Our Promise To You

A satisfied and creatively productive customer is our greatest cause for contentment here at Knowledge Base. For this reason AllyCAD is a user-orientated tool which will assist you with your design process rather than hamper you with operating procedures.

Our close relationship with you sets us apart from the competition and is essential in developing a CAD package with innovative functions and real benefits that impact directly on your productivity.

Our support is regarded as the best in the industry. Our attitude to support is quite simple. We know that time is money, and if you have a problem then we have a problem. We will do everything we can to help you resolve the matter as soon as possible.

WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
AllyCAD is used extensively by a wide range of industries including engineers, surveyors, contractors, architects, industrial designers, property developers, manufacturers, hobbyists and various others. This is what some of our clients have had to say:

"I must have produced 3000 drawings and issued approximately 5000 co-ordinates in AllyCAD. The co-ordinate system is better than any other package I've worked on."
Mandy Koorn, Structural design of Soccer City, PDNA

"I do everything in AllyCAD. It is probably our most important design tool. You can play around with it to get the different elements of the design to work together."
Johannes Pretorius, Senior Project Analyst at South African Airways

"The software works faster than any other CAD software that I have used and the interface is so much simpler."
Mark Chapman, High Cross Forecourt Canopies

The AllyCAD Advantage

AllyCAD has been completely rewritten to allow for both 2D and 3D draughting and is even faster and more powerful. We have added and improved many features and functionality to give you the AllyCAD Advantage, allowing you to design the way you want to.

FULL DWG COMPATIBILITY
AllyCAD allows you to work with DWG files easily and with no loss of data. The data structure has been completely re-designed for DWG compatibility and includes XRefs, drawing space and layouts, multiple viewports and various line, text, dimension and table styles. AllyCAD can also read DGN, CEX, UCX, DRG and SHP files.

IMAGE HANDLING ABILITY & SPEED
AllyCAD is known for its lightning speed in handling huge images as well as its compatibility with geo-referenced data. We currently support the JPG, BMP, SID (MrSID), ECW (ERMapper), PNG and TIF image formats among others. In fact, we can cover just about any image you may have. Easily rotate, clip, and adjust the brightness and contrast of your images with the built-in image controls and the Image Manager.

GEOMETRY LINES
Geometry lines are a superset of construction lines and are now enhanced to give better visual feedback when you are busy drawing, making them more intuitive and easier to use. They allow you to position lines and arcs tangential to each other, and to define the basic layout of the drawing elements. You can then fill in with solid lines to create the objects. In short, geometry lines allow you to focus on your design.

NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN COORDINATES
AllyCAD supports both Northern and Southern hemisphere survey coordinates to ensure that you maintain data integrity with astounding accuracy.

MULTIPLE VIEWS AND VIEWPORTS
You may now split the drawing window into multiple views, each with its own view direction (including isometric views). You can even draw from one view to another. In addition you may create named viewports so you can identify key parts of the drawing and switch between the views easily.

AUTO UPDATING LAYOUTS
AllyCAD now has layouts that contain viewports into the drawing space and will also automatically generate all your final plans as dynamically updating layouts which will reflect all drafting changes instantly. If your drawing changes, so do your layouts, so that your design and your production drawings are always in sync.

EMBEDDED DRAWINGS (XREFS)
Multiple drawings may now be embedded in the working drawing allowing multiple designers to work on different aspects of a project while allowing the rest of the project team to see the latest changes. The XRef’s layers, linestyles, text styles, dimension styles and blocks will be merged into the current drawing.

OLE OBJECTS
The new OLE function allows you to embed other objects such as documents, spreadsheets and illustrations in your drawing. To edit these objects simply double click to activate the host application for the object.

ENHANCED SYMBOLS (Blocks)
An extensive symbols library (blocks) is supplied. The new Block Manager allows you to visually browse symbol files and drawings for blocks.

MOUSE WHEEL ZOOMING & PANNING
You may now zoom in and out of the drawing by rotating the mouse wheel. This helps you to quickly get to the part of the design that you need to work on.

VISUAL SNAPS
Visual snaps allow you to see where a snap will be applied as you move the cursor. The screen will be dynamically updated to indicate where the nearest snap point is and in GrabAll snap mode, it will also indicate what type of snap point is nearest.

DIMENSIONING
Dynamic dimension preview shows you exactly what the dimension will look like before it becomes part of the drawing. You can also have different dimension styles per drawing.

ANNOTATIVE SCALING
AllyCAD once again allows you to specify text, dimensions, arrows and block inserts as "mm on paper" regardless of scale. When you add a viewport to a layout, AllyCAD will automatically configure the viewport so that annotative objects in the viewport are drawn at the same size in 'mm on paper'.

ADVANCED HATCH PERIMETER TRACKING
Hatches and solid fills are so much easier with vastly improved auto perimeter tracking including island detection and multiple perimeters.

