December 1, 1999 — 3DPowerTools, Inc. announces the release of a new product in its family of 3D CAD modeling solutions. 3DPowerToolsViz, available at the low introductory price of $95, is a potent set of tools designed specifically for Mechanical Desktop 4.0. Features such as transparent orbit and interactive, fully shaded move, scale and rotate transform Mechanical Desktop 4.0 along with AutoCAD 2000 and Architectural Desktop 2.0 into powerful and intuitive modeling platforms.
Features include
- Transparent Orbit – perform view rotations in the middle of any command.
- Orbit about an arbitrary center point
- Orbit while maintaining “up”
- Move, scale and rotate parts while maintaining shading
- Axis constrained translations and rotations allow precise positioning and orientation
- Interactive dimensions display the angle rotated or the distance translated
All 3DPowerToolsViz commands provide immediate feedback by showing you the results of the command as it proceeds. This feedback occurs in the current shading mode. 3DPowerToolsViz takes advantage of the capabilities of AutoCAD and the underlying video hardware to redraw only the changed portion of the scene, making it much easier to work with large assemblies.
Quinn Zander, a 3DPowerTools beta tester said, “We (news group junkies) have been screaming for this functionality in MDT4. Your ‘object modification’ completely blows MDT’s AMMANIPULATOR right out of the water”. This sentiment has been echoed by other user evaluations, including one user who said that 3DModify was a “major improvement above MDT’s native commands and is better than Solidworks tools, too.”
