Heidi Hewett's Blog

Detroit and Nashville... This Week!

What do Detroit and Nashville have in common? They are both great places to be this week!

If you are in the Michigan area, don't miss the Detroit CAD Camp on Thursday! In addition to the all-star line-up of instructors (including Robert Green, Matt Murphy, and David Cohn), Doug Cochran, AutoCAD Product Manager, will deliver a special "lunch and learn" presentation of AutoCAD 2007!

If you are in the Tennessee area, I hope to see you at the American Design Drafting Association (ADDA) Annual Conference. I'll be teaching four half-day AutoCAD sessions including Sheet Sets, Dynamic Blocks, AutoCAD 2007 Design Tools, and AutoCAD 2007 Visualization Tools!

Scenes from Raleigh

It was a full house (or should I say full Hilton) for the Raleigh CAD Camp on Thursday! There were about 190 enthusiastic attendees with lots of energy and great questions!

User group and CAD Camp in Raleigh, NC

The Triangle Autodesk User Group met Wednesday night in Raleigh, NC, prior to CAD Camp. Cadre Systems sponsored a fabulous dinner prior to the special presentations by Matt Murphy and Robert Green. This local user group meeting offered a sneak peek at Thursday's event. It isn't too late to join us for the Raleigh CAD Camp!!  See you there!

 

Scenes from the Baltimore CAD Camp

The Baltimore CAD Camp, hosted by Avatech Solutions, was a huge success with more than 180 attendees.

Top Daugs competed for valuable prizes!

My daughter Sierra (aka Vanna) helped the Top Daugs select their prizes.

Matt and Sierra (Pat and Vanna) selected a lucky attendee to win the Autodesk software of their choice!

After piling in a minivan (too bad we didn't have a PT Cruiser... with Sierra we could have broken our 6-person record!), we convinced the carnivores NOT to eat dinner at a roadhouse!

Take your daughter to work.... week!

The fourth Thursday in April is national Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Since I was traveling all week for the Baltimore and Raleigh CAD Camps, I turned it into Take Your Daughter to Work Week! My daughter and I started our trip early with a quick tour of Washington, D.C. before continuing on to Baltimore. What Baltimore visit would be complete without a ride on the Ducks?

AutoCAD 2007 Webcasts... Mark your calendar!

If you've had difficulty working with solids and surfaces in AutoCAD in the past, then it's time to try AutoCAD 2007 software. This release focuses on improving the ability to create, edit, navigate, and visualize your conceptual designs.

Get a jumpstart on learning the new AutoCAD 2007 conceptual design and visualization tools by joining me for these FREE Webcasts!

Best Practices for Conceptual Design:  May 10, 10:00 AM PST
Best Practices for Rendering and Visualization: May 17, 10:00 AM PST

Sheet set fields... quick tip!

If you use custom sheet set fields in your drawings, you might have noticed that AutoCAD displays dashes "----" for fields that have no values. You can force AutoCAD to display a blank rather than the dashes by entering the following code as the default value for those custom properties: \U+00A0

Scenes from Denver!

Last night I had the rare opportunity to present AutoCAD 2007 without boarding an airplane! There was a great turnout for Denver's Professional AutoCAD Users Group (PAUG) meeting and they were very enthusiastic about the new AutoCAD 2007 functionality. Following the AutoCAD 2007 presentation, Nate Bartley, Autodesk Beta Coordinator, described how Autodesk customers can help influence future releases of Autodesk products by becoming involved in the Autodesk Beta Program.

Thanks to CAD-1 for providing the pizza and the pictures!  I hate when I forget my camera!

Get Outta Denver... Not!

Now is the time to get into Denver so you can attend the PAUG (Professional AutoCAD Users Group) meeting on Wednesday evening (April 5). Join Nate Bartley and myself as we demonstrate the new functionality in AutoCAD 2007! Oh... and bring your appetite! Pizza and refreshments will be provided by CAD-1!

Alphabet Soup!

A recent post by Roopinder Tara, in his new CAD blog, serves as reminder to those of us that are responsible for communicating technical information to others. While acrynms make it quicker to communicate within our CoP (communities of practice), they can make us sound like we're speaking a foreign language to those outside our CoP! 

“Use the SSM to open your DST which gives you quick access to your DWGs. From there, you can quickly create a ZIP, EXE, or DWF.”   Huh?!?

Thanks to Roopinder for reminding us that CAD is different things to different people... and congrats on the new CAD (Computer Aided Design) blog!

AutoCAD 2007 Primitives: WEDGE

Think outside the BOX! Try a WEDGE!

View Animation

You can create a 3D solid wedge similar to creating a box. Begin by drawing a rectangle and then specify the height. However, keep in mind that when drawing a wedge, the first point you pick determines which side of the wedge will have height!

 

After you create the wedge, you can easily edit it using grips, similar to a box. You can edit the overall height of the wedge by stretching the top or bottom triangular grips and you can edit the width or length using the four triangular grips at the base of the wedge. The four square corner grips enable you to stretch the corners of the wedge to edit the length and width at the same time! You can use the square center grip to move the wedge without changing its shape!

In addition to editing the wedge with grips, you can use the Geometry pane of the Properties window to enter values for the length, width, and height of the wedge!