Spirit offers one of the most comprehensive toolsets available to architects, planners and designers through a cross spectrum of industries. It does this by virtue of it&qout;s unique hybrid approach. What does this mean? If one looks at the background and history in the development of Spirit, one will see that the primary initial focus was on effective 2d construction drawing. You may have considered this a drawback to developing a modern BIM cad package, but we used this to our advantage as the following example will demonstrate. One of the unique features that Spirit has had from inception is what we call line overshoots. It may be regarded as a mundane feature, but it sure attracted many architects early on with it&qout;s ability to produce documentation that was “”architectural”” in nature and not “”mechanical””. We retained this feature and many of the other powerful features in the way we construct our “”smart”” parametric building objects (walls, windows, doors etc.).
SPIRIT Features

BIM modeling tools
Spirit offers an array of BIM based modeling tools, including walls, doors, windows, niches, recesses, floors, columns, stairs, rooms, roofs, dimensions as well as new view dependent fixtures and furnishing components, all accessible via drag and drop technology from the new resource browser. Windows and doors and fully parametric and dynamically editable as embedded or exterior components.

3D modeling tools
SPIRIT offers exciting new 3d modeling tools such as the polyslab with push/pull technology, the new sweepbody, comprehensive boolean operations, 3d knife with trim and break options, terrain modeling with TIN, Drop Mesh and Rule Surface which now all encompass the 3d mesh object with appropriate automatic smoothing in Fresco II rendering.

3D Presentation tools
SPIRIT offers powerful visualizations from the BIM via the integrated Lightworks rendering engine. Dynamically orbit the model and apply procedural textures via drag and drop. Easily edit applied materials in real time or change sun position to calculate shadows any time of day or year for any location on earth. Download and utilize a variety of free high class textures from the Lightworks user web site. Output interior panoramas to wow your clients.
You can also output the model to the highly compressed O2C format that can be embedded directly in Microsoft Office applications or in regular html web pages.

2D Presentation tools
SPIRIT offers an array of new possibilities with it&qout;s comprehensive suite of tools that include color transparency, color fill with manufacture based special color palettes, including Sherwin Williams, bitmap transparency, bitmap background transparency, gradient color fills as well as bitmap tiling.

Output
SPIRIT offers output of your visualization or CAD data to any windows based plotting device. It also has built in support for direct output to PDF and DWF with advanced support for dynamic links. You can also output directly to the Windows clipboard or to a bitmap image at virtually any supported resolution. Multi-Scale plotting allows layouts of details at varying scales on any number of plot sheets. Batch plotting internally or externally speeds the process of creating plotting sets.

Powerful collaboration
SPIRIT can import and reference a variety of standard industry data formats including the following: SketchUp *.skp, AutoCAD dwg/dxf (including support for paper space and ACIS solid models in ver 14.2), Microsoft Word *.doc, Microsoft Excel *.xls, Rich Text format *.rtf, html, txt.
SPIRIT can now export your BIM data directly to dwg format. It will export the current active details mode, so if you have a high level 2d representation detail selected, this is what will be exported. If you wish to export the 3d data, simply change the detail representation to 3d and then export.

Estimation and Quantities extraction
The included Pronto*Reporter extracts all current data from the model as well as other CAD data which can then be output as a report or exported directly to Excel. Data that is selected in Pronto*Reporter can be highlighted in real time in the BIM.
A new plug in called Cost Manager will enhance the process of creating real time cost estimates from the BIM.