Advantages of CAD Drafting over Manual Drafting

Computer Aided Design (CAD) has been a real breakthrough in the AEC industry by becoming the primary source of communicating design intent. Before the advent of CAD, the only source for draftsmen was pencil and paper for drawing sketches. The traditional method of manual drafting is iterative and time consuming. However, now there has been a paradigm shift from traditional manual drafting to cad design and drafting.

Some of the benefits of CAD Drafting are as follows-

Data storing and Accessibility – One of the advantages of CAD drafting is that the drawings need not be filed and stored in folder unlike in manual drafting. CAD drafting can be easily saved on the computer server and can be accessed from anywhere with internet connection. The chance of losing the documents is higher in manual drafting. As CAD drawings can be saved electronically without the use of paper, it is also an environment friendly method.

3D views – 3D drawings are the best way to virtually represent a structure. Though one can manually create a 3d model, it wouldn’t look as realistic as the 3D model generated by AutoCAD. AutoCAD breathes life in the 3D model and aid the visualization process. While creating 3D view manually is a challenging, time-consuming and tire-some job, it becomes much easier with software like AutoCAD.

Revisions – While you create any drawing on paper or software, there is bound to be some amount of revisions or modifications. In manual drafting, you need to erase and redraw to make any modification to your drawing. CAD simplifies the revision process to a large extent with its various editing tools. With few clicks of mouse, you can undo, redo or delete your actions. You need not re-draw an object anytime later as you can modify the existing object by mirroring, stretching, rotating, scaling etc.

Speed and Time – Technologies are invented to make our work easier, save our time and to complete the work faster. AutoCAD is significantly faster than the traditional method of manual drafting. It speeds up the task of preparing bill of materials, reports, scaling etc. The tedious task of drawing each line on paper can be done in few mouse clicks. As CAD software eliminates repetitive iterations, a substantial amount of time is saved. In AutoCAD, data describing a component or its family is associative in nature and hence revisions are automatically made to all places the data is used.

Accuracy – In manual drafting, all the objects drawn must be of correct size and alignment. Each object need to be manually verified and dimensioned as the slightest error can be catastrophic to the entire project. With CAD, there are numerous techniques available to obtain exact dimensions thus leading to improved accuracy in the project.

Owing to the numerous benefits in terms of speed, accuracy, data storage, revision CAD offers over manual drafting, it has become a standard for the AEC industries.

Kuldeep Bwail, Director at XS CAD, providing 3D Architectural Modelling,3D BIM Modeling to Homebuilder, Architect