Microstation: New Article

by Lucky Balaraman, Executive Director, The Magnum Group

We’ve just uploaded an excellent article on MicroStation, the renowned CAD platform from Bentley Systems, Inc.

If creating 3D objects is part of your business process, please read it: it’s a distillation of our thousands of hours’ experience in the area, and contains many valuable observations that can only be obtained through similar usage.

Find out why it is often easier to use than AutoCAD for 3D drafting…

Technorati Tags: bentley, microstation, cad, 3d cad, cad drafting services, cad drafting

© 2006 - 2008 The Magnum Group. Reproduction of our content in any form without prior, specific written permission is prohibited.

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Reduce Image Size, not Image Quality

by R Kamalathasan, Assistant Manager (Projects), The Magnum Group

Have you ever thought about using super-intelligent image resizing software to minimize image filesize?

Are you wasting a lot of time trying to resize images without causing their quality to drop like a stone?

Ok, then you should know about “Seam Carving”.

What’s “Seam carving”? No idea what it means?… ok, here’s a small description:

It’s an image resizing technique based on removal of pixels identified as zero importance by a special algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.

To get a better idea about the capabilities of seam carving technique watch this video: http://www.seamcarving.com/

SEAMonster and Liquid Resize are some of the wonderful programs that do image seam carving and they are free.

There is also a site which does online image seam carving. Check it out and get your images resized magically to
your needs!

© 2006 - 2008 The Magnum Group. Reproduction of our content in any form without prior, specific written permission is prohibited.

Learn more about our Engineering drafting and architectural drafting services

Getting a Missing AutoCAD Menu Bar to Load

by R Kamalathasan, Assistant Manager (Projects), The Magnum Group
 
I just surmounted a strange problem in AutoCAD 2007: my toolbars did not load during my AutoCAD session but everything else worked fine.

When I typed the “menuload” command, the “Load\Unload Customizations” dialogue box opened; I browsed to the “Select Customization File” dialog box and selected the “acad.cui” file and when I tried to load…  it didn’t load.

I tried some other methods (suggested by a user forum) such as replacing the “acad.cui” file, assigning a different path to support files and support files from cache…so on and so on… nothing worked!

Finally I decided to repair the AutoCAD installation through the control panel.

First I tried “Repair errors in my AutoCAD 2007 installation” option and restarted AutoCAD; the problem persisted. Next I tried the “Repair registry” option… no use. I finally tried the “Reinstall AutoCAD 2007” option but that didn’t solve the problem either.

I was frustrated that I couldn’t crack the puzzle.

After two days, when I Googled “menuload failed loading in AutoCAD 2007”, I came across this link: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=6132379&linkID=9240617

Yes, I finally got to the root of the matter:

The culprit was the XMLINST.exe file. It was missing (somehow?) from the specified path in the Windows directory. I downloaded it and extracted it to the specified path in Windows.

Then I restarted AutoCAD.

Hurray!… my AutoCAD 2007 was restored to the original condition!

© 2006 - 2008 The Magnum Group. Reproduction of our content in any form without prior, specific written permission is prohibited.

Learn more about our Engineering drafting and architectural drafting services