create PDF from AutoCAD with a Single Click - export PDF files from AutoCAD drawings, fine tuning export to PDF process, adjust layer export in the file. The ability to ‘Plot’ PDF files directly from AutoCAD has been on the AUGI wish list for many years. PDF remains the standard ‘Electronic’ file format for drawing exchange in the AEC Industries. PDF support was finally added to AutoCAD in 2009.
Shaan Hurley, Between the Lines

NVIDIA Quadro 5000 Review - $2250 card performs well, good for large assemblies, rendering, RobRodrquez.com