Technical drawing for work?

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I've been noticing that son#1 (he's also spectrum) has an interest in drawing with a focus on being technically correct instead of 'artistic'.

There's not a lot of work here in this part of Southern Tasmania, so I'm willing to explore the commercial aspects of his interests to help him overcome unnecessary obstacles when he finishes high school in several years.

One such plan is to get a student edition of a technical drawing program for our computer to see if it is something he'll take on.

But there seems to be a few options, like cad, autocad, sketchup, and probably others I haven't discovered yet.

Please share your experiences with regards drawing programs you use, or have used, in work that you have engaged in, and which programs you'd recommend for the kind of work you do.

Thankyou.

Technical drawing is a great thing to pursue.

I know nothing about it, though.

There are some here who are technical drawers.

I used to do it the manual method and I got on well with it. Then cad cam came in and while I could do it, for me it felt like a false world which I didn't like so I stopped doing technical drawing when computers became popular.

I worked as designer, mostly working on the physical parts of electronic gadgets, for a fair few years - also involving preparing and converting drawings to data for computer-controlled production tools.

AutoCAD was very much the de-facto standard among the colleagues, customers, and suppliers that I worked with, as it has been for a long time now. Its "DXF" file format is by far the most common for exchanging data between professionals, for which reason, most of the alternatives also support this format with varying degrees of compromise. The downside is that it can be eye-wateringly expensive; not something I had to worry about as I wasn't spending my own money!

I have also used SketchUp extensively for home projects. I think that this is much easier to learn than AutoCAD, but is better suited to designing, for example, 3D computer game characters than industrial products, and even in that domain isn't an "industry standard". Altering the dimensions of something often requires far more re-drawing, for example, and the "DXF" file compatibility is rather flakey (and not available in the cheaper versions, IIRC.)

In technical terms, SketchUp is a "face modeller" and AutoCAD is a "parametric modeller" - the former more suitable for computer graphics design, and the latter for industrial design, generally speaking. So, if your son is more interested in one of those careers than the other, those would be key terms to look out for when choosing an alternative.

Thanks all for your perspectives. There certainly is a big price difference. The student edition of cad is about $500 for a year subscription and sketchup is about $70 for the same.

Ill probably go cad. With the local industries centring on construction and boat building, it might be more useful.

I work for a state roads department (not as a designer/drafter myself but I know the names of some of the software):

AutoCAD is useful in a variety of settings, but expensive. For home use, I got myself a software called Turbocad which was about 10x cheaper but worked in a roughly similar way for most purposes. That might be useful to start with, for learning the basics of computer-aided drafting. There are short TAFE courses in AutoCAD that are well worth doing to learn the basics.

My ex used Sketchup a lot, for visualising house construction. Never used it myself, but I think it can produce drawings faster and more intuitively than AutoCAD, so its good for home use. Not used much professionally, as far as I know.

12D is the modelling software used as standard for road works design in my department. So this is a good one to learn if someone is specifically looking for civil engineering design work. But it's probably not very useful for learning drafting techniques at home as you need to upload ground survey data before you can do anything useful.

Civil 3D is another software from the makers of AutCAD and I believe it has better 3D modelling capability. It seems to be getting more popular, but that's all I know.

Hope that helps

I'm an architect so technical drafting is just one part of what I do, and my response will be biased towards a career in the architecture/building industry.

I use AutoCAD but have used other software like ArchiCAD and Rhino in the past. AutoCAD LT is a cheaper, 2D-only version of AutoCAD which might be good to start with. I'm not familiar with cheaper alternatives, or ever free ones, but they might be better as an introduction. The workflow for creating drawings is very similar. There are of course industry standards one has to comply with too, depending on the field. As mentioned .dxf is the de facto standard for drawing exchange which gives AutoCAD (.dwg/.dxf format; interchangeable) a big market advantage.

We don't use Sketchup for drafting. We use it for 3D-modelling, as I'd say it is good for boxy shapes like buildings due to its "push-pull" concept. You *can* sculpt faces and characters with it, but software like MAX, Maya, and Zbrush are even better at that. Sketchup is fast when you just want to model an interior or simple furniture. It's easy to learn, easier than AutoCAD, but architects don't consider it a drafting program.

Here's a handy little guide from a well-known architectural website.



Good luck!

Thanks for the responses. I'll study the info given.

Sorry for the late response. For some reason the email notification of your responses got placed in my spam folder, which isn't usually the case, so I missed it.