Inside Bricsys: Heidi Hewett’s First Impressions

All of us at Bricsys are very excited to welcome Heidi Hewett as our new User Success Manager. She joins the Bricsys global team to assist our customers in moving to the next level of productivity with the best dwg-based CAD applications available today – BricsCAD® and BricsCAD® BIM.

Hi from Heidi!

Wow! What a great welcome from the wonderful people at Bricsys! I’m Heidi Hewett, and if you haven’t already read the announcement about me joining the Bricsys team, check it out and share it with others! I’ll be enjoying my new role as the BricsCAD User Success Manager – helping people move smoothly to my new favorite CAD application, BricsCAD!

I enjoyed an amazing week in Belgium getting to know the Bricsys team, and learning about our design solutions. They were gracious hosts as they showed me around the beautiful city of Gent. I never knew job interviews could be so much fun! But, as much as I appreciated their hospitality, that’s not what persuaded me to join Bricsys. It was the software!

While at HQ, I met our top product designers and developers as they demonstrated our products. I learned about BricsCAD Shape, the free 3D modeling tool that enables designers to freely create conceptual designs with the accuracy of CAD. That got my attention for several reasons. First, I love 3D modeling. Second, having spent my entire career using the most popular CAD program in the world, I depend on accuracy. Third, the native file format is DWG. And, finally… did I mention that it’s “Free”? From there I learned the conceptual designs created in Shape could be opened directly in BricsCAD BIM, our Building Information Modeling solution. BricsCAD BIM also uses DWG as its native file format!

Heidi meets the BricsCAD^® family

I didn’t think I needed a detailed demo of BricsCAD. It was immediately quite familiar to me, even though I’d only seen it twice before. Well, after spending a day with Hans de Backer, our head of BricsCAD core development, I realized that there’s much, much more to BricsCAD than just DWG compatibility. You’ll hear a lot more about what I discovered in my upcoming blog posts. Stay tuned!

I was also treated to a demo of the Bricsys BIM solution by Jacob, Tiemen and Pieter. What I found confusing, right off the bat, was that BIM looks just like BricsCAD. That can’t be! BIM can’t be done using the DWG file format that is familiar to millions of designers around the world, right? Wrong! I was seeing a BIM model, built in DWG, right in front of my eyes! The BIM tools looked so easy and intuitive, and the workflow so friendly, that I had to keep asking “Is that BricsCAD or is that BricsCAD BIM”? BricsCAD BIM is real 3D, and I can’t wait to learn more about it!

Things just kept getting better for me, as Dmitry from the BTR team introduced me to our MCAD and sheet metal design solutions. My background is in architectural engineering, but I know a good bit about the manufacturing industry.  You shouldn’t be able to dynamically bend a piece of sheet metal or modify an assembly component in a DWG-based CAD system… and do it THAT easily, right? But yet, I was seeing it happen in an application that looked and felt just like the CAD environment that I already know!

There’s so much more to see, too!

In addition to sharing information about our currently available products, Luc, our CTO, shared some amazing future technologies and initiatives with me. What is currently available from Bricsys is just the beginning of the future of DWG!

Everything I saw during my intro week at Bricsys looked impressive, but for me seeing isn’t quite believing. After leaving my 26-year career with Autodesk, I was well on my way to a new career in real estate (another passion of mine) and semi-retirement (an even bigger passion of mine)! I wasn’t going to give those up to join a company that had products I didn’t believe in. So, between meetings, demos, and beer/wine tastings, I installed the trial version of BricsCAD Platinum with BricsCAD BIM, and tried to reproduce what I had seen in the demonstrations.

When I launched BricsCAD BIM, I went straight to the most challenging things… the ones I didn’t think possible inside the DWG file format. For example, defining my own window as a block that inserts in a 3D solid wall and automatically cuts an opening the wall – and can moved anywhere in the wall by just dragging it. And, me doing this with minimal experience in the application? I was sold!

My long term plans have changed!

I’m postponing my real estate career indefinitely (and our plans to tour the US in an RV)… and I couldn’t be more excited! Over the coming weeks and months I’ll share my journey through the land of BricsCAD as seen from the eyes of a veteran and dedicated AutoCAD user. I hope you’ll join me, Heidi Hewett, here on blog.bricsys.com!