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What's New in AutoCAD 2024: Digging into the Details

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With each release of AutoCAD software, Autodesk adds new features and enhances existing features. In this session, we'll take a look at the compelling new and enhanced features included in AutoCAD 2024 software. See the enhancements made to importing markups into your drawings! Discover how machine learning improves productivity with Smart Blocks, and learn how you can better track the changes made to your drawing files with Activity Insights!

주요 학습

  • Get an introduction to the new and improved features in AutoCAD 2024.
  • Learn about the collaboration improvements to Markup Import and Markup Assist.
  • Learn how you can improve productivity with Smart Blocks!
  • Learn how to track AutoCAD workflows through details of multi-user activities in a DWG™.

발표자

  • Volker Cocco 님의 아바타
    Volker Cocco
    Volker Cocco began using AutoCAD software in 1991 and joined Autodesk, Inc. in 2011. His career began as a technical drafter, and has included roles in CAD management, consulting & training. Volker lives in Troutdale, Oregon, U.S.A
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      Transcript

      VOLKER COCCO: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this year's AutoCAD University, and thank you for attending this session of what's new in AutoCAD 2024. Before we begin, I do need to show you our safe harbor statement. In a nutshell, if I make any statements related to plans or future development of our products, don't make any business decisions based on those comments.

      Technology changes, and that, of course, affects the development process. That's it. Let me quickly introduce myself. My name is Volker. I'm with the Autodesk Customer Technical Success Enablement team, and I'm based in Portland, Oregon USA. I've been using AutoCAD software since 1991, beginning as a technical drafter.

      I joined Autodesk in 2011, so I'm entering my 13th year and enjoying every minute of it. And enough about me. Let's talk a little bit about AutoCAD. We'll begin this session with a lot of-- we'll have content, but we're going to have enough demos in between the content to not PowerPoint bore you to death. OK? And we'll leave time after the session for Q&A.

      Don't forget to download the handout, which digs even deeper into the details of AutoCAD 2024. So let's begin with some general information. AutoCAD 2024, including the specialized tool sets, which includes AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT for Mac, AutoCAD LT for Windows. All of those were released on July 23 of this year. We recently updated the software with the AutoCAD 2024.1 update.

      And we do this semi-annually, releasing an update with additional features and fixes which were either reported to us or were discovered by development. One of the top questions we receive at Autodesk around the time of the release is, has the drawing format changed? No. AutoCAD remains with the AutoCAD 2018 drawing file format, so there should be no problems at all with backward compatibility if you're working with someone using AutoCAD 2018 through 2024.

      The basic system requirements remain the same as AutoCAD 2023. There were a few recommended updates to the system requirements. I'd encourage you to take a look through those. We've also included a short section in the system requirements about graphic cards and drivers. There have also been some changes to AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT for Mac.

      And think you'll be happy to hear, for those on the Mac OS, AutoCAD for Mac now supports the M series chip, which provides performance improvements. Naturally, the results will vary based on user experience, the machine you're working with, the operating system, any filters or geometry in the drawing files. However, I think you'll find this is a nice improvement.

      Moving on, other performance improvements have been added. Installation of AutoCAD is now faster, two times faster than AutoCAD 2023, and we've also improved installation times for AutoCAD LT and DWG TrueView. Performance improvements have also been added for when you're switching layouts in AutoCAD 2024. Nine times faster than in 2023.

      Again, all of this is determined by the geometry in your drawing files. 3D graphics have been improved. We now have better support for Map 3D and Civil 3D. It's now part of the tool sets. But Map 3D and Civil 3D now have better support for large coordinate systems, paper space, and point clouds. And there were additional visual performance improvements as well.

      Moving on, let's take a look at some of the feature changes to the application itself. With AutoCAD 2024.1 update, we have added a end product, AI guided help bot which streamlines your support ticket submission and ability to contact live agents. You now have the option of searching for the content that you need when looking for a help documentation in the Autodesk Assistant Palette.

