AutoCAD 2006 Preview ~ Dynamic Blocks
It’s great to finally be able to talk about this feature. Bill, before you do those nut & bolt lisp’s you mentioned last week have a look at this 
Dynamic Blocks are a major new feature in AutoCAD 2006. Simply put they are AutoCAD blocks that respond to user manipulation by altering graphics, shape or form. How they change is controlled by parameters built into the block using a suite of new tools.
Dynamic Blocks will find a myriad of uses and will allow multi-block libraries representing similar parts to be replaced by one multi-purpose block. For example you may have individual blocks representing M3,4,5,6,8,10,12,14 Hex nuts. One Dynamic Hex nut block can contain all the parameters and a size table that allows it to display all those sizes. Adding another is as simple as adding values to the size table. Another use could be to have a Table block with preset sizes and adding chairs as the table is stretched based on embedded rules in the block.
To create these new blocks there is a new block editing interface and palettes of tools to allow parameters (polar, linear, rotation etc) and actions (Stretch, mirror, rotate, scale, lookup table etc) to be applied. Dynamic block actions are applied to 2d AutoCAD entities inside an AutoCAD block. In this release they are not intended for 3d object manipulation.
The palettes give an idea of the parameters available but the easiest way to explain Dynamic Blocks is show them in action:
Download/view AutoCAD 2006 Dynamic Block.wmv (555.7K)
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