 devCAD Smart technology examples
 Smart Polar Snap
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Smart Polar Snap is an innovative snapping technology developed by the devCad Team.
You are probably aware of the usual Ortho and Polar Snaps offered by most standard CAD applications.
A CAD user normally draws using these snaps, plus object snaps, temporary track points, construction lines and
other features; all this can become rather boring and slow.....
Smart Polar Snap was developed to offer an easy and automatic support for the most used drawing procedures.
It reacts to 450 different drawing contexts in the most useful way, displaying one or more dynamic snaps.
When the cursor is captured by a Smart Polar Snap line, the tooltip shows the Snap type and the referring
polar center is highlighted (default color is cyan)
Smart Polar Snap is activated either when you draw a new object or when you edit an existing one.
It reacts also to other objects, for example displaying a Tangent and a Perpendicular Snap when clicking
on an existing object
It can be even used when Radial Snap and one or more Object Snaps are enabled.
Use the bottom toolbar to toggle Smart Polar Snap.
After using Smart Polar Snap, you will be happy to work with it!
Some examples:
 Draw a segment tangent (or perpendicular) to an object at a specified point
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This is a rather common (and boring) case.
If the curve is a circle or an arc you must enable Center Object Snap, draw a construction line
(or ray) from the
center to the specified point, draw a construction line (or ray) perpendicular the last created line,
enable Near Object Snap, draw the segment and delete the construction lines.
A very long way to go...
And what if the curve is a spline for example?
Mumble mumble.....
The approach with Smart Polar Snap is really simple:
Enable Smart Polar Snap and Near Object Snap, pick the first selected point and you will see the tangent and
perpendicular Snaps!!!
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Rectification of a polygon
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This is a common operation performed after digitizing, as an example, a scanned raster drawing.
With Smart Polar Snap enabled you need only to use a few clicks of the mouse.
Click on a vertex and move the cursor on the right Snap lines.
When you see the near vertices highlighted
(cyan) you can click again to shift the vertex.
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Move a door along a wall
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A very easy and fast task using Smart Polars Snap and the Stretch command!
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Smart Shape
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Smart Shape is a useful object available in devCad.
You can use it for example to draw a section of an airplane fuselage. You can select among 4 types of symmetry
[Horizontal/Vertical/None/Both], draw the object, then define its details using the object grips, as displayed
in the movie.
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Shear - How to modify the sweep-back of a wing
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The Shear function is another great feature of devCad.
You can shear every object along horizontal, vertical or a free axis.
This can be very useful for example if you want modify the sweep-back of a wing with just a few
click of the mouse.
See an example in the included movie.
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NUScale - How to modify the aspect-ratio of a wing
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The NUScale function stays for Non-Uniform scaling.
You can modify every object using X and Y different scale factors.
This can be very useful for example if you want modify the aspect-ratio, simply select the objects to modify, the basepoint,
then input the X and Y scale factors.
See an example in the included movie.
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Double polyline
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Using the DLine function you can draw double polyline, with automatically rounded corners.
You can for example using it to draw a simple landing gear.
See an example in the included movie.
Please note also a useful trick: you can use Smart Polars Snap to select the direction of the segment,
and insert the segment length in the command line.
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Drawing over a raster file
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Sometime you may want to draw over a raster file (for example a scanned plan or drawing), to
vectorize it (or some part).
DevCad offer you the technology to do that.
The involved steps are:
- Insert the raster file as an image background in a CAD drawing
- Calibrate it, inserting the real length of a specified segment
- Set a color to the lines of the drawing (optional). This can help you to distinguish between raster lines and CAD objects.
- Enable Raster snap, to snap the cursor to the lines of the raster image (optional)
- Draw lines, polylines, arcs, circle
and so over the raster image
See an example in the included movie.
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RTF - Rich Text Format management
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Formatted texts, tables and inserted images are often a big problem in CAD applications.
DevCad offer you a very simple approach.
You can create a RTF (Rich Text Format) file using for example Office applications like Word or Excel, then insert
it in devCad drawings.
Tables, images, texts styles and so on are managed by RTF and automatically included in your drawing.
You can also use the built in editor to create and edit RTF files.
See an example in the included movie.
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Insert objects from Parts Library
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DevCad includes a hierarchical and extensible Parts Library.
You can insert prebuilt parts from the included library, or create your own libraries.
See an example in the included movie.
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Curved text
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With devCad you can draw a Curved Text, using an existing object as a path.
Almost all the object types can be used as a path, including:
- Lines
- Polylines
- Arcs
- Circles
- Ellipses
- Elliptical arcs
- Smart shapes
- Regions
- Text boxes
- Curved text boxes
- Rich Text Format boxes
- Images boxes
See an example of a text over a Polyline in the included movie.
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Coming soon.....
We are preparing more videos showing examples of our Smart technologies
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