It's been almost 2 years since I vowed to leave the AutoCAD fold. My years-long irritation at Autodesk's attitude toward its user base came to a boil in 2013 over a minor subscription price increase resulting from a missed renewal deadline, so began looking at IntelliCAD as an alternative. I bought CMS IntelliCAD v7.2 Pro, and tried hard to like it, but after a week or so of testing I found that its support for AutoLISP wasn't going to work for me. I rely heavily on custom AutoLISP routines, and the CMS implementation simply wasn't in the same ballpark as AutoCAD's.
With lots of work to crank out, I soon went back to AutoCAD 2013. I had good intentions of doing more research on alternatives, and even installed a demo of BricsCAD, but like a true addict I found the prospect of leaving the warm embrace of AutoCAD overwhelming. The BricsCAD demo expired before I gave it a fair test, though I did note that its AutoLISP implementation was much more robust than the CMS offering.
Then a couple of weeks ago I realized that the primary hard disk in my workstation was nearly 3 years old. Although I back up my data daily, both locally and in the cloud, the thought of dealing with a disk failure was pretty daunting -- reinstalling and reconfiguring software is big time sink -- to I decided to clone the drive and make the clone a RAID 1 array. (My workstation has hardware RAID support that I'd never made use of.) I used Clonezilla to turn my 1TB primary drive into a 2TB mirrored array, but in the process I managed to hose my AutoCAD license -- I guess it was keyed to the original drive ID somehow.
Suddenly I didn't have AutoCAD. At all. And I had several time-sensitive jobs that I had to keep moving forward. So in a near-panic, I downloaded BricsCAD v15 and bought a license for it. I had to tweak a few things, and am still tweaking things, but I was able to keep my work moving forward with surprisingly little disruption. There's a printer offset issue that I brought to the attention of BricsCAD customer support (they were able to replicate the problem and are working on a fix), but there's also a workaround for it. The panic is over, and life without AutoCAD now seems very doable.
I bought BricsCAD Classic, which is their low-end offering. It seems to do everything I need. The AutoLISP support is impressive, in some ways even better than Autodesk's. I sprung for the All-In package (1 year of updates and priority email support, plus a copy of Ralph Grabowski's Customizing BricsCAD), which set me back a total of $690. The base license is $520, which is only $25 more than the 2013 cost of my AutoCAD subscription.
I plan to follow up with Autodesk to see if I can reactivate my v2013 install, just so I can have it available if something comes up. But if I can't make that happen without paying, I'll shrug my shoulders and keep churning out work with my new CAD partner, Bricsys.
P.S. Clonezilla is great, but it took me a couple of tries before I succeeded in getting a clone that would boot properly. You have to get the switch settings right, and it's not very intuitive.
Sounds like BricsCAD is worth a solid look. I am tired of
AutoCAD
Bentley
Trimble
Leica
Topcon
having the attitude that we are enslaved and that they will not listen, make their systems proprietary, and generally act like we are totally dependant on them. Here I am thinking that we are the customers. I will explore many options to make sure the above get as little of my business as possible. I am glad to hear that you found a workable alternative.
I've used version V10 and V11 in the past. At that point images and heavy files caused constant crashes.
Because of that i've switched to Autocad C3D and i'm staying with it because of my point cloud processing needs.
Bricscad does have exellent add-on from third party vendors. If you're not into very large files Bricscad will do the job with the latest releases.
It's based here in Belgium;-)
Will BricsCAD work with Carlson?
I have Rl.15 and Dimscale keep getting setback to 1, when I use dimensions , I your version doing this.
Get the Dotsoft tool pac and Maptools . The tool pac is a must.
Also just found that in Briscad you can drag and drop a pdf into an open Briscad window . Slick
itellicad does this to.
> I bought BricsCAD Classic, which is their low-end offering. It seems to do everything I need. The AutoLISP support is impressive, in some ways even better than Autodesk's. I sprung for the All-In package (1 year of updates and priority email support, plus a copy of Ralph Grabowski's Customizing BricsCAD), which set me back a total of $690. The base license is $520, which is only $25 more than the 2013 cost of my AutoCAD subscription.
Out of curiosity, would you mention the details of the system in which you're running BricsCAD Classic?
