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!
Getting started with BricsCAD?
Register now for a webinar “BricsCAD in 20 minutes”
Have a specific (technical) question?
Visit our support page
Want to read more?
Here is an overview of all the articles of Heidi’s journey:
1) First impressions (Current article)
2) Download and install
3) Welcome to BricsCAD
4) Exploring the interface
5) Command access
6) Exploring trial levels
7) Exploring each workspace
8) Drawing Entities
9) Settings for Drawing Entities
10) Drawing with Styles
11) License options
12) Working with blocks
13) Working with references
14) Working with Layers and Linetypes
15) Editing Entities
16) Entity Manipulation
17) Selection Methods
18) Drawing Explorer
19) Settings
20) Classic Edition
Well, well, well, this is a development that I couldn’t have predicted: Heidi at Bricsys?! But you have me intrigued; anyone with as much experience as we have with AutoCAD products, who can get this excited about a new product line, and delay her life plans…I will stay tuned — I signed up for your blog. ‘Til then…
Not something I would have predicted either, Cathleen. But, now that I’m here, I can’t imagine being anywhere else! Thanks for following the blog and joining me on my new adventure.
Very exciting Heidi! congratulations on your new adventure!
After doing some research on BricsCAD I was very impressed with what I saw.
I have an appointment set for next week to demo this in our office in hopes of gaining approval for a couple of seats.
Be well my friend.
Michael
Thanks Michael!
I’m excited to see what you think after the demo. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have questions.
Heidi
Will do.
Congratulations, Heidi! Let us know when you need a new all-star group :). Well, first I’d have to learn Bricsys…Anyway, really glad to hear you’ve landed somewhere where you’ll be a valuable asset.
Thanks Ben! The more the merrier! You can learn along with me 🙂
Just learned the news, that’s what happen when you retire! Congratulations, Heidi! I’m going to be trying out Shape ASAP!
Hi Dave! Glad to hear you’re enjoying retirement. Yes, definitely check out Shape. And BricsCAD when you get the chance. Maybe you can author a BricsCAD book! 🙂
Heidi, apologies for this question, but it has dogged me since jumping into BricsCAD. I’ve been using BricsCAD since v17. (I had been an AutoCAD
user though away from that for a long time due to job loss!) That said, though I have been a system admin and network admin,my own machines have been exclusively Linux since 2000 and having the possibility of a DWG application running on Linux was a no brainer. That leads me to my question. I’m currently running BricsCAD in Linux Mint and updating Mint has been no problem for my BricsCAD install, but it’s always a question as to whether I should deactivate prior to an update or not. I can see a disk wipe and reinstall would require something more extreme, but can you offer an suggestions. Up to now I appreciate being able to run versions side by side, but with v19 it appears that may not be possible any longer. I have more questions, but I’ll stop there. By nature I’m the ultimate question asker! (I do have one copy on my laptop I need for travel and the other on my desktop.)
Hello Rob,
> Up to now I appreciate being able to run versions side by side, but with v19 it appears that may not be possible any longer.
There is no intentional design change in BricsCAD (Linux) V19 regarding co-existence with previous versions.
V19 should be able to install alongside V18, V17, etc.
There has been an installation issue on fedora (rpm installer) with file permissions.
Perhaps a similar bug is at play. I would need more info to be able to help further.
Can you please enter a support request?
Hello Heidi. It was great to meet you and some of the team in Halifax. I wish we had had more time to go over some of the areas of working through drawings in 2D and 3D. My main stumbling block is trying to figure out how the transition works. Do you start a drawing in 2D then switch to 3D or do you start everything in 3D? Do we have to switch profiles? I’m still confused with this but it may be just my stubborn AutoCAD/Inventor habits.
BricsCAD is highly flexible, you can start in 2D OR 3D, it’s up to you. You don’t have to switch profiles, but you can if you want. If you have more questions you can chat to other users and some of our developers on our forum. Or if you have a more specific problem, you can send a support request under “my account” on the Bricsys homepage.