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| CAD, CAM, CAE, design, technical drawing, drafting, delineation, visualization, manufacturing | ISSN 1442-2255 : 11/21/2009 - 9:47:48 PM |
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CADKEY is one of the stayers of the CAD world, despite having suffered some unsettling changes of ownership and marketing policies, and poor marketing in some countries. It made a major impact very early on in DOS days through providing a highly effective and practical 3D facility when CAD systems were generally either 2D only, awkward in 3D, or good at 3D but very costly – or all of the above. CADKEY was fundamentally a 3D system right from the outset, which helped a lot to avoid the operational complexities of systems that gradually added 3D.
Under DOS, each CAD system developer had to devise their own graphic environment. CADKEY adopted a remarkably easy to use and highly productive user interface that was at the same time extremely simple. A number of good CAD products on DOS/Unix floundered somewhat in the transition to Windows, but CADKEY has managed to adapt to the Windows environment very well after some initial peculiarities. It maintains an individual style of on-screen presentation that those who knew it on DOS can see owes some of its style to the original interface logic. But it is a system that is immediately obvious enough to anyone familiar with Windows, and very easy to learn for those who aren’t. Often there is a conflict between intuitively-obvious ease-of-use and speed of productive operation once you have become used to a system. Sometimes this conflict is resolved by providing alternative methods of operation. In CADKEY, the user interface is simple enough to be learned quickly yet at the same time fast to use by experienced operators.
It has the usual Windows menu bar from which everything can be operated, sometimes with rather a lot of cascading of menus etc – not always the most efficient way. It also has the usual Windows main icon toolbar below that. This has the obligatory Microsoft-endorsed standard grouping of common controls on the left – New-file, Open-file, Print, Cut, Copy, Paste. The rest of the bar has buttons for redraw, pan, zoom, erase, coordinate orientation, rotation, and (the four rightmost buttons) selecting wireframe; shaded with wireframe; or shaded, display, and a ‘what’s this’ help button.
Unusual additions are the two up & down arrow buttons on the left. These replace the standard toolbar with one of three others in sequence. These are groupings of buttons for respectively drawing operations, modify operations and annotation operations. Tooltips supply a very brief text explanation of each button in the now usual way, plus a less cryptic explanation appears immediately in the bar at the bottom of the screen when the cursor is over a button.
As well as those controls, there are control grouped in a panel down the left side of the screen, and these are in effect modernized derivatives of the original CADKEY control systems. The upper part is a command panel and below that is one or more panels that display and set current options and settings such as draw color, line-weight, line-type, layer, pen, view, zoom-scale, grid, snaps, etc. Those settings are grouped in six panels and by default only the one showing color and line-type etc, is displayed. The others can replace the display by clicking the >> and << buttons. In addition, by clicking the ‘Tear’ button the currently displayed panel moves to below the current display from where it can be dragged if desired. By this means you can tear off as many panels as you like to have permanently visible and locate them anywhere on the screen. In practice it is mainly useful to fill up the blank space at the bottom of the left column when a high resolution screen is used.
CADKEY toolbars and tool panels.
The upper panel of command buttons follows the original CADKEY logic of having only a few commands visible at a time ( it used to be 10 in DOS, picked by the F1 to F10 keys), logically grouped. Here the panel provides up to 16 buttons and the groups are selected by the buttons above them: Create, Modify, Detail (or annotate), and XForm (Transform).
The Layout button is different. It switches to Layout mode (the paper plot layout sub-system) and pops up a dialog to define a sheet size and drawing scale, or pick from those defined. Then additional controls appear in the upper command area. A Create button pops up a dialog from which you can select from various standard views of the model, or views that have been set up as System Views. In the case of orthographic views the Align button provides several options for automatically or manually aligning views to each other.
The layout button pops up a dialog to define a sheet size and drawing scale. There can be several layouts and if several are defined the Layout button prompts to pick one to use. On a blank layout the Create button
shows this dialog from which you can select from various standard views of the model, or views that have been set up as System Views. In the case of orthographic views the Align button provides several options for automatically or manually aligning views to each other.