      If you cannot find the information you're looking for, you have options to contact a live chat representative or submit a support request. And I will show you how that works momentarily. Other improvements have been to the Start tab, which continues to be improved in this release, including new options to sort and search recent drawings.

      There's improved Autodesk projects integration, so your projects located in Docs or BIM will be easier to navigate, improved performance when rendering thumbnails, as well as opening and viewing drawings on ACC Docs. Minor changes have been made to the UI. For the New Files Tab, menu has been added. This replaces the Overflow menu which previously would appear when numerous AutoCAD drawing files were opened.

      We also have a New Layout Tab menu, which is similar to what you would see appear when right mouse clicking over Layout tab, but it has been moved into one corner and you can access the information about any active layout from that Layout Tab menu. Let's go ahead and take a look at some of this. So this is the Start tab of AutoCAD 2024.

      The first thing we'll take a look at is that we now have a chat icon up here for the Autodesk Assistant. You can also get to that from the dropdown list, Autodesk Assistant, but it's available without being in a open drawing just by launching the application. When you do so, this palette appears which will bring up the assistant. You are basically in the chat mode at this time.

      And you can type in something like, slow drawing, just to use this as an example. Hit Enter, and it searches for content based on those keywords and shows you some articles that you could take a look at to see if that resolves your issue. If none of this content suits you or does the trick, then you can contact a live support agent here, or open up a support case.

      I'm not going to click on this because I'll be disturbing those specialists who are working with customers right now. Let's go ahead and close this. You'll see we now have some improved functionality for our Start tab. The thumbnails have been reduced in size. Depending on how many recent files you have open-- I don't have that many here, but I could search for a drawing here. I could also reorder columns when in a list view.

      And just by clicking on this gear here, I can reorder these however I need, whatever suits me as far as displaying the information I need. I can also disable or enable these. Where this is really apparent is in your Autodesk projects, which now will have the standard thumbnail view, or you have the list view, which I was on initially.

      List or tree view, actually, is what we should be calling it, because it lists all of our views-- all of our projects in a easier to navigate fashion. Switching between BIM and Docs, I can easily get to my files. And again, let's just use the sample I plopped in here. Again, we have our column settings. I can add columns easily.

      And of course, I can reorder those columns as I prefer. So that is our Start tab. Let's move back to some other enhancements in AutoCAD, some of which were introduced in AutoCAD 2023 and were improved with AutoCAD 2024. The AutoCAD 2024 adds a new plotter configuration file, and this is an enhancement to the existing publish to web PNG PC3 driver.

      It now supports the creation of PNG files with a transparent background. This has been a much requested feature. The transparent background option is included within the plotter configurations custom properties dialog, which is accessible from the Device and Document Settings tab. The existing background color option has been enhanced to include separate options for transparent background and colored background.

      Additionally, we've made changes to the PDF SHX system variable which determines how text is stored in a PDF when printed from AutoCAD. So initially we had just two bit codes, zero and one. We now have an additional one. It's bit code two. Bit code two will create hidden text from text objects that use shape fonts. In other words, the text will be selectable in a PDF document, but you will not have the comments that you would have with the setting of one.

      So this is a much requested feature as well, and it's one I do prefer to have enabled. The space environment continues to improve, and now includes a new copy from trace command which copies objects from a trace into a drawing. Settings which were previously only available from the command line are now available as controls from the Settings icon on the trace toolbar.

      The image that you're seeing, the top two slider bars are trace front and trace back overlay effect transparency and geometry and trace transparency. Those are only available from the-- the only two that you see available when in the trace command itself. If you were to go into the markup assist function, the trace settings would show all four of those sliders. And you'll see that shortly.

      The previous AutoCAD included the markup import and markup assist functionality, which uses machine learning to identify markups and provide a way to view and insert drawing revisions with less manual effort. This release includes improvements to markup assist that makes it easier to bring markups into your drawing. This update includes-- we can now update existing text as opposed to just inserting as M text or creating an multileader.

