Spotlight: Mauritz Botha of IMSI/Design

DoubleCAD XT and XT PRO are from IMSI/Design, makers of TurboCAD, DesignCAD, and IDX Renditioner rendering plug-in for Google SketchUp.  Mauritz Botha, the Chief Technology Officer of IMSI/Design answers a few questions from “The Daily CatchUp” regarding their DoubleCAD products.

TDC: What is DoubleCAD?

Mauritz: DoubleCAD is a new line of 2D CAD products that we’ve created for the professional market.  They are designed as drafting and detailing solutions for developing construction documentation.  We know that most people don’t do all their work in one application and we chose to emphasize streamlining workflow between applications, in particular SketchUp and DoubleCAD, and AutoCAD and DoubleCAD.

TDC: IMSI has been known primarily for your retail and consumer products, not for the professional market.  Why the switch?

Mauritz: We are the #1 CAD brand in retail and will continue there, but we haven’t been solely for the consumer market.  Our TurboCAD PRO product line has been firmly planted in professional environments for years.  But three years ago when new investors took over IMSI and created IMSI/Design we decided to place a new emphasis on the professional market.  Many CAD producers were trying to push customers upstream to more sophisticated BIM and PLM solutions.  SketchUp was a great example of a product slipping into the market underneath all the high-end marketing buzz and meeting a real world need:  simple 3D conceptual design.  We are trying to do something similar and provide more focus and innovation on the other end of the process:  2D construction documentation.  We felt the big players have been reluctant to add innovative features and significant productivity improvements in this area when their business goals are to push customers upstream to expensive and cumbersome BIM packages.

TDC: How is DoubleCAD going to change the market?

Mauritz: Rather than spend a lot of money on marketing buzz, we put the money into the product, and in price savings.  We’ve created two versions, DoubleCAD XT which is designed to compete favorably with AutoCAD LT, is what we call an AutoCAD LT work-alike.  It is free for both personal and commercial use – like SketchUp.  DoubleCAD XT PRO goes well beyond XT and AutoCAD LT in providing parametric design tools, advanced drafting and detailing features, and a lot more, for only US $695.

TDC: What do you mean by AutoCAD LT work-alike?

Mauritz: Because most people doing 2D drafting today are familiar with AutoCAD, we designed the DoubleCAD user interface to be similar to AutoCAD LT in order minimize switching costs.  If you are familiar with the AutoCAD classic interface then there is little to learn regarding basic functionality.  The menus, commands, intelligent cursor and other elements are designed similarly.  But we didn’t make DoubleCAD a clone:  we wanted to be free to innovate and make improvements.

TDC: What improvements are there compared to AutoCAD LT that people can expect?

Mauritz: Fantastic SketchUp file import for one thing.  We bring in all the expected geometry, layers, views, etc, but we also create a paper space with a viewport for each SketchUp scene.  It may not sound sexy, but it is a huge time savings with certain types of models and documentation.  The viewport properties include layer visibility, camera position, and 2D or perspective camera views.  If you use layers extensively and have dozens of views to document, this can be a huge time saver, and help reduce errors.  We’ve also added features that lots of AutoCAD users have been asking for such as Bezier curves, draw-order-by-layer, transparent fills, embedding bitmaps… we’ve also added a wall tool that creates self-healing walls for 2D plan design.  Save your design as a .DWG and because the walls are AutoCAD Architecture compatible, the walls remain self-healing in AutoCAD even though they don’t have the tools to create a wall.  You can use that tool to quickly design floorplans that you can export to .DXF or explode and save as a .DWG and import into SketchUp, create faces for the slabs and walls, extrude, group one floor and add it to another – you are quickly on your way.

TDC: And what about the PRO version?

Mauritz: DoubleCAD XT PRO includes a lot more!  There is a full suite of AutoCAD Architecture compatible tools including compound walls, parametric AEC doors and windows, stair, rail, slab, and roof tools, plus schedule and section tools.  There is the drafting palette which allows you to create floorplans, roof plans, sections, elevations, and detailed views that are fully associative with the model, even an Xref of the .SKP file.  We’ve added parametric design tools including 2D parametric constraints, similar to the ones that were only added to the full AutoCAD in 2010.  There is the parametric parts manager that is a bit like dynamic components, except that the parts are scripted.  The PRO product also includes tools for creating weld symbols, surface roughness symbols, a gear tool, a trace tool, and more.  And all for only US $695.  And we’re continuing development at a good pace.

TDC: Who is using DoubleCAD today?

Mauritz: The free product attracts a very, very wide range of users.  Some simply treat DoubleCAD XT as a viewer or a file converter:  you can open a .SKP and save it as a .DXF for import into Blender, or save a .DWG that includes more information than the SketchUp Pro .DWG export function, and you don’t need the Pro version of either application to do that.  We’ve seen lots of students using it, as well as many professionals that are looking for an extra CAD seat for home use.  Smaller architectural offices and others downstream in the architectural workflow, from HVAC contractors, to electricians, and many others are profiting from its availability.  The PRO version has seen its best adoption from smaller architectural firms, sole practitioners, landscape architecture, and people that do 2D mechanical design and product design.

TDC: Can you tell us about your plans for future versions of DoubleCAD?

Mauritz: We are listening to our users, so you can get a feel for many of the changes by reading the DoubleCAD forums (http://forums.doublecad.com).  And if you don’t see what you want you can jump right in and suggest it.  We’re working on shorter design cycles right now and want to really build momentum through a combination of innovation on the one hand, and constant improvements to existing functionality on the other hand.  In particular we are currently working on a number of performance improvements to speed working with large drawings or even several large drawings assembled via Xrefs.  We’ll be improving Xrefs, our text tools, layer management, and over the next few releases we have quite a few enhancements to benefit SketchUp users in particular.  And in conjunction with partners in several countries we expect to see localized versions in the near future.

TDC: Thank you for spending the time with us to explain a little more about DoubleCAD and the direction IMSI/Design is taking.

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