- •About the Authors
- •Dedication
- •Authors’ Acknowledgments
- •Table of Contents
- •Introduction
- •What’s Not (And What Is) in This Book
- •Mac attack!
- •Who Do We Think You Are?
- •How This Book Is Organized
- •Part I: AutoCAD 101
- •Part II: Let There Be Lines
- •Part III: If Drawings Could Talk
- •Part IV: Advancing with AutoCAD
- •Part V: On a 3D Spree
- •Part VI: The Part of Tens
- •But wait . . . there’s more!
- •Icons Used in This Book
- •A Few Conventions — Just in Case
- •Commanding from the keyboard
- •Tying things up with the Ribbon
- •Where to Go from Here
- •Why AutoCAD?
- •The Importance of Being DWG
- •Seeing the LT
- •Checking System Requirements
- •Suddenly, It’s 2013!
- •AutoCAD Does Windows (And Office)
- •And They’re Off: AutoCAD’s Opening Screens
- •Running with Ribbons
- •Getting with the Program
- •Looking for Mr. Status Bar
- •Let your fingers do the talking: The command window
- •The key(board) to AutoCAD success
- •Keeping tabs on palettes
- •Down the main stretch: The drawing area
- •Fun with F1
- •A Simple Setup
- •Drawing a (Base) Plate
- •Drawing rectangles on the right layers
- •Circling your plate
- •Nuts to you
- •Getting a Closer Look with Zoom and Pan
- •Modifying to Make It Merrier
- •Hip-hip-array!
- •Stretching out
- •Crossing your hatches
- •Following the Plot
- •A Setup Roadmap
- •Choosing your units
- •Weighing up your scales
- •Thinking annotatively
- •Thinking about paper
- •Defending your border
- •A Template for Success
- •Making the Most of Model Space
- •Setting your units
- •Making the drawing area snap-py (and grid-dy)
- •Setting linetype and dimension scales
- •Entering drawing properties
- •Making Templates Your Own
- •Setting Up a Layout in Paper Space
- •Will that be tabs or buttons?
- •View layouts Quick(View)ly
- •Creating a layout
- •Copying and changing layouts
- •Lost in paper space
- •Spaced out
- •A view(port) for drawing in
- •About Paper Space Layouts and Plotting
- •Managing Your Properties
- •Layer one on me!
- •Accumulating properties
- •Creating new layers
- •Manipulating layers
- •Using Named Objects
- •Using AutoCAD DesignCenter
- •Copying layers between drawings
- •Controlling Your Precision
- •Keyboard capers: Coordinate input
- •Understanding AutoCAD’s coordinate systems
- •Grab an object and make it snappy
- •Other Practical Precision Procedures
- •Introducing the AutoCAD Drawing Commands
- •The Straight and Narrow: Lines, Polylines, and Polygons
- •Toeing the line
- •Connecting the lines with polyline
- •Squaring off with rectangles
- •Choosing your sides with polygon
- •(Throwing) Curves
- •Going full circle
- •Arc-y-ology
- •Solar ellipses
- •Splines: The sketchy, sinuous curves
- •Donuts: The circles with a difference
- •Revision clouds on the horizon
- •Scoring Points
- •Commanding and Selecting
- •Command-first editing
- •Selection-first editing
- •Direct object manipulation
- •Choosing an editing style
- •Grab It
- •One-by-one selection
- •Selection boxes left and right
- •Perfecting Selecting
- •AutoCAD Groupies
- •Object Selection: Now You See It . . .
- •Get a Grip
- •About grips
- •A gripping example
- •Move it!
- •Copy, or a kinder, gentler Move
- •A warm-up stretch
- •Your AutoCAD Toolkit
- •The Big Three: Move, Copy, and Stretch
- •Base points and displacements
- •Move
- •Copy
- •Copy between drawings
- •Stretch
- •More Manipulations
- •Mirror
- •Rotate
- •Scale
- •Array
- •Offset
- •Slicing, Dicing, and Splicing
- •Trim and Extend
- •Break
- •Fillet and Chamfer and Blend
- •Join
- •When Editing Goes Bad
- •Zoom and Pan with Glass and Hand
- •The wheel deal
- •Navigating your drawing
- •Controlling your cube
- •Time to zoom
- •A View by Any Other Name . . .
