What's New with Land F/X Version 13.0 and F/X CAD 2017
October 17, 2016
Presented by: Jeremiah Farmer
We’ve had a busy year as usual, rolling out our latest version of F/X CAD while continuing the steady stream of improvements to Land F/X you’ve come to expect. In this webinar, we’ll give you a peek at F/X CAD 2017 – particularly its differences from a default AutoCAD installation. We’ll also show off some new Land F/X features and even provide a tour “under the hood” of Land F/X by displaying some of the actual code. If you have questions about F/X CAD 2017 or the latest additions to our plugins, this is the webinar for you.
Webinar Contents:
Note: The following catalog of content covered in this webinar is time stamped to allow you to follow along or skip to sections of the video that are relevant to your questions. You can also search for content on this page using the FIND command in your browser (CTRL + F in Windows, Command + F in Mac OS.)
- Intro/TOC
-
What is F/X CAD?
- What F/X CAD Can & Can't Do
- How F/X CAD Varies from AutoCAD
- What is New with F/X CAD 2017?
- Major Land F/X Features from 12.0 to 13.0
- Side-by-Side Comparison: F/X CAD 2017 & AutoCAD 2017
- Video Demonstration of F/X CAD & Land F/X
- Only for our customers (requires Land F/X)
- Powered by CAD technology (command limited)
- Similar to AutoCAD LT
- Sold and supported by us
- Requires us to change the name
What F/X CAD Can & Can’t Do (4:36)
Can:
- Open/Save any version of DWG
- View Civil3D proxy objects
- Any AutoCAD command you regularly use
- Customize interface & shortcuts (+import exporting)
- Tech support through us!
Can’t:
- Run AutoLISP scripts
- Install add-ons (M-Color, Carlson)
- Rendering, Lighting, 3D
- Autodesk 360, Cloud, Seek, Content. App Manager, Material Library, Inventor Fusion, Cloud services
- Clean title bar: A nice clean old-school look
- Import PDF as Vector: Import PDF will now render individual elements as lines, text, etc.
- Resizable dialog boxes: Many dialog boxes have been enlarged and made resizable. Less scrolling and headaches!
- Smart Centerline and Center Marks: Center marks move when you move or resize the associated object
- Revised ribbon buttons
- Area callout
- Place hatch, Draw
- Work Area layer suffix
- New layers
- Spot Elevation, slope enhancements
- Copy along Poly, Random Variation
- Detail Manager to palette
- RefNotes, embedded data
- MLeaders!
- Colorization of RefNotes areas
- New Site Amenities dialog box
- Detail Enlargement tools
- fxREF tool
- SuperJoin tool
- Plant Data window
- Plant Label, Snap mode
- Verify Plant Labels, re-associate
- Irrigation symbol masks
- Emitter symbol families
- Delete Station dialog box
- Locate Valve
- …and 280 more
In all, we’ve added:
- 68 incremental updates
- 27 lines of code per day
- 100s of new content blocks
- 2 new site amenity manufacturers
- 1 new irrigation manufacturer
Question: How can I get F/X CAD to run faster? (15:00)
Answer: The easiest way to have a great CAD machine is to get a great gaming computer. This means:
- Solid-state hard drive
- Powerful video card
- Lots of RAM
(Processor speed isn’t as important as the video card and RAM.)
We’ll cover how to optimize your setup in a few upcoming webinars. Stay tuned.
Question:Why can’t F/X CAD for Mac be released yet? (30:15)
Answer:AutoCAD for Macs isn’t AutoCAD per se. It’s a CAD program, but it’s not the same product for us to have our plugin with the same source code bolt in. It would take an extremely large port. Plus, PC SketchUp is much better that Mac SketchUp. And several programs, such as Arc GIS, are only available for PCs. For now, we use Parallels to run a Windows virtual machine
Redesigned ribbons (39:00)
Area callout (provides the area of a closed polyline) (39:50)
Callouts converted to MLeaders (40:30)
Dockable palettes (RefNotes, Details, and Planting Managers) (40:45)
Presentation of the source code required for the client request to add a Draw capability for drawing groundcover and Shrub Area on the fly: 27 lines of code (41:00)
Work Areas with layer suffixes, which make it easier to isolate and freeze the Work Area (45:20)
New layers added – for example, different types of irrigation heads are on their own layers by default (46:00)
New Spot Elevation dialog box with different callout styles (47:20)
Multileaders (MLeaders) with background masks (48:00)
Random rotation of blocks when copied along a polyline, plus dynamic blocks (48:40)
RefNotes: Dockable palette, MLeaders added to callouts, and embedded data assigned to callouts (49:50)
Improved Detail Enlargement tools (52:15)
fxREF and SuperJoin Command line tools added (54:10)
Improved Plant Data window with added custom fields (54:25)
Locate Valve command, emitter families added, background masks added to irrigation symbols (56:57)
Delete Station dialog box improved (58:00)
Question: Since F/X CAD doesn’t allow LISP coding, will we do anything with code sent to us by users?
Answer: If you have some LISP code you really like, feel free to let us know about it.If we don’t already have something that can do the same thing, we can incorporate it– example: Circle to Poly command.
Contact
- Land F/X
Our software tailors AutoCAD® to the needs of landscape architects, irrigation designers, and other professionals. We automate your most tedious tasks and ensure accuracy, giving you more time to design.