Vector Cad is a nurbs based, 3D wire frame and surface design program with IGES, DXF, and STL file format compatibility.  Vector Cad XT has a noteworthy sketching capability that combines ease of operation with the high precision needed for mechanical part design.  Shaded surface rendering is accomplished directly on the active geometry window.  Modeling may be done with a wire frame or rendered image.  Boolean selection filters and ample control over color, layer, line style, and weight attributes provide a powerful tool with a simple interface.  Additional features include multiple undo, repeat last command, pick and match, copy-paste attributes or entities, dynamic rotation and single click view angle selection.  Vector XT is Windows compatible and includes features such as multiple viewing windows, multiple documents, and copy-paste of geometry between Vector documents and from other Windows applications.  Screens and seleted geometry may be written directly to the clipboard for pasting into graphics programs.  Vector is OLE compliant and allows insertion of ole objects such as Excel spreadsheets and Word documents into Vector drawings.  Likewise Vector drawings may be inserted into Excel spread sheet cells, and Word documents for use as technical illustrations in manuals or as sketches on faxed documents.

 

Drawing functions include, point, line, arc entities with sketching, cartesian or polar coordinates, tangents, 3 point arcs, intersection points, ellipse, cubic and arc splines, Cad text, Tru Type font text, dimensions, hatch, rectangle, offset, undercut, and s-curve.  Trim and extend, fillet, and chamfer functions operate on open or closed chains.  Reorganize to precisely control order and direction of database entities.  Entitie attributes and characteristics can be enquired and modified at any time.

 

3D surface functions include, curves from interpolated points, from nth order curves, and lines from least-square regression, arcs to fit points, and surface to fit point cloud.  Nurbs based ellipse, hermite curve, projected curve onto x-y plane, projected onto surface, and extended curve with tangent arc.  Surface creation functions include ruled, revolved, skin, coons 4 boundary, coons 3 boundary, curve net interpolation, swept surface, swung surface, drive curve surface, bi-rail surfaces, planar surface from closed chains, and blended surface.  Z-level curves can be created from surfaces, as well as surface to surface intersections and surface edge curves.  Surfaces may be trimmed, independent axis scaled, sheared, split, and triangulated.

 

Vector Cad requires a minimum of a Windows 98 operating system, and is also compatible with later Windows releases such as ME, NT, 2000, and XP. Recommended hardware is 800 mhz pentium compatible or faster, 256 meg RAM, Open GL compatible video driver with at least 16 meg vram.