- •Looking Around in Layout Land
- •Degenerating and Regenerating
- •Getting Ready to Write
- •Simply stylish text
- •Taking your text to new heights
- •One line or two?
- •Your text will be justified
- •Using the Same Old Line
- •Turning On Your Annotative Objects
- •Saying More in Multiline Text
- •Making it with Mtext
- •It slices; it dices . . .
- •Doing a number on your Mtext lists
- •Line up in columns — now!
- •Modifying Mtext
- •Gather Round the Tables
- •Tables have style, too
- •Creating and editing tables
- •Take Me to Your Leader
- •Electing a leader
- •Multi options for multileaders
- •How Do You Measure Up?
- •A Field Guide to Dimensions
- •The lazy drafter jumps over to the quick dimension commands
- •Dimension associativity
- •Where, oh where, do my dimensions go?
- •The Latest Styles in Dimensioning
- •Creating and managing dimension styles
- •Let’s get stylish!
- •Adjusting style settings
- •Size Matters
- •Details at other scales
- •Editing Dimensions
- •Editing dimension geometry
- •Editing dimension text
- •Controlling and editing dimension associativity
- •Batten Down the Hatches!
- •Don’t Count Your Hatches. . .
- •Size Matters!
- •We can do this the hard way. . .
- •. . . or we can do this the easy way
- •Annotative versus non-annotative
- •Pushing the Boundary (Of) Hatch
- •Your hatching has no style!
- •Hatch from scratch
- •Editing Hatch Objects
- •You Say Printing, We Say Plotting
- •The Plot Quickens
- •Plotting success in 16 steps
- •Get with the system
- •Configure it out
- •Preview one, two
- •Instead of fit, scale it
- •Plotting the Layout of the Land
- •Plotting Lineweights and Colors
- •Plotting with style
- •Plotting through thick and thin
- •Plotting in color
- •It’s a (Page) Setup!
- •Continuing the Plot Dialog
- •The Plot Sickens
- •Rocking with Blocks
- •Creating Block Definitions
- •Inserting Blocks
- •Attributes: Fill-in-the-Blank Blocks
- •Creating attribute definitions
- •Defining blocks that contain attribute definitions
- •Inserting blocks that contain attribute definitions
- •Edit attribute values
- •Extracting data
- •Exploding Blocks
- •Purging Unused Block Definitions
- •Arraying Associatively
- •Comparing the old and new ARRAY commands
- •Hip, hip, array!
- •Associatively editing
- •Going External
- •Becoming attached to your xrefs
- •Layer-palooza
- •Creating and editing an external reference file
- •Forging an xref path
- •Managing xrefs
- •Blocks, Xrefs, and Drawing Organization
- •Mastering the Raster
- •Attaching a raster image
- •Maintaining your image
- •Theme and Variations: Dynamic Blocks
- •Lights! Parameters!! Actions!!!
- •Manipulating dynamic blocks
- •Maintaining Design Intent
- •Defining terms
- •Forget about drawing with precision!
- •Constrain yourself
- •Understanding Geometric Constraints
- •Applying a little more constraint
- •AutoConstrain yourself!
- •Understanding Dimensional Constraints
- •Practice a little constraint
- •Making your drawing even smarter
- •Using the Parameters Manager
- •Dimensions or constraints — have it both ways!
- •The Internet and AutoCAD: An Overview
- •You send me
- •Send it with eTransmit
- •Rapid eTransmit
- •Bad reception?
- •Help from the Reference Manager
- •Design Web Format — Not Just for the Web
- •All about DWF and DWFx
- •Autodesk Design Review 2013
- •The Drawing Protection Racket
- •Autodesk Weather Forecast: Increasing Cloud
- •Working Solidly in the Cloud
- •Free AutoCAD!
