Hi, I’m Don, Head of Product for BricsCAD. As our vested users know, Bricsys releases major, minor and maintenance releases each year – generally every other month! BricsCAD® V22.2.02, our mid-term release for V22, is available today – and it’s better than ever. And, as always – every release of BricsCAD delivers fixes, enhancements, and performance improvements to ensure that you get the absolute best value for your CAD investment.

Depending on how you use BricsCAD, your mileage may vary, but here’s my list of the top 22 features in BricsCAD® V22.2. Want to see more? Just check out the Release Notes.

  1. Transient visibility states are now supported inside of BEDIT (Block Edit) and REFEDIT (Reference file Edit) – you can hide, isolate and un-isolate selected entities during the editing session.
  2. BricsCAD now supports Block Placeholder fields!
  3. The BLOCKREPLACE command now supports BricsCAD’s native Parametric Blocks.
    BlockReplace ParametricBlocks 3
  4. Our unique BLOCKIFY workflow has been enhanced to highlight identical objects, helping the user to visualize the entities that will be converted to Blocks.
    Blockify Preview 4
  5. Boolean operations – union, subtract and intersect – now operate on REGION entities at the BricsCAD Lite license level.
  6. We’ve dramatically improved the on-screen performance of entities with a large number of GRIPS.
  7. When Rendering, rectangular lights now act as area lights, and non-rectangular lights behave as spot lights.
  8. Creation and updating of multiple Drawing Views – using VIEWBASE, VIEWPROJ and VIEWUPDATE – can be performed in parallel, using multiple CPU cores.
  9. Baseline dimensions can use the current Dimension Style, or inherit the DimStyle of the previous (or selected) entity with the new DIMCONTINUEMODE variable.
  10. BricsCAD imports .OBJ files as native entities.
    Import OBJ 10
  11. The new ATTACHMENTS panel is introduced in V22.2.
    AttachmentPanel Appearance 11
  12. The new Parameters & Constraints panel is also new to V22.2.
  13. The new Parameters Manager panel is also a part of BricsCAD V22.2.
    ParametersPanel Appearance 13
  14. We’ve improved the performance of solid models by decreasing load times and making the switch between Shaded and Wireframe modes much faster.
  15. The REFPATHTYPE setting lets you choose absolute or relative pathing for attached external references (XREFS).
  16. A new Table Cell formatting dialog has been introduced in V22.2.
  17. We added a new, Qt-based Tips panel to BricsCAD in this release.
  18. An experimental Qt-based Tool Palettes panel also supports fly-outs!
  19. The VISIBILITYSTATES panel makes it easier to manage visibility states for selected entities.
  20. BricsCAD’s Civil toolset includes:
    Improved performance on vertical Alignments,
    Better import of Autodesk® AutoCAD® Civil 3D drawings,
    Standard and projected break-line entities,
    A new progress bar that’s displayed during TIN Volume creation.
  21. BricsCAD’s Point Cloud toolset offers a lot of new functionality:
    Export to LAZ format point clouds,
    Live sections for point clouds,
    Import and export of HSPC – Hexagon Visual Computing Hub – point cloud format,
    Improvements to point cloud deviation checking performance.
  22. BricsCAD Communicator, our add-in module for industry-standard file I/O, now supports user selectable foreground / background operation, and improved handling of DS SOLIDWORKS® 2022 files.

But that’s not all that’s new for BricsCAD® V22.2!

These productivity-enhancing features, new in BricsCAD® V22.2, sit alongside many improvements to our core and stability. To see everything that’s new for BricsCAD® V22.2, be sure to check the release notes and come back to the blog, as we will be exploring more features soon!