numberwrong Posted August 22, 2015 Share Posted August 22, 2015 Hi, I'm not that competent with any drafting programs but I want to invest a little time and money in learning. I'm a lampie and want to be able to create lighting plots with associated data (DMX/Dimmer circuits etc) and work out truss loading. Should I bother with Autocad or just go straight to vectorworks? The main advantage I can see with autocad is that it's cheap as you can rent LT for a month which is good to know if you're relying on it to deliver a project. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonathanhill Posted August 22, 2015 Share Posted August 22, 2015 Both AutoCAD and Vectorworks are drafting programs. The main difference being that Vectorworks is available as a specific lighting design package called Vectorworks Spotlight. The full versions of either are expensive, upwards of £2.5k. To be honest, I would start out with LX Free as it is simple and free. See how you get on with that before spending a huge amount of money on something that may be over complicated for what you need. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indyld Posted August 24, 2015 Share Posted August 24, 2015 Neither package is a magic bullet nor that cheap, particularly VW although lighting data handling is much more appropriate in Spotlight than in base AutoCAD. However, although improved in recent years, the paperwork side to VW is a little half-arsed in places and the reason that VW users often also use Lightwright to work with data and produce paperwork. Don't imagine that any software will do all the work for you and you won't spend ages importing layers at the wrong scale, exporting stuff to Excel to tidy it up and other such CAD faffing which makes one wonder why pay for all this when you can draw to scale relatively cheaply and use spreadsheets for your data. I would suggest that truss loadings need to calculated by a competent person, should it actually matter to any extent. Firing a nominal figure assigned to a fixture type into a report and totalling the results on a truss by truss basis is not the same as doing load calcs. VW does do quite a bit of engineering-y stuff if you know where to look for it, but this isn't front and centre in the Spotlight tool kit and, if you know how to get meaningful results from it, then you are probably competent to do the calcs some other way. If you do just want a total of fixture weights per truss, a decent fixture schedule made up in Google spreadsheets will do just as well. ACAD LT obviously has limitations of functionality, VW doesn't give you the option of such limitations (and therefore a cheaper solution). I have used all the major CAD packages for lighting purposes and currently run ACAD and Vectorworks as I'm lucky enough that I no longer have to pay for them myself. If I did, I would probably go back to using a vector drawing package or cheap CAD that could work with DWG and spreadsheets. From the outside, this kind of software looks like it may solve all one's problems. In reality, it is often not cost effective for the sole trader - even a pretty busy one. (All the above said, *learning* CAD shouldn't be sniffed at, being a skill that can bring money and other work. For learning, I would choose AutoCAD as more non-lighting departments/companies use it and the skill can be a little more transferrable. Once you have learned one pro CAD package, learning others is easy enough. A further thought on the subject of learning: If I were to suggest one place to invest precious time in learning software for lampies it actually would be After Effects) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mac.calder Posted August 24, 2015 Share Posted August 24, 2015 Will you have to work with other designers often? Or are you planning on having to? Find out what your fellows work with and use that. If you are working with lighting and video bods that use Vectorworks, go that route. If you are working with lots of set builders and desginers that use AutoCAD, learn AutoCAD. If lots of locals use TurboCAD, use TurboCAD. Whilst AutoCAD files are generally the go-to format that every piece of software tends to read, Autodesk love to change things just enough every version that opening the files in other packages will often result in oddities. Like scales being slightly out or XREF's (linked/included documents) not embedding properly. At the moment I am swapping between Turbo, VW, QuickCAD and Auto - because my company standard is TurboCAD, some of the older guys refuse to change and are still using QuickCAD, our we have VW for working with certain designers and I am currently consulting on building works - and AutoCAD is pretty much a requirement there... It is not ideal - each software has it's pros and cons, similarities and differences - but they all work around the same principals. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Ripley Posted August 25, 2015 Share Posted August 25, 2015 It might be worth checking out the format that the people you work with or for use. Most theatre venues use AutoCAD - they can get it cheap as charidees. Production companies and support cos generally use AutoCAD, they may have some VW but most are AutoCAD based As Mac said there are issues with importing DWGs to and from various programmes and the format changes every 3 or 4 years meaning Vectorworks etc can't open the files from new AutoCAD versions for a bit Your point about the monthly leasing is a good one that keeps costs down but even cheaper is DraftSight an AutoCAD LT clone, which although the free version doesn't have all the toys, the paid version at £250 inc VAT has a lot of them. It uses the same AutoCAD command line commands so if you learn AutoCAD you'll be well on your way. I do have a couple of students on the ABTT course using DraftSight and they haven't run into any problems yet. You can import the lantern symbols/drawings from the various manufacturers and other websites with no problems (that I've found) so give it a go Speaking of training... RCSSD AutoCAD (Blatant plug) All the best David Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trussmonkey Posted August 27, 2015 Share Posted August 27, 2015 try Draftsight. its free and almost exactly like Autocad..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andy_s Posted August 28, 2015 Share Posted August 28, 2015 it's free if you only work in 2D. For 3D and other useful functions like importing pdf you have to pay. But still lots and lots less than autoCAD or VW. Also I don't think it works very well on a mac, but this may be an operator thing as I've only recently started using mac... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andy_s Posted August 28, 2015 Share Posted August 28, 2015 Having read my post again (but too late to edit) it seems a bit negative - I'd like to say I'm a big fan of draftsight and use it all the time on my pc (2D is fine for 95% of what I do), Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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