- •Going once, going twice, going 123D
- •Your head planted firmly in the cloud
- •The pros
- •The cons
- •Cloudy with a shower of DWGs
- •AutoCAD 2013 cloud connectivity
- •Tomorrow’s Forecast
- •Understanding 3D Digital Models
- •Tools of the Trade
- •Warp speed ahead
- •Entering the third dimension
- •Untying the Ribbon and opening some palettes
- •Modeling from Above
- •Using 3D coordinate input
- •Using point filters
- •Object snaps and object snap tracking
- •Changing Planes
- •Displaying the UCS icon
- •Adjusting the UCS
- •Navigating the 3D Waters
- •Orbit à go-go
- •Taking a spin around the cube
- •Grabbing the SteeringWheels
- •Visualizing 3D Objects
- •Getting Your 3D Bearings
- •Creating a better 3D template
- •Seeing the world from new viewpoints
- •From Drawing to Modeling in 3D
- •Drawing basic 3D objects
- •Gaining a solid foundation
- •Drawing solid primitives
- •Adding the Third Dimension to 2D Objects
- •Creating 3D objects from 2D drawings
- •Modifying 3D Objects
- •Selecting subobjects
- •Working with gizmos
- •More 3D variants of 2D commands
- •Editing solids
- •Get the 2D Out of Here!
- •A different point of view
- •But wait! There’s more!
- •But wait! There’s less!
- •Do You See What I See?
- •Visualizing the Digital World
- •Adding Lighting
- •Default lighting
- •User-defined lights
- •Sunlight
- •Creating and Applying Materials
- •Defining a Background
- •Rendering a 3D Model
- •Autodesk Feedback Community
- •Autodesk Discussion Groups
- •Autodesk’s Own Bloggers
- •Autodesk University
- •The Autodesk Channel on YouTube
- •The World Wide (CAD) Web
- •Your Local ATC
- •Your Local User Group
- •AUGI
- •Books
- •Price
- •3D Abilities
- •Customization Options
- •Network Licensing
- •Express Tools
- •Parametrics
- •Standards Checking
- •Data Extraction
- •MLINE versus DLINE
- •Profiles
- •Reference Manager
- •And The Good News Is . . .
- •APERTURE
- •DIMASSOC
- •MENUBAR
- •MIRRTEXT
- •OSNAPZ
- •PICKBOX
- •REMEMBERFOLDERS
- •ROLLOVERTIPS
- •TOOLTIPS
- •VISRETAIN
- •And the Bonus Round
- •Index
Chapter 11: Edit for Credit 233
If you want to offset a series of connected lines (for example, a rectangular house plan outline or one side of a pathway on a map), make sure that you either draw it as a polyline or convert the individual line and/or arc segments into a polyline with the JOIN command. (We cover JOIN later in this chapter.) If you draw a series of line segments with the LINE command and then try to offset it, you have to pick each segment and offset it individually. Even worse, the corners usually aren’t finished off in the way that you’d expect because AutoCAD doesn’t treat the segments as connected. You avoid all these problems by offsetting a polyline, which AutoCAD does treat as a single object. Figure 11-6 shows an offset polyline. See Chapter 8 for more information about the differences between lines and polylines.
Slicing, Dicing, and Splicing
The commands in this section — TRIM, EXTEND, BREAK, FILLET, CHAMFER, BLEND, and JOIN — are useful for shortening and lengthening objects, for breaking them in two, and for putting them back together again.
Trim and Extend
TRIM and EXTEND are the twin commands for making lines, polylines, and arcs shorter and longer. They’re the yin and yang, the Laurel and Hardy, the Jack Sprat and his wife of the AutoCAD editing world. The two commands and their prompts are almost identical, so the following steps cover both. We show the prompts for the TRIM command; the EXTEND prompts are similar.
