Architosh Staff ([email protected])

9 Aug 00

Macs do well at CAD Shootout!

This year's CAD Shootout at AEC Systems was again covered by ArchitecturalCADD with detailed coverage of the jury's comments and screen shots. The detailed comments of individual jury members is very interesting in that it reveals important details about each team and its software and the hardware involved.

Notable this year was the appearance of VersaCAD, a favorite CAD application from the Macintosh's past. VersaCAD 2000 was used along side its sister application 3D Joy, and the new VersaCAD team apparently did pretty well for a first time event. The most interesting news was that the VersaCAD team did there work on two Macintosh PowerBook G3s and used the infrared ports to achieve networking—a required feature of the competition.

Where are those Power Mac G4's?

Longtime Mac CAD leaders VectorWorks chose to use two networked Power Mac G4s, fully loaded and decked out for rip roaring performance. In addition, they were apparently working on Apple Cinema Displays. This, unfortunately, provided some problems for the team because they were unable to project their work onto the large audience screen due to no analog output ports on the all digital TFT screens.

The VectorWorks team also did well at the CAD Shootout, as they usually have over the last several years. Be sure to read our detailed interview article on VectorWorks CAD and Mac OS X.

form-Z Team

Perhaps the most unique feature of this year's event was the appearance of a form-Z team. And the good news is they did quite well. The form-Z team did most of the 2D and 3D required elements in the competition. As one juror put it:

Going into this challenge, we knew that FormZ is a powerful 3D modeler. What we didn't know is how good would it be at doing a whole building project. It was interesting to see how quickly the FormZ Team had a great appropriate frame building.

While the form-Z team used Wintel hardware, specifically a Pentium III machine with NT running on it, this great software—like so much else in the computer world—was developed first on the Macintosh and continues to be Mac-focused product. FormZ, which has always run on the Mac, will be coming to OS X as well.

Conclusions and Wishes for Next Year

It was good to continue to see Macintosh at the 2000 AEC Systems CAD Shootout. In the past teams such as ArchiCAD and MiniCAD/VectorWorks have used Apple Macintosh computers to race against time and other teams in a competition that reveals the virtues of both individual hardware and software packages. What a delight it was to see the return of VersaCAD, at one time of the most important CAD applications running on the Mac. Even more delightful was their choice of two PowerBook G3s with infrared networking as their choice of hardware for this event.

But why network with infrared when you can have AirPort? Next year it would be nice to see all of the Macintosh software running on Macintosh hardware using AirPort networking. If this was to happen, the team of ArchiCAD, VectorWorks, FormZ, and VersaCAD would all be on Power Macintosh. That would be quite a scene, fifty percent of the shootout for AEC pros on Macintosh!