In the four functional command groups, gray buttons pop up small sub-toolbars for more specific variations on that command. The active buttons have a distinctive color for each group: green for Create, mid-blue for Modify, Brown for Detail and dark-blue for XForm. Many of these buttons are duplicated on the alternative main toolbar buttons. You can choose which way you prefer to work. In my opinion, the tool-panel is the fastest and easiest way.
The icon tool palette is a matrix that changes according to which button is clicked of Create, XForm, Modify or Detail. Here Detail is picked and the buttons provide dimensioning and annotation tools. Grey buttons pop up sub-palettes of additional variations or options. Here, the angular dimension button pops up a 2-button sub-palette with angle selected by 2 lines or by 3 points.
The bar at the bottom of the screen is used as a display area for explanatory text and to show the command history in the form of copies of the tool buttons used in sequence. These are active buttons and can be used to repeat previous actions.
Below the main menu and toolbar and above the work area and side panel is an area that initially appears blank. This is used to display prompts and buttons while a command is in progress, and is a key element of CADKEY’s efficient operation. Not only does this area display text prompts saying what user action or option selection is needed at that point, but it provides temporary active control buttons for just those actions that are possible at that juncture. This avoids any uncertainty or hunting for controls. It also includes Accept, Backup, Cancel or other appropriate buttons at each step.
As illustrated below shows the work area divided into three viewports, displaying three different views of the model, one of them shaded. The default background is black, but white has been selected here because it shows more clearly on the web. CADKEY only offers a limited selection of background colors and all but black or white are too garish to be useable. All drawing and editing commands display the results instantly in all viewports including any shaded view.
The CADKEY display on a 1024x768 screen. The 'entity properties' toolpad has been 'torn-off' and placed below the other toolpad. On a bigger screen (higher resolution) there is room for a second or maybe third tear-off. Otherwise, you cycle through the six panels by the >> and << buttons.
The area below the menu bar and main tool bar displays command prompts and option buttons while the command is in progress. Here it is a transform operation so the Xform toolpad displays.
This shows 3 views displayed for the current model, one shaded with wireframe superimposed (you can also use shaded without wireframe) and the other an orthographic view in wireframe. All work appears on all views simultaneously.
The bottom area displays explanations of the button under the cursor or other actions, and on the right, the command history as clickable buttons.
A common problem in drawing in 3D in many CAD systems, especially those that evolved from 2D, is controlling the plane upon which the inherently 2D mouse operations will be placed. CADKEY has simplified this considerably and one wonders why others have made it so complex. Usually one click on a feature is all that is needed to set the work-plane.
CADKEY’s minor usage of layers (as with most real 3D systems) causes some re-learning difficulties for those used to AutoCAD, which is the most exceptionally layer-focused system. But if you don’t have that background that is no problem, and if you do, CADKEY’s ways are easy to adjust to provided you don’t try to cling to another system’s logic.
The ‘pro’ version of CADKEY 19 includes the ACIS solid modeling sub-system fully integrated. In this lower-cost, wire-frame version the solids facilities obviously are not operative. But it has a good complement of surface modeling tools. Some earlier versions of CADKEY suffered from a confusing set of optional modules for surfaces and rendering etc, that were not well enough integrated. That may have put some people off the product at the time. If that applies, it would be worth another look now at this very well integrated version.
I'd need to play around rather longer to get a sound grasp of what its limitations are. But I know from past versions that it is indeed a viable 3D system. It is the CAD system most widely used for injection molding design and tooling in the US, so I've been told (probably by a vested interest).
The inclusion of "wireframe" in this version is somewhat misleading as this version also does surfaces too - it's just the solid modeling technology that isn't included in CADKEY Wireframe. It also lacks the advanced complex curved surfacing that was a major-cost add-on in previous versions. Many users may have difficulty determining just where the limits for CADKEY Wireframe lie and in many cases .
Certainly, for anyone wanting to get into 3D design as an initial step without spending lots of money, CADKEY Wireframe would be by far the best choice around. It does have surfaces in it despite the name, (obviously since it does shading!) and can be upgraded to a very powerful system later if required.
CADKEY 19 Wireframe is a very well organized and efficient CAD system for 3D work, and highly recommendable.
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