PartyCAD ME version 5 adds many more features to the Millennium Edition that was introduced last year. The big news this year is PartyCAD Picture Show, but many other nice features have been added as well. Those of you who have purchased a machine that runs Windows XP, will find that version 5 installs easily onto your new machine. For those of you who get an XP system and want to install PartyCAD ME version 4, a little trickery is required. See the last article below for information on how to proceed. Really though, wouldn’t you rather have version 5?

PartyCAD Picture Show

   PartyCAD Picture Show is a new module that lets you set up slide, movie and virtual reality presentations of your designs. Use Picture Show to present your designs to clients. This saves a good deal of rummaging around in the many PartyCAD modules, and helps to emphasize your work rather than the capabilities of PartyCAD when you are doing a presentation.

   Picture Show gives you a very professional, computer based method of showing your PartyCAD designs, and it takes very little time to use since shows are constructed from art that is automatically saved as you do your normal design work with PartyCAD.

   You can just use Picture Show in your office, or you can exported shows to a CD, a floppy disk, or an email attachment file for delivery to clients. This allows your prospect to take your design away with him and use his own computer to see your art, run your movies, and walk through your designs.

   The PartyCAD Picture Show help video will have you producing your own shows in no time.

Furniture Album

   Last year we introduced the Furniture Album in the Furnish program. This allows you to browse though pictures of available furniture and simply click on a picture to load a needed piece into the Furnish program. This year the number of album pages has been more than tripled to include all of the standard furniture that ships with PartyCAD. Because there are now nearly 100 pages in the album, these have been subdivided into the following furniture categories: General, Party, Outside, Home, Office, Library and Computer.

New Furniture in Version 5

   Over 20 Tentnology Marquee style tents were added to the Furniture Album.

   Also, more oval and racetrack style tables have been added, as well as a selection of rectangular and serpentine tables with integral risers.

Better Export of PartyCAD Art

The Make Plan, Furnish, View, Virtual Reality and Layout Page modules have been modified to better export images. In any of these programs clicking:

File / Save as JPG saves the screen as a JPG file. These are ideal for emailing and for use in Picture Show.

File / Copy to Clipboard saves the screen as a BMP file to the Windows Clipboard. Once on the Clipboard, such images can easily be pasted into word processing and paint programs.

New Project Naming

The default names for project folders created by PartyCAD are much more readable in this version. These are now just the project name with non-alphanumeric characters replaced with underscores. The improved names should make it easier to find a particular project's folder in Windows Explorer.

Project Import Feature

A new feature has been added to the Project Manager that searches your hard drive for PartyCAD projects. Any that are found are automatically added to the Project List. This feature makes is much easier to move PartyCAD from an old machine to a newer one.

Improved Virtual Reality Lighting 

A new Lock option in the Virtual Reality Lighting menu allows you to preserve any desired orientation of the sun relative to your camera as you do virtual reality walkthroughs. This means that the sun's position is continually adjusted to give the most pleasing effect as you navigate through your event.

More Videos

   All of the new features and capabilities of Version 5 are covered in a new set of Help Videos that are packaged with PartyCAD. Just click on Show Help Videos in the Main Menu, then select from the list of available topics.