The Roundhouse London

Originally a steam engine turning shed, now converted, it is a specialist entertainments and arts venue holding up to 3,000 people standing in the main space. The Roundhouse stages everything from Bob Dylan to the RSC and all variations between.

Head of Stage, Ben Ranner’s job is to liaise and plan with performers to overcome the building’s quirkiness to make the most of the venue says, “This makes for a very unusual and specific venue, with production plans and processes often needing to be altered so companies can work effectively in the space”.

Ben opens up communications with performers well ahead of any event. Plans of the stage area, auditorium, entrance, exits, lighting etc are all drawn providing accurate floor plans to work with.

After trying AutoCAD and VectorWorks, the Roundhouse now use TurboCAD to meet all the needs of their stage team.

SIS Production & Broadcast

SIS is a highly experienced and technically advanced broadcaster. From its UK origins it has extended its reach throughout Europe and across the globe. Using its own extensive fleet of start-of the-art uplink trucks, SIS transmits tens of thousands of hours of live broadcasting every year. Many of the world’s major news stories and live events are transmitted by SIS.

It has long-term, high value contracts with other leading broadcasters, such as Sky and ITV, to provide live coverage of news and sports events, including Formula 1 and Rugby World Cup.

SIS doesn’t just broadcast programmes – it makes them too. With proven content-sourcing, presenting and production skills, plus technically advanced studio and editing suites SIS has all the facilities and skills you would expect of a world-class programme maker.

In 2009 SIS bought 25 licenses of TurboCAD to plan the layout of all their outside broadcasts.

TurboCAD Professional Platinum, including a training pack for both 2D and 3D, books and videos, plus unlimited practical and technical support is £1,000.

Call for more information.

01962 835 081 ex 1

Paul

See ‘Training in Winchester’ for new training dates for one day courses.

Call to book

01962 835 081 ex 1

Upgrades and new sales are at a discount when booking a training course at the same time.

Please click on the link below to view the video -

Parametric Part Example

DISCOUNT TurboCAD SOFTWARE
Limited Time Offer
20% Discount
As quite a few people bought TurboCAD software and training materials using the 10% offered recently, the web team is allowing me to give you a link to get a bigger discount for a short while.

So until the end of July by using the promotional code below you can get a 20% discount on anything you can find on the main TurboCAD site.

In terms of the 2D / 3D training book bundle it means that you are in effect getting them at cost price to us. These are excellent books, with training CDs inside, I can highly recommend them.

The other big bargain is TurboCAD Professional Platinum v15. With the discount you are only paying about £162. If you were thinking of buying a Deluxe version and want 3D functionality, then go for this. As we are now on v17 there are only a few left and you will not find a cheaper way of getting into the professional market.

The site
www.turbocad.co.uk/sales

The code to get discount
Use the promo code TCPROMO20
Give me a call if you want any advice.
Paul

01962 835 081 ex 1

TurboCAD Training for AutoCAD Users

Introducing Ty Whiston

A good percentage of our new customers are those previously trained for AutoCAD who are no longer prepared to pay AutoCAD prices. A brief telephone conversation normally reveals that TurboCAD fits all their needs at a fraction of the cost of AutoCAD and with no on-going licenses to pay every year. For AutoCAD LT users that defiantly want to stay in the 2D field and want to look at a familiar looking screen we have DoubleCAD. DoubleCAD looks just like AutoCAD LT, yet it is half the cost and with greater functionality. For those dealing in 3D you will find TurboCAD Professional far easier and quicker to use than AutoCAD. The top priority for any CAD system these days is not the name on the box, but it’s compatibility with other packages.

I’m very pleased to announce that we now have the services of Ty Whiston to help with the transition from AutoCAD over to TurboCAD. Ty is an institute accredited Instructor with Autodesk who has over the past few years been a freelance CAD Trainer/Consultant. He has wide experience in industry having worked for companies such as Lucas Electrical, Broadway Malyan (Architects) and British Aerospace etc. At the latter he was the CAD manager. Ty was also Senior Lecturer at Reading University of Further Education with responsibilities for preparing and delivering the CAD/CAM curriculum for degree students in the colleges across the South of England.

Ty runs one and two day courses form our offices in Winchester, other training centers that we use, or will travel to your place of work.

Ty can be booked by contacting Rob Page on 07787 574285, rpage@softwareparadise.co.uk

Please click the link below to see the new Newsletter from DoubleCAD

DoubleCAD Spring 2010 Newsletter

The main problem that Vista threw up for me was disappearing doors and windows, a feature that I came across as I was demonstrating the software to a bunch of designers – not the best time to discover a fault. You’d create the door or window as usual, but as soon as you chose another tool, your creations disappeared. It took me some time to find out that I had to download something from the Vista site to get these tools working – for me that’s a job too far, so I re-instated XP.

