HighDesign Professional

HighDesign Professional

Unleash the full potential.

Walls and Columns

HighDesign Professional includes tools to construct walls with automatic intersections and columns. In the Wall Inspector you can choose the shape of the wall between rectangular and irregular, define its thickness, leading side and exterior face, disable connections on the heads, and set the graphic properties such as pen and linetype of the edges, and color and hatch fill. A wall has an exterior face, so you can implement a performance-oriented design.

When you create or edit a wall, it connects automatically to other existing walls on the same sheet and adjusts the kind of joint according to the geometry and position of the node.

Walls are host elements, meaning that they can host doors and windows, so that when you move or stretch a wall, its hosted elements move accordingly.

The Columns tool lets you insert rectangular, square and round columns with a single click.

Doors and Windows

This tool lets you insert parametric doors and windows inside walls. Doors and windows are hosted objects that always refer to a host wall, and adjust automatically to any changes of thickness and position of their wall.

The Inspector window lets you set all the parameters, including type, size and dimensions, construction system, partitions, sweep angle, sill, and more.

Doors and windows automatically adjust their level of detail to the current drawing scale, so that the same object will show sill, jambs, and partitions at 1:10, and display as a simplified diagram at 1:48.

Project Views

A Project View is a handy way to create layouts ready for printouts: through the Project Views pane it is possible to create new views of your project and to browse through existing views.

A project view stores the position of the current view and the visibility status of current sheets and layers, allowing you to create for instance a "layout" of a plan with dimensions and surfaces and another "layout" of the same plan (sheet) with services only.

By combining visible sheets and layers you can create project views for your printouts: in the Print window you can select which view to print.

Styles

A style is a predefined set of properties and behaviors that you can apply to the graphic objects of a project. Styles store the current settings of layer, pen and fill color, arrowheads, line type and pen weight, and can be generic or tool-specific and include any advanced properties of tools like texts and dimensions.

You can create, edit, and organize your own styles, and select all the instances of a specific style in the project.

Presets

Tools that have special properties and have an Inspector pane, such as Hatch, Text, Dimensions, Wall, Column, Door and Window, in HighDesign Professional provide the Presets menu to let you create and save re-usable sets of properties that are available in all projects.

HighDesign provides default presets for both imperial and metric units, with the ability to create and extend your own library.

“A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

Photogrammetry

HighDesign Professional provides a powerful, single-image photogrammetry tool to obtain the actual projection of the architectonic elements captured in a picture: this function can be used for surveys of architectural façades and any planar surface and it only needs a normal camera and two measures. No specific equipments nor knowledge are required.

Photogrammetry in HighDesign offers two methods:

  • Image Correction: transforms the original image by rectifying the perspective deformation
  • Perspective Tracing: creates a corrected projection by tracing the elements in the image after the internal geometry of the image has been set up. All projections are vector-based.

Adjust Image

Images can be edited in HighDesign without the need to use an external editor. The Adjust Image tool provides an integrated image editing module to perform many enhancement functions, such as mirroring, crop, grayscale, color inversion, sharpen and blur, and adjusting brightness, contrast, and saturation.

Render

A powerful tool to create high-quality, rendered images from vector based drawings.

This tool not only applies anti-aliasing and line rendering to object edges, but it also allows customizable print size and image resolution and provides background options, frames and color effects to make high impact presentations of your project. The result is an image that can be exported into any of the supported graphic file formats.

Extended Input/Output

It is possible to create single- or multiple-page vector PDF documents which can be edited with other applications and printed on large format printers and plotters.

You can choose which sheets to export, include copyright information, choose the page size and apply filters.

"Import DWG/DXF Blocks" automatically converts folders of DWG/DXF blocks to HighDesign symbols or extracts the blocks from a DWG/DXF drawing to extend your symbol library. This tool also facilitates the transition from another CAD software allowing you to retain your existing library of blocks and makes it easier to collaborate with clients and associates.

Custom Shortcuts

Use the Shortcuts pane to set and customize the keyboard shortcuts for almost all commands of the HighDesign menus.

You can customize the keyboard shortcuts to speed up your workflow and keep using the key combinations you are accustomed to in other software programs.

Templates

New in HighDesign 2015 Professional is the support for project templates. You can now create new projects starting from pre-defined models that can include colors, layers, sheets, page sizes, units, linetypes, objects, and more.

The Templates preferences pane lets you create and organize your own templates, so you can easily comply with national and company CAD standards.

HighDesign 2017 Pro

Available at $299.00