1. Click the Trim or Extend button on the Home tab’s Modify panel.
AutoCAD prompts you to select cutting edges that will do the trimming (or, if you choose the EXTEND command, boundary edges for extending to):
Current settings: Projection=UCS, Edge=None
Select cutting edges ...
Select objects or <select all>:
2.Press Enter to accept the default option to select all drawing objects, or select individual objects by picking them. Press Enter to end object selection.
The objects you select in this step become the cutting edge of the TRIM command or the boundary to which objects will be extended by the EXTEND command.
Figure 11-7 shows a cutting edge (for TRIM) and a boundary edge (for EXTEND).
www.it-ebooks.info
234 Part II: Let There Be Lines
Cutting edge (for trim) Boundary edge (for extend)
Figure 11-7: Anatomy of the TRIM and EXTEND operations.
AutoCAD prompts you to select objects that you want to trim or extend (EXTEND doesn’t have the eRase option):
Select object to trim or shift-select to extend or [Fence/Crossing/Project/Edge/eRase/Undo]:
3.Select a single object to trim or extend. Choose the portion of the object that you want AutoCAD to trim away or the end of the object that’s closer to the extend-to boundary.
AutoCAD trims or extends the object to one of the objects that you selected in Step 2. If AutoCAD can’t trim or extend the object — for example, if the trimming object and the object to be trimmed are parallel — the command line displays an error message such as
Object does not intersect an edge.
You can select multiple objects to trim and extend by typing F and pressing Enter to use the Fence object selection mode or by entering C to use Crossing selection. Even better, you can use implied windowing and drag a selection box to select multiple objects. Refer to Chapter 10 for more on multiple object selection.
The command line continues to prompt you to select other objects to trim or extend:
Select object to trim or shift-select to extend or [Fence/Crossing/Project/Edge/eRase/Undo]:
4.Choose additional objects or press Enter when you’re finished trimming or extending.
Here’s a triple-threat tip: If you accidentally trim or extend the wrong object and you’re still in the TRIM or EXTEND command, type U and press Enter to undo the most recent trim or extend. You can switch between TRIM and EXTEND without exiting the command by holding down the Shift key. And finally, if you find yourself with a remnant that won’t trim because it doesn’t cross the cutting edge, type R (for eRase) and press Enter to erase it without leaving the TRIM command.
www.it-ebooks.info
Chapter 11: Edit for Credit 235
The example in Figure 11-7 shows trimming to a single cutting edge, in which the end of each trimmed line gets lopped off. Another common use of the TRIM command is for trimming out a piece of a line between two cutting edges. In the two-cutting-edges scenario, TRIM cuts a piece out of the middle of the trimmed line. The default option for selecting cutting edges or boundaries is ALL, which works well in this scenario. Pressing Enter to accept the default option selects all objects in the drawing as a cutting edge if you’re in the TRIM command, or a boundary if you’re in the EXTEND command.
An object being trimmed or extended can also be a cutting edge or extending boundary and vice versa, all in the same run of the command.
The LENGTHEN (LEN) command provides other useful ways to make lines, arcs, and polylines longer (or shorter). You can specify an absolute distance (or delta) to lengthen or shorten by, a percentage to lengthen or shorten by, or a new total length. Look up the LENGTHEN command in AutoCAD’s help system for more information.
LENGTHEN is an option on the grip pop-up menus on lines and arcs. To display the menu, just hover your mouse pointer over an endpoint grip on either of those object types or over one of the new triangular grips on an elliptical arc and click Lengthen.
Break
The BREAK command isn’t what you use before heading out for coffee. (AutoCAD doesn’t have a command for that yet, but we keep hoping.) It’s for creating gaps in lines, polylines, circles, arcs, or splines. BREAK also comes in handy if you need to split one object into two without actually removing any visible material.
The following example shows how you BREAK an object (don’t worry — in AutoCAD, you won’t have to pay for it):
1.On the Ribbon’s Home tab, click the label of the Modify panel to open its slideout and then click the Break button.
AutoCAD prompts you to select a single object that you want to break.