      So just updating any existing text. Nice feature. Markup assist recognizes text that has been crossed out and allows you to erase the text or replace the text with text from a markup. Text comments that were added to a PDF using Adobe software will display and can be inserted into the drawing as a M leader, M text, or used to update existing text.

      We now have a fade markup control. So after you have marked up the drawing with the information given, once you mark up, the markup itself will fade into the background. You can also control this manually. When you select markups within a boundary, all objects will be selected within that boundary. This makes it a lot easier to work with the markups themselves, being able to just grab a selection set.

      And in addition to that, if you're in a paper space layout, you can activate the model space viewport. Instruction text will also be detected by markup assist. So if you have words like erase or delete, move or copy in the markup, AutoCAD detects that and markup assist identifies that as an instruction and executes the appropriate command for that.

      Right now move, copy, and delete are the only three that work as instruction text, but there could be more to come. With the 2024.1 update, we added the ability to detect and identify mark ups and flatten PDFs. So some nice improvements, but also this is a good reminder. Install the update. If you've installed the application, install the update to get those additional features and functionality.

      But enough with the PowerPoint for right now. Let's go ahead and take a look at how some of this functionality works. I'm going to go into my demo drawing and I'm also going to go ahead and switch to a different workspace here. So I have some tools available that I need to show you. And the first one is that in this markup we have some traces.

      A little bit of lag here. Sorry about that. So these are existing traces that my alter ego created a while back and sent to me. And what I am going to do is show the new copy from trace command. We are in a layout right now or in a model tab right now. I'm going to just, for demo purposes, demonstrate how this works. I want to go into the model environment for this particular trace because that's telling me that's where it's at.

      I select that, and what it's showing me is a trace sent to me by my colleague who has given me a note that says, hey, add share eight and update all shares in this selection. Well, I'm going to get to that later. For right now I just want to make a note of this to myself. So if we take a look, this is the trace environment, like I said. Here we have the ability to change the overlay effect using our slider bar. We can also reduce the geometry.

      Personally, I kind of leave it right here in the middle. I'm happy with that. But going into the trace back environment, I can now make some changes. So as a refresher, trace front allows me to add to a trace if I want to send this to one of my colleagues to have them do the work and have some additional notes. Trace back allows me to modify the drawing itself.

      So using the command copy from trace-- this is only available right now from the command prompt. I'm prompted to select the objects that I'd like to copy into my working drawing. And so in this way I'm taking it, I'm not removing it from the trace. I'm copying it to my drawing so it will be there so I can remember to do this later on, this instruction that was given to me. So I've selected those objects. I'm going to hit Enter, and now I'm going to leave the trace environment.

      And you'll see these are now in the AutoCAD environment itself, not in the trace environment, and I can modify those later. Let's take a look at one more example here. This is in a layout and-- so in the previous example-- I don't know if I would have wanted to add the M leader or not, but here I'm not going to. I'm just going to do what the instruction asks of me. So I'm going back into trace back.

      I'm going to go ahead and type copy from trace. Yeah. Mistyped that. That's OK. I'm going to go ahead and just select this. This isn't a block or anything. I hit Enter, and I'm out of the trace environment, in the layout environment, and there's my label that I quickly added. And if we take a look down here, we see the other crates that I added.

      I can add a markup at this stage if I want to from this palette, or, of course, I can go to the Collaborate tab and select Markup Import. That has not changed from AutoCAD 2023. I'm going to go ahead and select the floor plan mark up that I have here. And now it gives us a little bit of a better progress bar as far as what's happening with the import, showing me that it's working on it.

      Everything here looks good so I'm going to hit Accept. Let's take a look at some of these new features. All right. So first of all, I have a rev cloud here. Nothing's happening. I'm just seeing the markups because I'm in the trace front environment. If I select the gear up here now, I can also modify the transparency options for the drawing background.

      Do I want to fade it out more? Depending on the color of your background, it's going to be more visible or not. I usually leave it about halfway. So let's take a look. This is an instruction that was a comment made in Acrobat. So I'm going to go to my trace back environment right now because I do need that to make any changes using mark ups.