3D CAPABILITIES (Objects, Surfaces and Rendering)
We have added full 3D with hidden line removal, rendering with light sources and shading, and perspective views. You can define your own lighting and view your design in multiple named viewports or in different perspective views and work on any view (top/side/iso) at the same time.

NEW 3D ENTITIES
The following are just some of the new 3D entities that have been added:

3D Face Polygon Mesh Ruled Surface Evolved Surface Box Cone Sphere

3D Polyline Lights Extruded Surface Tesselated Surface Pyramid Tube Dome

NEW CAD ENTITIES
In addition to the 3D entities we have also added the following new CAD entities:

Helix Arc-aligned text Spline MLeader Tolerance OLE Frame

Ray Rtext Table Multiline Wipeout

TABLE EDITOR
The Table function makes it a lot faster to draw tables with definable column widths, text styles and colours. Table styles can be defined to simplify table formatting.

The AllyCAD Toolkits

The AllyCAD specialised toolkits have been designed to speed up essential but time-consuming tasks relevant to the various CAD disciplines.

GENERAL TOOLKIT FEATURES
The General Toolkit contains innovative functionality specifically designed to speed up your design time. Read more..

• Print multiple drawings and easily edit your batch print list
• Convert multiple files between DRG, DWG, DXF and CEX formats
• Read Excel spreadsheets and insert the data directly into your drawing
• Insert the date and the visible layer information on the plot
• Quickly divide lines and angles into a specified number of segments
• Instantly calculate total line length (eg cables /pipes on a layer)
• Hide or set a layer by clicking on any entity in the layer
• Easily convert all line types and pens to normal line and pen numbers
• Write any text onto any arc with a specified text height and pen
• Quickly draw a revision cloud to focus attention on design areas
• Easily draw centrelines, chamfered rectangles and filleted rectangles

ARCHITECTURAL TOOLKIT FEATURES
Ships with SABS 0400-1990 building standards for speedy design of building plans. Read more..

• Set, edit, load and save building standard files
• Easy draughting of external and internal walls for buildings
• Roof line insertion for drawing roof elevation and cross sections
• Fully customizable symbol library in easy referenced structure
• Easy editing, saving and reloading of internal/external wall types
• Draw horizontal & vertical cross sections from existing plan view
• Easy adding of plan and elevations of staircase to drawings

The AllyCAD Versions

The AllyCAD versions are all fully functional but differ in terms of drawing size limitation and the level of support available. Please refer to the table below:

	Home	Micro	SME	Pro
Full Functionality
Toolkits Included
Drawing size:	300 KB	600 KB	1800 KB	Unlimited
Email support:
Telephonic support
Support Forum
Free updates

Did you know that AllyCAD HOME includes all the functionality of the AllyCAD Professional version. AllyCAD HOME is limited only in its drawing size capacity (300Kb) and is ideal for the hobbyist and small venture draughtsperson. Support is available via the Support forum. AllyCAD HOME is available for the nominal price of £36.00. Buy and Download AllyCAD Home Edition →

"AllyCAD operates seamlessly with all other software. A big advantage is that you can design using simple geometry lines which helps you get the design right the first time."
Gary Benatar, Industrial Logistic Systems

"The construction drawings for the foundation were detailed in AllyCAD. We prefer this program because it is quick and easy to use. A particularly useful feature of the software is the specialised toolkits."
Wolfgang Fischer, Fischer Seelenbinder & Associates

ON-GOING DEVELOPMENT AND UNBEATABLE SUPPORT
When you become a member of the international community of AllyCAD users you are buying into much more than just a powerful CAD system. You will be signing on to the broad range of support services including a hotline to our local support centre, remote desktop support, visits to your offices, user group meetings, workshops, and regular product upgrades and updates. This is complimented by frequent Tech Tip tutorials and specialised training to meet your requirements.

The Knowledge Base development team is continually improving AllyCAD in order to meet our users requirements and keep up with the latest industry developments. This close relationship we have with our users is highly prized by our existing clients and is the reason why AllyCAD is the preferred choice of professionals, consultants, local authorities, technikons and universities. Our Support Contract ensures that you receive the latest updates as soon as they are released and allows you priority access to our Customer Support Centre.

TOLERANCE EDITOR
Annotate your drawing with tolerances through the simple interface of the Tolerance Editor which also allows you to include finishing symbols

TEXT STYLES
Text styles allow you to apply multiple text attributes to one or more text items by simply editing the associated text style or applying a different text style.

MULTILINE TEXT EDITOR
Add a text paragraph with multiple lines of text by defining a box that will contain the text. You can apply formatting to parts of the text using controls similar to standard word processing systems.

ENHANCED SHEETFILE EDITOR
Using the new powerful sheetfile concept, unique to AllyCAD, you can generate production drawings with detailed title blocks, north signs, grids, scale bars and much more so that your plotting requires minimal, if any, CAD editing. The sheetfiles can be created or edited using normal CAD functions in a vastly improved Sheetfile Editor. AllyCAD works seamlessly with older sheetfiles as well.

