BricsCAD Shape

Plenty of people around the world may find themselves in the situations of wishing they could do some fun 3D doodling, either for school, work, or down-right boredom. However, most of the professional CAD programs will bring your budget back quite a lot. once in a while there comes a program that is either cheaper, offering almost the same amount of features. One such program is BricsCAD Shape, which brings enough tools to the table to be relevant to both basic and advanced users alike.

Depending on your experience level using such tools, you may find it more or less difficult to handle this app. However, due to the self-explanatory UI and intuitive design or menus and buttons, you'll get a  hang of it quickly, even if it is your first CAD tool ever. As expected from this type of software, you gain access to both 2D and 3D manipulation tools, thus being able to do anything from creating a poster to modeling a fully furnished house all by yourself.

Since working with 2D models is something you'll most likely be doing with specialized tools, the 3D portion of the design is the center point of this tool. As such, maneuvering the objects around while stretching, defining and customizing each plane and angle is done with ease, either through mouse movements or selecting the appropriate area of each design.

BricsCAD Shape comes with a library of 3D components to help you present your ideas, and in case you ever need more, just import 3D models from any source, or create your own. This, along with the possibility of using 2D images as textures for the otherwise blank models can allow you to design photorealistic renderings of a fully furnished house. Of course, it is worth mentioning that due to the program's lack of shader renderings, the app is light on your system's resources, befitting even the weakest graphics card models currently in use.

All aspects considered, BricsCAD Shape comes across as a rich and powerful CAD solution while still being accessible to those that don't exactly use this type of software at a professional level. This makes it great as a transitioning tool, either in schools for starting from scratch, or independently, before moving on to a more feature-rich alternative.