Dynamic blocks -again-, sorry!

Oung Tih

I am most terribly sorry if this has been asked before and over and over again, but I cannot find a proper answer in this forum or elswhere.

This is important to us as it is a deal breaker when it comes to switching al our cad workstations to bricscad:

Will Bricscad ever have the ability to CREATE dynamic blocks? Yes/No?

Joe Dunfee

 I have always wondered this myself.  I have never seen a statement from Bricsys.  But, even if they said "Yes, it is slated for the next release," and it were done, I would not recommend for you to depend on it to any great extent.  I would expect it to follow a similar pattern to the support of pre-existing dynamic blocks, where it took a number of years for the support to develop.

I am now investigating if an alternative to dynamic blocks, by CADprofi, is able to meet our needs.  I have not spent much time on it yet, but it seems to create blocks in a similar way to how dynamic blocks works. And at least, some of the blocks work like dynamic blocks.  Their mechanical package costs 550 Euros.

It may well be that a patent by Autodesk has prevented anyone in the U.S. from adding the authoring of dynamic blocks the way Autodesk does it.  Another observation is that the only CAD program available that can Author dynamic blocks is GStarCAD from China. In another thread, someone mentioned that In China, patents only last 10 years, and the dynamic block creation was added around the time that 10-year patent ran out.

Though, patent's don't seem to have stopped vendors from utilizing dynamic blocks created by Autodesk software.  Perhaps, it is the same logic that permitted the 3rd parties to reverse engineer the DWG format itself. Autodesk worked hard to prevent this, which would have forced customers to purchase Autodesk's own software to have access their own work. But, in the end the consumer's won that battle in court.  The authoring of dynamic blocks may be a different matter, since that is not simply using the users own prior work. Though, I think that making modifications, such as adding or taking away some detail, to/from an existing dynamic block would be.

Prior to AutoDesk's patent, other vendors, in CAD software like SolidWorks, have created ways to assign parameters and properties to drawings by way of design tables, etc. They even have had ways to click and drag various parameters. So, to my mind, the general idea pre-existing for a while. I did a quick gloss over of the Autodesk patents, but patent's are, by nature, full of descriptions that only a patent lawyer can understand.  And though I have certainly seen patents that really should not have been granted, I really am not qualified to judge the Autodesk patents, nor have I spent the time reading them.

-Joe