FASTER REDRAWS
We have optimized our redraw routine to make the redraws really fast which further improves your productivity.

ADVANCED SELECTION FILTER
A new and very powerful Advanced Selection Filter has been added in addition to the legacy selection filter, which also has been greatly streamlined for ease of use.

EXPLODE & REPEATEDLY EXPLODE FUNCTION
The explode function breaks a compound entity (object) into its component entities (what it is made up of), while the repeatedly explode function will explode a compound entity to its base entities so that they can be edited.

COMPREHENSIVE PURGE FUNCTION
This function removes unused objects from the drawing thereby reducing it’s size. You can select which entities you wish to remove.

DATABASE LINKAGE
Link drawing entities to external database records containing attributes. You can therefore store your data in an external database and display up to date data on your drawings without editing the drawings.

DRAWINGS FROM TEMPLATES
You can create template drawings with your preferred settings, styles and title blocks and then use them as a starting point when creating a new drawing.

PLOTTING
New plotting function uses the powerful sheet file system, but generates layouts with viewports. Your production drawings will therefore automatically update as you change your design.

GRAPHICAL EDITING
AllyCAD gives you easy graphical editing of all selected entities by either selection handles or nodes. This includes hatches, elliptical arcs and splines.

ADD ON TOOLS
AllyCAD offers the following tools and editors that work outside of the program:

Accelerator Editor Batch BBF BMP Geo LO Digitiser Editor Linestyle Editor

Menu Editor Palette Editor Registry Reset Settings Transfer Toolbar editor

USER INTERFACE & EASE OF USE
AllyCAD's user-interface has been made much more intuitive, consistent and user-friendly in the latest version with improved toolbars, mouse -zooming and context sensitive menus.

CONTROL CENTRE
The Control Centre gives you quick and easy access to view and interact with blocks, line types, text styles, layers and objects in a drawing through a central interface.

OUTPUT BAR
The Output Bar displays information such as the measurements and properties of entities when you measure or query an entity or polygon area. The Output Bar will be displayed automatically when results need to be presented to the user. Output can also be printed or written to file.

PROPERTY BAR
All entities can now be easily edited in the same place through the Properties Bar. One can quickly select a set of entities and then edit properties common to them.

FLYOUT TOOLBARS
Flyout toolbars contain multiple nested toolbars without sacrificing screen space. The nested toolbars are displayed only when activated and are otherwise not visible.

STYLE IMPORTER
The Style Importer allows you to import styles from external drawings. This is much quicker than trying to recreate the styles from scratch for every new drawing.

EASY CUSTOMISATION
AllyCAD includes superb customization of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and drawing standards.

You can easily edit menus, toolbars, palettes, linestyles, through visual editors. You don't have to edit text files to customize these anymore.

Company standards can easily be enforced by placing standardized pallets, pen mappings, line styles, menus etc on a network drive for all workstations to use seamlessly.

Visual indicators, skins, prompt colours, geometry colours and messages can also be customized.

All this and so much more...
 

STRUCTURAL TOOLKIT FEATURES
Allows speedy drawing of building grids and structural steel sections. Read more..

• Provides building grids with centre lines and column bases
• Fully configurable grid dimensions and labels with bubbles
• Ensures quick adding of column bases to grids
• Allows rapid drawing of hot rolled steel sections
• Includes I and H sections, Channels, Angles and plate girders
• Allows rapid drawing of cold rolled steel sections
• Includes angles, channels, lipped zeds and top hats

MECHANICAL TOOLKIT FEATURES
Provides fast and effective drawing of common mechanical components. Read more..

• Fully customizable mechanical toolkit default settings
• Extensive list of fasteners with automatic linear or polar repeat
• Through or blind drill/tap holes in plan, elevation or section
• Easy drawing of shafts, links, flanges and spur gears
• Annotate welds, tolerances and surface finishes
• Generate tables of coordinate, part and general information
• Draw rectangular to round ducting with development view

SURVEY TOOLKIT FEATURES
Allows easy generation of Survey General Diagrams and General Plans. Read more..

• Generate 'ready to lodge' SG diagrams and General Plans
• Automatically creates tabled and annotated SG diagrams
• Automatically scans and dimensions General Plans
• Create outside figure and reference mark tables
• Generates Sectional Title Plans
• Create block and floor Participation Quota (PQ) Schedules
• User specified splay wizard with off shoots

RECOMMENDED SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
The minimum system requirements for the installation and use of AllyCAD are indicated below:

Core 2 Duo processor (3GHz) 2048MB RAM SXGA (1280 x 1024 display) 240MB free hard-disk space Windows XP/Vista/or later AllyCAD will install as a 64 bit version if your operating system is 64 bit. Older versions will also run on a 64 bit system, but as a 32 bit program. The program is not multi-treaded, and does not require GPU acceleration. A dedicated graphics card will improve performance but is not required.