HighDesign vs AutoCAD LT: 4 Key Features That Set HighDesign Apart
Discover what makes HighDesign truly unique when compared to AutoCAD LT
In the current digital age, professionals in the fields of architecture, engineering, and manufacturing rely on advanced computer-aided design (CAD) software for projects that have become increasingly complex and demanding. In the arena of design software, while AutoCAD is a widely used solution, HighDesign is certainly a worthy competitor and a valid alternative to AutoCAD.
In this article we will focus on the 4 areas that make HighDesign a design software apart when compared to other CAD apps, in particular when compared to the well known AutoCAD LT.
We chose HighDesign Pro and AutoCAD LT because both are 2D design apps that come within a similar price range, even though the commercial license policies are different: HighDesign comes with a permanent license including an annual maintenance plan to get free updates, whereas AutoCAD LT offers an annual subscription (with optional monthly and 3-year options).
Both HighDesign Pro and AutoCAD LT have a complete set of design, drafting and documentation tools with precise 2D geometry, snaps, constraints, editing, and annotation capabilities, as you would expect from professional CAD apps. But when we talk about project organization, documentation, architectural and specialized tools, the differences are evident.
1. Project Organization
AutoCAD has a single drafting environment, called Model, and you have to arrange all the drawings and documentation of your project in that space, using the same drawing units for all the project, usually mm, inches or points at real scale (1:1).
On the contrary, HighDesign offers multiple drawing environments, each with its own page size, drawing scale and units, called Drafting Sheets, to organise the drawings that compose the project so that you can place a floor plan on a sheet named “Floor 1”, another floor plan on another sheet, a section on a dedicated sheet and the elevations on their proper drafting sheets.
Also, drafting sheets can be either transparent, so that you can arrange the drawings and compose quick presentations via the Project Views, or opaque, so that you can stack several plans and drawings that can be presented on layouts with viewports and title blocks.
In addition to drafting sheets, HighDesign offers more specialised sheets. Detail Sheets are special sheets used to extract and add detailed views of the project. This class of sheets allows a better organisation of the project by separating the drafting sheets, where the project is, from the other drawings that complement the main design. Details are typically “extracted” from a larger drawing and include additional elements and information, usually at a larger scale.
You can benefit of all these features to arrange your project in a better way but, at the same time, you can also decide to use just one drafting sheet at real scale for all your project and use the Layouts and Viewports (scaled project windows) exactly as in AutoCAD and other CAD apps. Although sheets are the best way to organize a project, HighDesign does not force you to give up your drafting habits all at once, but allows you to keep your usual workflow for as long as you feel comfortable with.
2. Project Documentation
In HighDesign Pro parametric objects and design objects, like walls and windows, are project elements and can store information called Element Properties.
This way those information, such as element parameters, properties as name, id, tag and even geometric data as length, number, thickness, height and area are immediately available when you need to document the project and make tables and schedules.
Interactive Schedules are project items that extract information from the project and display the data in table form. Data can be defined by property filters, grouped, sorted, and displayed with totals and counts.
Schedules are interactive as each row is linked to a project element, so that not only changes to the element are instantly updated on the schedule, but you can also edit values on the schedule and see the changes in the project in real time.
Schedules help you keep your project constantly under control and cost-efficient!
Architectural Tools
When you draw a wall in AutoCAD LT, you can use poly-lines or lines and then use the editing tools to offset the outline of a given distance and get a double track that represents a wall: you can use hatches to fill the inner space between the interior and exterior outline. If you want to insert openings, use the editing tools to break the outline and add blocks representing doors or windows.
Walls, doors and windows in AutoCAD are just lines and blocks, simple graphic objects.
Differently from AC, in HighDesign Pro, walls, columns, doors and windows are Parametric Design Elements, complex graphic entities that store editable parameters and properties: a wall in HighDesign knows it is a wall and not a set of lines and blocks!
Walls in HighDesign can be Basic, made of one, uniform component, and Composite, made of different internal layered components, each with its own properties. Also, walls automatically join to other affine walls and their parameters can be adjusted at any time.
With the new Energy Efficiency policies, composite walls are much more requested when designing new buildings and HighDesign Pro provides a valuable solution.
Doors and Windows are hosted elements that can only be inserted in a hosting wall: like walls, they have geometric, graphic and information parameters editable via the settings window.
The clear advantage of HighDesign in this area is the ability to extract information from those architectural elements to easily document the project and create schedules.
Special Tools
These tools are intended to help the designer in certain situations where it would otherwise be necessary to resort to external tools, with the disadvantage of using more time and resources. HighDesign gives this way the advantage to stay in the same design environment, allowing you to save time and money.
HighDesign Pro provides a powerful, single-image Photogrammetry tool to get the actual projection of the architectonic elements captured in a picture: this function can be used for quick surveys of architectural façades and any planar surface and it only needs a normal camera and two measures. The resulting projection can be either a rectified image or a vector projection of the traced elements of the picture.
No specific equipment nor knowledge is required!
Drawing Presentation is a 2D rendering tool that creates high-quality images of your project with varying effects of background, pen and fill colours, border and margins, watermark and adjustable size and resolution.
The result is an image that can be exported into any of the supported graphic file formats to make high impact presentations of your projects.
Conclusions
In this article we talked of the main areas that define the advantage of HighDesign over the other 2D CAD competitors. The list of unique features should also include the attention put on the User Experience through a modern and intuitive interface and the overall features updated and enhanced year after year to fit the evolving needs of professional users.
Check out a detailed comparison table of the features of HighDesign and AutoCAD.
HighDesign is the architectural design software that bridges CAD and BIM. For Mac and Windows.