The Autodesk annual Rights of Spring begins. The Autodesk AutoCAD 2024 was officially released early this week. The latest and greatest AutoCAD 2024 is released to some customers somewhere.
There is something new in AutoCAD 2024 for almost everybody. The One AutoCAD 2024 ships with a huge list of powerful AutoCAD Toolsets that include:
- AutoCAD Architecture
- AutoCAD Electrical
- AutoCAD MEP
- AutoCAD Mechanical
- AutoCAD Plant 3D
- AutoCAD Map
- AutoCAD Raster Design
See our updated Autodesk Online Help page to links to all the AutoCAD Toolset Help files and What’s New detailed listings. There’s a lot.
We must mention that improved AutoCAD 2024 3D and 2D graphics performance matters to us all particularly for us AutoCAD Map 2024 and Autodesk Civil 3D 2024 users out here in Civil 3D Land.
AutoCAD 2024 New Features
Here’s the Autodesk official video review from the AutoCAD 2024 Help.
What’s New in AutoCAD 2024
In no particular order here’s a list of the focused new features in AutoCAD 2024.
You Be the Boss
Inside the AutoCAD interface we get new File and Tab menus that do actually speed up how we all get to drawings and our Layout tabs quicker and easier. This one spoiled me quickly.
There are delicious tweaks to the Start menu interface. This includes new options to sort and search recent drawings. The recent drawings list uses smaller thumbnails to allow for more drawings to display.
- Sort and Search the recent drawings in both the grid and list views
- Customize the list view column headings by clicking settings.
Name and Pinned are persistent columns. - Drag to change the column order
Autodesk Projects
Hey. They renamed the Autodesk Docs folder to Autodesk Projects. Select Autodesk Projects, a new pane displays showing a hub selector and the project path tree.
Here the list of improvements:
- Improved support and performance when viewing large files on Autodesk Docs.
- Improved Desktop Connector resulting in improved performance displaying a drawing in the Start tab and opening a drawing from Autodesk Docs.
- Improved navigation on the Start tab for drawings stored on Autodesk Docs
Sheet Set Manager
There are significant Sheet Set Manager for the Web improvements:
- Automatic Sheet Set lock management
- Multiple Sheet selection for publishing
- Ability to publish to a multi-sheet PDF or individual PDF for each Sheet
- Control over the PDF name and location
- Option to overwrite existing files during publish and eTransmit
- Control over the eTransmit file name and location
- Control over the location for new Sheets
- Open Sheet Set button added to the palette
Yes. There will be a new Autodesk Desktop Connector released real soon now. As of this post it had not been released yet.
Smart Blocks
A major upgrade to the Block Palette interface. In ACAD 2024, we get Smart Blocks. See the video above.
- The block placement engine learns how the existing block instances are placed in your drawing to infer the next placement of the same block. As you insert a block, the engine gives placement suggestions close to a similar geometry where you've placed that block before.
- Replace specified block references by selecting from a palette of suggested similar blocks. When you select block references to replace, the product suggests similar blocks for you to select from.
Activity Insights
We now have a new Activity Insights log.
Activity Insights provides an understanding of the past actions that you or others have performed on drawings. Activity Insights tracks events whenever a drawing file is opened and being worked on in AutoCAD. It can also track some events outside AutoCAD such as a drawing rename or copy in Windows Explorer.
When a drawing is opened, past events performed in the drawing are read from the Activity Insights database and displayed chronologically in the Activity Insights palette. At the same time, events are being written to the database as you work in the drawing, which keeps the contents of the palette current.
Events are logged even when the Activity Insights palette is closed. All events are displayed the next time the palette opens.
Changes are written to the Activity Insights Event Location specified in the Files tab of the Options dialog box. The default location for the Activity Insights Event Location is C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Autodesk\ActivityInsights\Common.
Change this to a shared location so that any drawing activity is logged in one location regardless of who works on it.
3D Graphics
Improvements to the Shaded (Fast) and Shaded with Edges (Fast) visual styles.
- Support for Map 3D and Civil 3D
- Large coordinate system support
- Selection (Fence, Lasso, Polygon)
- Paper space support
- Point cloud support
- Line weights
- Dimming of Xrefs and locked layers
- General stability, visual fidelity, and performance improvements
2D Graphics
Improvements that have been made to the 2D graphics system.
- Pan performance is improved for drawings with raster images or wipeouts
- Display performance is improved for trace background,
Markup Import and Markup Assist, and ViewCube - Layout switching performance improvements
You Be the Boss of Me
From the video we can all see there’s a much-improved PDF based Markup Assist. The improvements net us four new System Variables and a new FADEMARKUP command.
Last but not least and not necessarily an AutoCAD 2024 improvement at all.
Autodesk Access Arrives
The Autodesk Desktop App (ADA) that we’ve all come to love and hate is being replaced by a new app called Autodesk Access.
Customers can now download Autodesk Access from the Autodesk Access landing page.
Autodesk Access is built using Autodesk’s latest installation technology, providing the fastest install experience, and is focused first on updates.
Autodesk Access is the platform for many future capabilities Autodesk has planned to make the update experience better.
Here are the differences:
- Admin controls to disable users’ ability to install updates and new update notifications.
- No settings yet for the local download cache or installing from a shared network location.
- Product installs are redirected to Autodesk Account.
Customers get Autodesk Access in four ways starting March 15, 2023:
- With any new 2022 or later product installation after March 15th.
- As an automatic self-update of our installer.
This will be a progressive, percentage-based rollout ending around mid-May 2023. - As an update to ADA, starting April 3, 2023.
- Direct installer download from the Access landing page (see link above).
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