      And as I hover over this markup right here, this PDF comment, it says markup assist identified, and it gives me some instruction text. OK. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add this note to this area, but first I want to add a rev cloud here. And if you've used markup assist before, one of the prompts here is to insert this as a rev cloud.

      Well, I want this rev cloud to be in the model environment, so I'm going to click here. I'm going to double click. And I now have opened up the model layout view-- the model view in the layout. So I'm going to go ahead and convert this to a rev cloud.

      And keep in mind you may want to change layers first before adding traces, just for demo purposes. I'm going to now just leave it on layer zero. And I'll select the PDF comment, and we still have the insert as M leader, insert as M text, or update existing text. I'm going to insert this as M text. This will be my note to myself that, hey, I'm going to have to pay attention to this in the near future for when that furniture arrives.

      All right. So let's scooch on over here. There's some more markups available. I'll go ahead and close the palette. All righty. So here we have some instruction text. We have just a markup here. You'll see that the markup does not recognize this particular item here, what we're trying to do with that. We also have a rev cloud and we have some PDF text.

      So the decision was made to remove the made April 7. OK, this is great. Let's go ahead and take a look at this here. And it says if I select it-- because it says remove there. If you look at my command prompt, it is telling me to erase select object. So it's executed the erase command, and I'm going to go ahead and select the border. And it executed that erase command, followed through with it. I'm going to just hit Enter.

      And it fades those objects out in the background. And you'll notice this markup here faded as well because I've completed that task. I don't need this markup here, so I'm going to select it, and it prompts me to fade this. I don't need to see it here. I do want to go ahead and convert that to a rev cloud. And again, I'm going to go ahead and insert the M text pointing out why-- whoops.

      Well, I messed up. But the nice thing is I can undo a step here. All right, so I do things like this. Little awkward moments. I'm going to go ahead and insert as M text, and just plop that in place right here. So pretty cool with the erase function. Let's take a look at one last markup here which I need. Ah, there it is. It didn't stand out very well. But here we have a block.

      This is actually an attribute in this block, which-- oh. I have several items selected. That's why that didn't pop up appropriately. There it is. Took a moment. A little bit of a lag here. But just wanted to show you this is a attribute block, or block attribute is actually the better way to put that.

      What I'm going to do is select the markup here, and I'm going to say I want to update existing text. And so I'll select this here. And I can either append, replace, or select the strikethrough. I'm going to replace this. And so it does that for me. I'm going to click outside, the markup fades.

      And again, having selected this, you'll see that this is still an attribute value or attribute tag. So it's pretty slick how this works. All righty. See how we're doing for time. OK, good. I'm going to close this and switch over to model, and let's talk about a couple of other new commands that have been added to-- or new features that have been added to AutoCAD.

      AutoCAD 2024 introduced smart blocks, OK? One of those smart block functionalities is smart block placement. This new automatic block placement capability has been added to assist with repetitive block placement. The block placement engine machine learning learns how existing block instances are placed in your drawing to infer the next placement of the same block.

      As you insert a block from the blocks palette or any other insert method to your drawing, the engine gives placement suggestions which are close to a similar geometry of where you've placed them before. So for example, if you already placed a chair block close to the corner of a wall, when inserting another instance of that same chair block, AutoCAD automatically positions that chair as you move it close to a similar corner.

      As you move the block, the walls are highlighted. The position, rotation, and scale of the chair block are adjusted to match the other block instances. So pretty cool functionality I'll show you that in a moment. We've also added smart block replacement. In AutoCAD 2024 you can quickly replace specified block references or multiple block references by selecting from a palette of suggested similar blocks or from a block in the drawing or from your block palette.

      When the block references are replaced, the scale, rotation, and attribute values are maintained from the original block. We've also added to the insights that we introduced several releases ago. This is called activity insights. And activity insights tracks events whenever a drawing file is opened and being worked on in AutoCAD. It can also track some events that occur outside of AutoCAD.

