IMSI Turbocad Professional 10

IMSI has been in business since 1982 and has sold various versions of its flagship 3D drawing package, Turbocad, over the years. Turbocad Professional, now at version 10, is obviously a mature product, and the software must have found a fair degree of user acceptance to have survived this long. According to IMSI, over two million copies of Turbocad have been sold.

Turbocad Professional 10 may seem highly priced until you compare it to the industry leader, Autocad 2005, at over £3,000. The Professional package is a suite of programs that, in addition to Turbocad, includes Floorplan 3D, Turboproject Express and Scan OCR. Also included are more than 10,000 2D drafting symbols and over 3,000 ACIS 3D symbols.

Turbocad Professional 10 supports 28 of the most popular industry-standard file formats, including Autocad dwg and dxf There's also the option to publish designs in HTML, jpg and mtx formats.

Unusually for software these days, Turbocad Professional 10 comes with a 400-page, perfect-bound, paper reference manual. This contains numerous examples of how to construct and manipulate vector drawing primitives in Turbocad. It covers 2D and 3D drawing, and drawing annotation. Having dealt with wire-frame drawing, the manual then goes on to explain lighting and 3D rendering.

Two installation CDs are provided; one carries the executables for the program collection and the second the symbol libraries. Installation is relatively painless and IMSI uses the user-code/response-code method of program activation with a 30-day grace period. The activation request appears on first-launch and there are the usual online or telephone options. The online option appears to allow users to register only as US or Canadian residents.

Turbocad Professional now uses the popular ACIS R11 engine. ACIS is a parametric modelling kernel that is owned by Spatial and licensed to companies that, like IMSI, market 3D-drawing software. It provides hybrid modelling, combining the speed-enhancing features of solid modelling with the flexibility and aesthetic control of surface modelling.

Due to the use of ACIS, it's now possible to move back and forth between solids and surfaces. Surfaces now don't need to envelop a volume, as Turbocad interpolates the needed surface to make a solid volume. Integrated raster-to-vector conversion allows import of raster images. All or portions of the image can be selected and converted to vector form. There are two conversion modes: either convert everything within a selected marquee, or just convert the features near to the cursor, which is useful for cut-aways. Conversion by colour can be performed where only the portions of the image that are a specified colour are converted. Optical character recognition (OCR) is also built in.

Previous versions of Turbocad have been criticised for a lack of organisation and, unfortunately, this is still the case with version 10. There are a large number of tool icons and both 2D and 3D tools are mixed together on the same toolbar. All the drawing tools also have rather fiddly fly-outs accessed by clicking on a corner of each tool icon. There are often very many ways with slightly different options to accomplish the same task. However, unlike many 3D programs, Turbocad does have 3D primitives which make the creation of sphere and cones, and so on, very easy. Clicking on a 3D shape reveals handles that can be used to resize, rotate and move the shape. There are two methods for interactive deformation of solids and surfaces. A uniform point pressure can be applied to a face, resulting in bell-like shapes, or points can be defined to constrain the deformation. It's easy to create cross-section linked to views, either using several predefined standard cross-sections, or by defining a new section by placing a line and selecting which side of the cross-section to display. There's a preview to check the selection before committing.

Floorplan 3D is a separate program that, as the name implies, is designed for drawing floor plans. Once rendered as a 3D model building it's possible to walk or fly through the model using the mouse to control the viewpoint.

While Turbocad may not be as all-powerful as Autocad, it's probably more than most people need from a 3D modeller.

Contact: Mediagold International 020 7221 4600
www.turbocad.co.uk

System requirements:

• Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/NT4
• Pentium II class processor or higher
• 128MB of Ram
• 55-220MB of free hard disk space
• 64MB+ of swap space
• Super VGA (1,024 x 768) display
• 16bit graphics card
• 3D graphics accelerator card

Price details:
RRP: £449.99 (£382.97 ex VAT).
Upgrade from v9 £79.99 inc VAT