However, the money 'ran out' before the promised LD Assistant licences were purchased for us to use for lighting paperwork - so our department is now sitting on three AutoCAD licenses which we virtually never use. Consequently, many AutoCAD licenses were purchased, and most departments now use it all the time. A couple of years ago a decision was made for all departments (production, workshop, LX) to migrate to AutoCAD - very sensible. The venue that I work at is in a bit of a daft situation CAD-wise - historically the venue has always used FastCAD (which I really don't like) as the in-house standard CAD tool. But as a tool for creating and managing lighting paperwork, it's only really of any use if you also have the LD Assistant plug-in (or similar) so that it understands what you want to achieve and how to achieve it.

AutoCAD is great for straightforward 2D/3D drafting, and is used by the vast majority of people in this business for that purpose. There are plugins for AutoCAD I think that try and do this too.Ĭertainly for the tasks you list (keeping track of spare lamps, inventory, patch paperwork etc.) base AutoCAD won't help you. I've never used WYSIWYG but it looks to have similar capabilities. and so can produce the paperwork more automatically or in conjunction with Lightwright, which is a very specialised piece of software for lighting paperwork. On the other hand Vectorworks Spotlight, which is what I've always used to draw lighting plots, 'knows' what a light is and what properties it can have like gel colour, dimmer, channel etc. yourself and produce the paperwork separately in Excel or similar.

However, AutoCAD itself does not 'know' anything about lighting, so you must keep track of channel assignments, universes, etc. If you put the work in, you can draw anything in it, and I know people who do use it to draw their lighting plots - there's no reason you can't import the correct symbols in and arrange them just as in any other more specialised CAD program. The main difference between the full version and LT is that LT is 2D only, not 3D. AutoCAD is the industry standard general purpose CAD program, and is a very useful bit of software to know how to use.

Autocad lighting