2.Select a single object, such as a line, a polyline, or an arc.
The point you pick when selecting the object serves double duty: It selects the object, of course, but it also becomes the default first break point (that is, it defines one side of the gap that you’ll create). Thus, you should either use one of the AutoCAD precision techniques, such as an object snap, to pick the object at a precise point or use the First
point option (described in the next step) to repick the first break point.
www.it-ebooks.info
236 Part II: Let There Be Lines
AutoCAD prompts you to specify the second break point or to type F and press Enter if you want to respecify the first break point:
Specify second break point or [First point]:
3.If the point that you picked in the preceding step doesn’t also correspond to a break point (see the preceding Tip), type F and press Enter to respecify the first break point. Then pick the point with an object snap or other precision technique.
If you do type F and press Enter and then respecify the first break point,
AutoCAD prompts you to select the second break point:
Specify second break point:
4.Specify the second break point by picking a point or typing coordinates.
AutoCAD cuts a section out of the object, using the first and second break points to define the length of the gap.
If you want to cut an object into two pieces without removing anything, click the Break at Point button on the Modify panel’s slideout. You first select the object and then choose a point that defines where AutoCAD breaks the object in two. You can then move, copy, or otherwise manipulate each section of the original object as a separate object.
As indicated near the bottom of Table 11-1, AutoCAD has an EXPLODE command. As with all things explosive, approach this command with caution. EXPLODE breaks up complex objects into AutoCAD primitive objects. For example, a multisegment polyline explodes into separate line and arc objects. Most of the time, those complex objects are created that way for a reason. The things you can explode (but shouldn’t unless you have a really, really good reason) include polylines, blocks, 3D solids, associative arrays, tables, and multiline text. And even though AutoCAD will let you, you should never, ever explode dimensions or leaders.
Fillet and Chamfer and Blend
Whereas TRIM, EXTEND, and BREAK alter one object at a time, the FILLET and CHAMFER commands modify a pair of objects. As Figure 11-8 shows, FILLET creates a curved corner between two lines, whereas CHAMFER creates a beveled corner. (In case you wondered, it’s pronounced FILL-et, not fillAY. Saying that you know how to fill-AY may get you a job in a butcher shop, but it will get you strange looks in a design office.)
FILLET and CHAMFER show a preview of the results of the operation as soon as you select the objects to modify. If the fillet radius or the chamfer distances don’t look right in the preview, you can change their values before completing the command.
www.it-ebooks.info
Chapter 11: Edit for Credit 237
Original lines Filleted lines Chamfered lines |
Lines lleted |
|
with zero radius |
Figure 11-8: Cleaning up those corners with FILLET and CHAMFER.
The following steps describe how to use the FILLET command. The CHAMFER command works similarly except that, instead of specifying a fillet radius, you specify either two chamfer distances or a chamfer length and angle.
1.Click the Fillet button on the Home tab’s Modify panel.
FILLET and CHAMFER share a flyout button; if you see a straight-line corner instead of a rounded one, click the flyout arrow to select FILLET.
AutoCAD displays the current fillet settings and prompts you to select the first object for filleting or specify one of three options:
Current settings: Mode = TRIM, Radius = 0.0000
Select first object or [Undo/Polyline/Radius/Trim/ Multiple]:
2. Type R and press Enter to set the fillet radius.
AutoCAD prompts you to specify the fillet radius that it uses for future fillet operations:
Specify fillet radius <0.0000>:
3.Type a fillet radius and press Enter.
The number you type will be the radius of the arc that joins the two lines.
AutoCAD then asks you to select the first object:
Select first object or [Undo/Polyline/Radius/Trim/ Multiple]:
4. Select the first line of the pair that you want to fillet.
AutoCAD prompts you to select the second object for filleting:
Select second object or shift-select to apply corner or [Radius]:
5.Select the second line of the pair that you want to fillet.
AutoCAD fillets the two objects, drawing an arc of the radius that you specified in Step 3.
www.it-ebooks.info