autoCAD or manual drawing, which should I go for?

May 31, 2010 8:22 AM

autoCAD or manual drawing, which should I go for?

I have the oppertunity to either use autoCAD 2010 LT or manually draw out a design of an eco house. Please can some recommend which I should use and any advantages/disadvantages with either..

posted by sockpim to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

Best answer: AutoCAD is the vastly superior tool with a vastly steeper learning curve.

Advantages of AutoCAD:

• Changes are easier.
• Layers are much easier.
• Dimensioning hugely easier and it is simple to dimension in multiple ways/scales.
• Easy to make as many copies as you want.
• Exchanging drawings uses email instead of mail/courier
• Easy to keep failsafe backups of drawings and to revert to previous drawings.
• Consistent line work.

The advantage of manual drafting is you can get started right away, abet with such poor results (because there is a learning curve even if it's not as steep) that you'll probably end up redoing your initial drawings several times. And the cost is pretty well a wash if you already have a decent computer; while you can do basic drawings with a 2H pencil and a $5 set of straight edges good work will require larger triangles, scale ruler, good work surface with good light, an assortment of pencils and equipment to keep them sharp, and large format paper of blueprint or clean scan quality. And you'll be hampered if you don't have a drafting board with scale arms.
posted by Mitheral at 8:53 AM on May 31, 2010

AutoCAD is a fantastic example of software that fundamentally changed the way an industry works. As Mitheral said, the advantages are huge, but its not something you can pick up very quickly. I'd go so far as to say that to be really proficient (not even expert) with AutoCAD, you need the equivalent experience of a training course.

That being said, even with the prevalence of CAD, many people still start out designs on paper. You could begin designing right away with pencil and vellum, start getting used to AutoCAD as you're working manually, and then when you're ready to get more intricate/detailed, move to AutoCAD (by this time you should have enough knowledge of it to put things into the computer.)
posted by dantekgeek at 9:05 AM on May 31, 2010

autoCAD is an industry standard (or so my instructor tells me). It's a good program to know if you have any interest in architecture, mechanical engineering, or anything else involving blueprints. Assuming that when you say you have the opportunity to use it, you mean someone is providing the software, I would jump at this chance to learn autoCAD on someone else's dime. Even educational licenses are remarkably expensive.

I'm a little surprised that you're even considering manual drafting. Are you already trained as a draftsman?
posted by d. z. wang at 9:12 AM on May 31, 2010

Mitheral hinted at this, but I should clarify in case you don't already know: drafting is difficult. I went to a vocational high school that used to train draftsmen. It took all four years, and if you ever have the opportunity to look at an old blueprint, you'll see why. I remember looking at one with some people and having trouble convincing them that it was drawn by hand. I had to find the little irregularities where the draftsman lifted his pencil before they believed me.
posted by d. z. wang at 9:22 AM on May 31, 2010

AutoCAD AutoCAD AutoCAD. What Mitheral said. But be aware than when Mitheral says "Changes are easier", s/he's potentially saving you days or weeks of time. I would predict that even on this project alone, the time associated with learning basic AutoCAD will more than be made back when it comes to revising drawings.
posted by nthdegx at 9:37 AM on May 31, 2010

If the concern between manual & autoCAD is cost, try Google Sketchup. But if I read your question right, you have access to autoCAD? Go with it. When aCAD first came out, we used it immediately in our (non architectural) business and never looked back. Automotive companies pretty quickly changed to aCAD or CATIA. While I agree that there is a huge learning curve to aCAD (really, eith either), it is akin to PhotoShop in that even though there are multiple layers of complexity and a steep learning curve, it beats the hell out of (most) manual processes to achieve the same results.

And--you are talking about LT which is, iirc, the "lite" version, so more like PhotoShop Elements, which is aimed at the consumer/prosumer user.
posted by beelzbubba at 9:38 AM on May 31, 2010

Anything you can do reasonably by manual drafting on your own you can do better and faster in Google Sketchup. It's fine to start with pencil conceptual sketches, but you need CAD to do anything nontrivial today unless you're willing to do this fulltime, or have a dedicated draftsman who is. I took 1.5 years of manual drafting in high school and had a few weeks of it in college (as part of a CAD class). It's tedious from the start, and unimaginably slow for making changes. For a house, consider you might want to change the door width for every door in a floorplan. This would take minutes in CAD (change door type, and slight repositions by clicks and drags). By hand you'd be erasing and redrawing them all. That's just one change. Things will get real smudgey without a blueprint machine.
posted by mnemonic at 10:35 AM on May 31, 2010

My mom's an architect and her firm does a lot of their initial sketching in SketchUp and then moves on to further drafts and detail drawings in AutoCAD. When I worked for an architectural engineering firm, we used AutoCAD -- I saw maybe one hand drawn blueprint that was ~50 years old in the entire time I was working there. Don't get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for good manual drafters -- they're really extraordinary. But they are few and far between because the field has been completely eaten up by AutoCAD in the last 20 or 30 years.