      So if you were to rename or copy a file using Windows File Explorer, those events are tracked as well. When a drawing is opened, past events performed in the drawing are read from the activity insights database and are displayed chronologically on the activity insights palette. At the same time, events are being written to the database as they occur in the drawing, and this keeps the content of the palette current.

      This allows drafters and CAD admins to stay informed of any relevant file changes and file access with a detailed activity log. Activity insights, it requires minimal setup, either on a LAN, a local drive, or cloud servers. In addition to that, AutoCAD LT has had a big improvement. AutoLISP is now available in AutoCAD LT.

      You can leverage the thousands of written programs that work in AutoCAD and could only previously be used in AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT. There are some limitations. OK? You can only access commands and system variables that exist within AutoCAD LT. So it can't access any third party APIs. It cannot access functionality, such as creating a 3D model, which AutoCAD can do. But it does include-- excuse me.

      It does include the DCL or dialog control language. So if you are writing your own code or if you have an existing LISP routine that has a dialog, it will run those as well. If you have not coded before, or even if you want to know what the limitations are in AutoCAD LT with LISP, there's extensive updated documentation in the AutoCAD LT help, as well as updated tutorials to help get you started.

      So that said, let's take a look at how some of these other new features work. So here we are, again, in a very familiar drawing. And one of the prompts was to add shares and update all shares in this section with the same name. We're going to update them shortly. Let's go ahead and add some more furniture.

      OK. So I'm going to go ahead and demonstrate the block placement function. Now I've gone ahead and changed it to the furniture layer just to make it look pretty, and I'm going to go ahead and select this desk, which has already been inserted into this drawing once. And let me turn off my dynamic input just to allow you to see this better.

      And you can see as I move next to these walls, the block orientates itself and positions itself to reflect how other similar blocks have been placed. I'm just going to click and move another one up here. Go ahead and place a block here. Let's not limit ourselves to those cubicles. Let's go ahead and try some of these angular ones.

      And you can see this is a very fast way to place multiple instances of a block in your drawing, and it's even faster when you don't have screen lag through the video occurring. So let's go ahead and add some chairs. And you'll notice how far from the-- come on, cursor. There we go. There we go. Yeah, I'm not sure what's happening with the cursor display here.

      Again, this is what happens with video. But we need to update and add chairs so, again, we'll update later. But I'm going to go ahead and add chairs like this right now. And you'll see the distance that the chairs are located away from the desk. And so I'm going to go ahead and place this here. Place that here.

      As we get over here, you'll see how that chair rotated itself to match the alignment of the desk. Again, we'll do the same thing here, here, and here. So pretty slick, huh? This is cool technology, and it gets better. Now I will point out that the first time you use this or the first time you try to insert a block that has not been inserted before, it's not going to know what to do.

      You have to place that block at least one time, and after that AutoCAD infers what it feels you're going to do next. So that said, let's take a look at block-- oh. Actually, no. Let me show you one more thing. This is also kind of cool. If we go over here, you'll see we have-- yeah.

      I'm going to go ahead and add a couple more urinals to this lavatory here. You'll see this is not to-- it's a larger scale. If I bring my cursor right here, it not only positions that block, it scales it as well. Do that again over here. Just kind of plop it in there. And voila. So this-- it just makes it real easy to place your blocks.

      So let's get back to the chair thing. Actually, the boss phoned me up and said, look, I need you to just replace all of your chairs-- chair seven with chair eight. They're more comfortable, and bottom line is they're cheaper. So we have a block replace function. And the way this works is that you do need to select a block that you wish to replace first.

      So this can be one block or multiple blocks. Well, I need to replace all of them, so I'm going to right mouse click in my drawing. If I could see the cursor this would be much better. There we go. And I am going to use the Quick Select command. And I'm going to select all of those blocks that are called share seven.

      All right. So I'm just selecting them all. And once they're selected, AutoCAD realizes, OK, you've selected a bunch of blocks. Here's the block name. But now we have this replace. This is the be replaced command. And that's available. And I'm going to go ahead and click on that, and it's going to show me a dialogue that has the chair I want to replace.