When Windows 7 came along all I heard and read was good, so I had it installed on my training machines and Mac lap top, running under Parallels. All seemed to be fine until a chap phoned me a couple of weeks ago who was having trouble with the pipe tool not working. Unfortunately I’ve discovered that the tool does not work in either v16 or v17. I’ve spoken to Dave Taylor of IMSI who has told me that more and more they are having problems with the SDK based add-on tools on Vista and Windows 7. The good news is that the re-writing of these SDKs is an ongoing project. So it will be back at some point. The bad news is that I can’t give you a date for it to be up and running.

However, Dave has made a short movie, attached below, to show an alternative way of achieving the same solution to using the pipe tool. It’s a little more complicated, although not much and it does have the advantage of being a more flexible solution.

TurboCAD v17 has now been out for about two months now and I’m pleased to say that it all seems to be working perfectly well. The only small snag that emerged has a work around above and only occurs with Windows 7, fine with XP.

Below is a link to trail versions of the Professional version, I believe it expires after 14 days. Also a patch for Deluxe.

There will be a chart showing the new features on this site soon, but you are welcome to call me for a chat about the developments.

01962 835 081 (1)

As v17 is now out, I can sell TurboCAD Professional Platinum v16 at half price, i.e. £500 and throw in a free training guide.

TurboCAD v17 Professional Platinum is at a 20% discount bought direct from me.

TurboCAD Professional v5 for the Mac is £398, but £320 direct.

NEW TURBOCAD PRO 17

With over sixty Performance Gains

TurboCAD Pro 17 and Pro Platinum 17 also contain dozens of new features and productivity improvements. The seven most noticeable developments are:

• View wireframes up to 60 times faster. A new drawing engine takes advantage of GPU-based graphics cards so speed increases dramatically in wireframe and 2D mode.  Larger files will pan, orbit, and zoom in and out smoothly.
• Work with the latest AutoCAD® files. Added support for .DWG 2010.
• Better Google™ SketchUp™ workflow. A significantly improved COLLADA (.DAE) export feature includes instances so that blocks and architectural objects will be read by SketchUp as components.
• More powerful Xrefs. We’ve added Xref clipping for dozens of file formats and allow binding of Xrefs, which can then be exploded and edited. Xref layers are easier to manage, even with layer filters.
• New possibilities are available with 3D patterns. Rapidly design mechanical parts with repetitive structures. Apply patterns to spheres and cylinders, radial patterns, 3D arrays, or patterns along a curve for shapes that couldn’t easily be drawn before.  Arrayed patterns such as ventilation holes, keypad designs, and more can also be designed and merged with other objects.  (Platinum Edition.)
• An improved Wall tool now allows for definition of intelligent relationships between walls to link or not link, clean or remain separate, in any combination.
• Create any style of door or window easily. ACA compatible Door and Window Muntins expand options for parametrically creating the exact object types for your design.  (Platinum Edition.)

And for a limited period we are giving away a very useful plug in called Drawing Compare. This tool detects differences in edited or updated drawings. Simply impose your original drawing over the edited version and the changes are immediately highlighted.

Availability and Pricing

TurboCAD Pro 17 is now available for £895.

TurboCAD Pro Platinum 17 is now available for £995.  (For a limited time, receive Drawing Compare plug-in with Pro Platinum 17 purchase, a £83 value.

For more information or to upgrade contact Paul Tracey, 01962 835 081, ptracey@processflows.co.uk.

Importing New Materials

LeMog – 3d Textures

This is a site from where you can download free images and use them either as pictures, perhaps for a backdrop, (there are caves), or import them into your materials palate enabling you to wrap the images around objects. There are some very useful images such as old woods, tree trunks, water, stone walls, wall paper and all sorts of fabrics. The site is at www.lemog.free.fr/lemog_v5/index.php?cat=4

Or you can just google LeMog

Importing pictures into you materials pallet is easy, although I find the instructions in the manual confusing, so I’ve broken them down to my own list below.

1. Copy the image into your ‘My Pictures’ folder.
2. Via ‘View’ open your ‘Materials’ pallet.
3. At the top of this pallet is an icon saying ‘Edit Pictures’ – select it.
4. If you are adding a material to an existing ‘Category’, then select it.
5. If you wish to create a new ‘Category’, select the ‘New Category’ icon to the right of the ‘Categories’ box.
6. This will automatically open a dialogue box prompting you to name your new category.
7. Select the ‘New Material’ box and name your material.
8. Using the folder image to the right of the ‘Find Image’ box, locate the image.
9. In the white box on the left hand side of the ‘Material Editor’ there are five icons.
10. The top icon should read ‘Wrapped Image’.
11. The bottom icon should read UV
12. You may need to increase the scale of both the U and V. I generally deal in mms so I type 40 in each box initially to get an idea of scale, it can always be changed later.

A tip here to ensure that you see a preview is to click in the ‘Review’ box between each of the actions above. I don’t think that it should make a difference, but it does seem to.

I’d be very interested to hear of any similar sites, if anyone knows them. The annoying thing that I find with many of these sites is that they start off saying ‘free symbols’, but when you find the one you want, they try and sting you for a few quid.