I too (like most surveyors I know) am fed-up with AutoCAD. I made the switch to Draftsight Pro. I like it, but It doesn't have 3D capabilities. We have been using Sketch-Up for our Topo's. That's the only part I don't like. How is BrisCad for 3D?
Thanks for the mention. However, Frame says "bought BricsCAD Classic", our add-ons require Pro or Platinum.
It also supports Linux operating system, if you also want to give Microsoft the boot.
I tried BricsCAD several times because they do Linux, my normal OS. (actually I use Linux Mint Debian Edition)... I became frustrated and never got over the hump and just booted Windows to do CAD stuff. OK, I am lazy.
Now I find Acad is the only thing I use windows for... it is high time to leave that world completely and for good.
$520 is hard to justify, but maybe I will just call it my birthday present... 🙂
Jim: Clonezilla is funky and difficult. The next time you want to clone something I suggest using a Live CD/USB with Linux, and use the Gparted program.
Just yesterday I cloned a 45GB partition to a second location on the same drive in about 20 minutes, flawless exact copy. It does a Much cleaner job than Clonezilla, and the interface is user friendly... same price (free)
> Out of curiosity, would you mention the details of the system in which you're running BricsCAD Classic?
Dell T7500, Intel Xeon ES607 (2.26 GHz), 12GB RAM, Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. Now sporting mirrored 2TB SATA hard drives. 🙂
> Jim: Clonezilla is funky and difficult. The next time you want to clone something I suggest using a Live CD/USB with Linux, and use the Gparted program.
> Just yesterday I cloned a 45GB partition to a second location on the same drive in about 20 minutes, flawless exact copy. It does a Much cleaner job than Clonezilla, and the interface is user friendly... same price (free)
Thanks, next time I'll give it a try. Near as I can tell Clonezilla didn't do anything wrong, it's just that this operator had a hard time figuring out which options to apply. The big problem (for me) was figuring out how to get the Windows boot stuff correctly set up. Even though I only cloned the drive 2 weeks ago, right now I couldn't tell you which options I used, which would seem to fit the "difficult" description.
> I've used version V10 and V11 in the past. At that point images and heavy files caused constant crashes.
So far the largest drawing files I've tried are around 4.5MB, with TIF images in the 14MB range. No problems with those, which are typical for my work, but they're not what I'd call large files.
> Will BricsCAD work with Carlson?
I've not looked into this, but I suspect not. Bricsys departed from the IntelliCAD consortium recently, so my guess is that v15 isn't fully compatible with IntelliCAD. However, I suggest checking with Carlson before making any decisions in this regard.
> I made the switch to Draftsight Pro. I like it, but It doesn't have 3D capabilities. We have been using Sketch-Up for our Topo's. That's the only part I don't like. How is BrisCad for 3D?
BricsCAD Classic does basic 3D; for more elaborate 3D stuff you'd probably want Pro or Platinum. The bite for the higher offerings is still pretty modest in Autodesk terms: $650 for Pro, $990 for Platinum.
I use files up to 3GB to load in certain plans. These are ortophotos generated from 3D scans for heritage purposes. These load slow but images of 200~300MB load very nice.
Everything I do is in Belgian-coördinate system. I need C3D for this.
I've always had it in the back of my mind to just go with a Mac and something like BricsCAD... so frustrating over the years of hardware and Windows bulls&*^%T.
I've had a Mac at home for the last 8 years with basically ZERO issues, but have burned through 3 or 4 setups of computers/servers in that time at the office. GRRRRR...
AutoCAD vs BricsCAD... GParted
Jim: just a quick note and a link to the GParted website:
GParted free partition editor
http://gparted.org/index.php
GParted is included in the install disks for most Linux flavors, I have never tried the stand alone version but I believe it is exactly the same.
There are some good tips and tricks explained, but it is user friendly and you probably will not to do much study.
I strongly advocate using separate partitions for data and types of data, it makes copy and backup routines much less onerous.
I am more familiar with this:
GParted partitioning software - Full tutorial
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gparted.html
good luck!
PS: I suggest making Labels on your partitions, even Windows can read them.
(try Linux, consumes much less hard disk space, faster, and easier after a short learning curve, and FREE!)
Andy, You can download BricsCAD on the Mac free for 30 days. Give it a try!