      I can either pick an existing block in the drawing. It's also showing me down at the bottom recent blocks that I've used. And there is a slider here too, or I can use the mouse wheel to scroll and see more of those. And then these are blocks it is suggesting. Now, with this, this is all machine learning, so you need to also be aware that sometimes the block that it is suggesting may not be what you want.

      I've seen in some drawings where, when I've replaced a sink, it's tried to replace it with a bathtub or even a toilet. OK? So just take it for what it's worth and pick the block you need. I'm going to go ahead and just select this chair. By the way, it's also looking at the library drawing that I have attached in here, so in this Library tab that I can't access at the moment because this dialogue is open. But I'm going to go ahead and click that. It's working away. I don't want to redefine.

      This will come up. And look, all we're collecting is data on what kind of blocks you're replacing a block with. That's it. You don't have to agree to this. You can just uncheck this and click OK, but sending us this information helps us identify how blocks look similar to one another and makes this replacement technology a lot better.

      I'll encourage you to agree to this, but you can continue without doing that. I'm going to hit Escape here to get out of the block replace command, and all these blocks have now been updated. So this is different than the express tools because I can selectively replace blocks. OK, on to our View tab under the palettes. Or, excuse me, history panel. We have this insight activity button, which I've clicked, and-- yeah. Save the drawing.

      And what it has done is track the events of what's occurred in this session. It doesn't track the individual commands. It doesn't show me who edited this drawing, but doing functions like a trace, it shows that I have worked with this trace that was given to me. And we have other insights here as well. I modified this yesterday. I did a purge on this particular drawing.

      And if I go back even further, I saved the drawing to a new name and saved to a new name. Trace created. So events such as published, events such as renaming it outside of file explorer, all of these are tracked and noted on this palette here. And here I can take a look at what has occurred based on date, who the user was-- in this case, it was just me. OK? Just me.

      And then we can also take a look at the type of events. Now right now this will track what AutoCAD events are being used. And I'm saying this because it can be-- this is available in the vertical tool sets as well. As we are moving forward, those tool sets are adding-- when this first came out, had just the AutoCAD commands.

      But now, as we're moving forward, specific commands that may occur in AutoCAD architecture, MAT, and so forth are also being added to be tracked as events. So this is the first iteration of this technology, and it's only going to get better, and it's a great way to collaborate. You can store the database easily. Just change the path in the options dialog and you can start on a server.

      You can store it in a cloud location just by redirecting it. By default, the events are stored in the app data folder of the local machine for the user. So you can redirect that, and they're just small JSON files. All right. Let's finish up. We have a couple more minutes left before the Q&A segment would begin. And I'm hoping you like the features you've seen so far.

      Now, with any subscription, you do have AutoCAD and AutoCAD for the web and on the mobile apps available. You can also get these as an individual subscription. This allows you to connect the-- work in those with your drawings in the field. You can use AutoCAD web from a computer just by logging into a web browser, or you can use the mobile app on your iOS or Android devices. They will open up AutoCAD drawings.

      The visual fidelity is the same as in the desktop install of AutoCAD. Some minor changes, like the web doesn't support all TrueType fonts, so fonts are going to look like standard AutoCAD fonts, but everything else is AutoCAD. It's an AutoCAD drawing that can be worked on.

      AutoCAD web now has some new features. It has a sheet set manager, as well as the ability to batch plot drawings to a PDF. It now supports AutoLISP and DCL, dialog control language. Again, it is limited to some functions because not everything is available on the web that would be on the desktop.

      And it supports local file access so you aren't forced to save to the Autodesk Cloud. However, you can add numerous other cloud providers as storage locations for the web and mobile app as well as for AutoCAD desktop. We can now make use and share files using these different providers that you prefer to use.

      And that said, thank you again for attending. I do appreciate that you've decided to join this session and learn a little bit more about AutoCAD 2023. There's a lot of other sessions available, so I definitely hope that you've walked away with something. Thank you again, and have a great day.