Manual drafting is tedious, exacting, and extremely time consuming -- especially in stages of the project where many changes are being made. CAD software, on the other hand, is tedious but takes far, far less time. It's just plain more realistic to be using some kind of CAD package for anything other than basic sketches.
posted by malthas at 12:26 PM on May 31, 2010

Sketchup: Simple, powerful, intuitive, awesome. (not to mention FREE as well!)

I recently read a survey of architectural CAD users, and the overwhelming majority of them said they wished their CAD software used Sketchup's interface. I've used many of them, and Sketchup is this thing I go to as a rule of thumb. It's FAST, and it flows. Also, the online tutorials and videos are really quite amazingly good and effective.

Can't think of how many times I've created in Sketchup, then ported to some CAD flavor or another.
posted by MacChimpman at 1:34 PM on May 31, 2010

And--you are talking about LT which is, iirc, the "lite" version, so more like PhotoShop Elements, which is aimed at the consumer/prosumer user.

You should NOT take this to mean that AutoCAD LT has a friendlier, simpler UI by any means. It is simply a way for Autodesk to capture the "bottom" end of the market by offering a version of AutoCAD that has no support for 3D modeling or advanced scripting/automation tools.

Sketchup is a great modeling tool, but in many ways can be very frustrating as a drafting tool. The "LayOut" app helps you produce working drawings from a Sketchup model, but I believe is only available with Sketchup Pro, which costs a few hundred dollars.

MacChimpman has a good point though -- design the house in Sketchup, and document it in AutoCAD (or sketchup, if you must). Although if you are considering paying money for AutoCAD LT, I would recommend that you read up on Sketchup Pro and LayOut -- for less money you can have a more holistic 3D design and documentation software that has a significantly more approachable UI.

If you have a friend who is giving you access to AutoCAD LT, maybe you could get them to teach you the basics? You can do 90% of most drafting tasks with a half-dozen commands: LINE, RECTANGLE, POLYLINE, MOVE, COPY, OFFSET. Okay, maybe TRIM, FILLET, DIMLINEAR as well.
posted by misterbrandt at 1:53 PM on May 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

What are you doing with the design? Will it be built? Is this an exercise, or something for an article or paper? Obviously if it will actually built the drawings would need to be re-done by a professional, so you might as well go with the tool that appeals to you most.

AutoCAD is fantastic for accurate, detailed drawings but it is not easy or particularly fun to learn (thanks to an unwieldy UI, mind you its worlds better than when I learned command-line). Knowing how to use it is a handy, marketable skill however.

Hand-drafting can be incredibly gratifying, is more of an art-form than using any CAD platform, and ultimately you may actually learn more about how 3D spaces work. Pretty much no one uses it for production anymore though, even the old-school 1-man shop craftsmen I sometimes work with have made the switch to CAD drawings.

All this assumes you don't have training in either of course, in which case I would also recommend Sketchup as an easier learning curve that can communicate a design fairly effectively. Done really accurately, I have had parts SLA'd or CNC-manufactured from it, and others in my studio have transferred drawings to AutoCAD from models begun in Sketchup.
posted by id girl at 7:24 PM on May 31, 2010

in architecture school, we spent the first year doing nothing but hand drafting; it forces you to get comfortable thinking and expressing yourself in a precise way with the pencil. Good designers continue to draw throughout their lives, but everyone uses CAD for production work.

if your goal is to have a design drawn for a house, hire someone else to do it.
if your desire is to learn the craft of technical drawing, do it by hand.
if your desire is to learn a piece of software as a tool for technical drawing, use autocad.
if your desire is to learn marketable job skills, go into architecture school, or at least a drafting program teaching CAD as a gateway to BIM, because even autocad won't hold the drafting crown for much longer, and drafting in general is less important than critical thinking and design skills.
posted by Chris4d at 9:34 PM on June 1, 2010 [1 favorite]