Dedicated Registered AutoCAD Workers
Users Group - Fort Wayne, IN area

2003 Meeting Highlights

January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November | December

Previous Years Highlights
2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000

December 2003

December's meeting was our traditional highlights from Autodesk University 2003 meeting. Unfortunately Dennis was ill and could not bring his presentation on cable and harness capabilities inside of Inventor 8 professional. We all enjoyed a relaxing evening of pizza, beer, soda, and AU stories. Thanks to all who took the time to attend.

November 2003

Ed Rose introduced the new Inventor 8 series of software including Inventor8 and AutoCAD Mechanical. There were lots of new features that had the Inventor users drooling! The coolest part was probably that you could now parametrically detail your Inventor part in AutoCAD Mechanical in an MDT type environment.

Byron Funnell then did a quick recap on creating graphics files to insert into other Windows documents. This was a short version of the material he will be teaching in Las Vegas at Autodesk University 2003.

Congratulations to Tom Keogh the winner of a 2004 Entertainment Book and to Dale Estabrook the winner of an NFR copy of Inventor Series 7. Enjoy them guys.

October 2003

AutoCAD Electrical was presented by Autodesk at Industrial Technologies building. Anyone who does wiring diagrams or layouts should seriously look at this package!

September 2003

Ed Rose presented using FEA in 2D and 3D using AutoCAD and Mechanical Desktop. Dennis Jeffrey covered some hot tips in AutoCAD 2004. Byron Funnell showed how to create a table driven wave spring using lofts in Mechanical Desktop.

August 2003

Allen Gager and Ed Rose covered project files in Inventor and the vault. The meeting was well attended and many said it answered a lot of questions that they had on the topics. Thanks guys!

July 2003

We chose to cancel the July 9th meeting since many of our speakers and officers were not going to be able to attend. We hope that you enjoyed/enjoy the 4th holiday.

June 2003

Another of those you should not have missed. We covered some interesting topics in Inventor including creating 3D paths that update with assembly changes. Very cool.

We also continued our study of shape files. This time Ned Scholer showed us how to create linetypes with shapes or font characters in them. Well done Ned.

Lastly we debbuged an assembly problem from Mechanical Desktop in how it constrained some parts. We hope to do more of this type topic in the future.

May 2003

Our meeting at Advanced Solutions was a fun one. I did my best to share on how to create shapes, fonts, and Big Fonts. I am looking forward to seeing all the new symbols and shape files. Dennis Jeffrey gave an alternate presentation on using project files in Inventor and how to set them up.

April 2003

This meeting was held at Industrial Technologies. Discussions were held to merge the new Inventor Users Group with the DRAW Users Group. Ed Rose gave a presentation on AutoCAD Mechanical and its new features.

March 2003

Dale Estabrook gave a presentation on doing tolerance stackups. You may review the spreadsheet used in the presentation and do some of the extra problems to test your skills.

Dave Schoeff presented how to use the AUGI online classes and Dennis Jeffrey gave us our first look at AutoCAD 2004.

February 2003

Our February meeting was at Industrial Technologies and we had a great time. We had Steve Lake, an industrial arts teacher at Homestead High School, and one of his junior students in to tell us about how they are using Inventor for their projects. Last year they won a national event by making the best high mileage vehicle beating out Stanford and many other colleges. The entire project was designed in Inventor. They are creating a new car this year as seniors and the junior class is creating a hovercraft to be used in a similar competition. It was very impressive to see how they were able to learn and utilize the software so quickly. We look forward to seeing the finished projects. Thanks again for sharing with our users group.

Our second guest speaker Melissa Schoeff, is the daughter of our events coordinator, Dave Schoeff. Melissa did an awesome job giving us an introduction to Adobe Photoshop. We had been asking for someone to do a presentation on a raster based program for our AutoCAD users. Many of our users have found Photoshop and similar programs to be very unfriendly after learning the "AutoCAD way". At times graphics need to be modified for inclusion in documentation that is not friendly with AutoCAD, or to create graphics to be used as a texture in 3D modeling. Melissa was a great help to the users and answered many questions. Thank you Ms. Schoeff for a very helpful presentation.

January 2003

We started the meeting by holding our annual elections of officers. The result may be seen on our officers page.

Dave Schoeff then reviewed an old topic on VBA. The old Code-A-Day site still exists, but has changed their format considerably. For a small fee one can download their application and have access to all kinds of great routines and better yet a program to help categorize and keep tabs on all of those routines. You can even add your own routines to the database. Two links for the VBA topic are http://www.vbdesign.net/software/llama.htm and http://www.vbdesign.net/index.php. 

Dave also looked at the screen capture program called snagit. This allows you to capture a window, screen, popup, etc. from your monitors image and save it as a raster image. You can find information on this topic at http://www.techsmith.com/products/snagit/default.asp.

The final topic of the evening was a look at the possible file outputs available in AutoCAD and Mechanical Desktop with an emphasis on raster output. The two looked at the most in depth were the .jpg and .png file types available as web output from a plotter. Unfortunately the .wmf file in the export doesn't allow enough control over the line weights to be truly useful in most cases.

We are still looking for someone to teach a one hour segment on a raster based package like photoshop or paintshop pro. If you know of someone, we would appreciate some help on the topic.

Next months meeting schedule