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Using Tool Settings and Linear Elements

December 6, 2009 in AutoCAD, CAD, Revit

place circle settings We will start discussing details on our drawing tools. We are going to discuss some basic drawing tools, and how to use it with tool settings. The basic elements are linear, circle, and polygon elements.

Using tool settings

We use tool settings to change the element parameters. Tool settings will show you all available parameter for active tool. When you activate place circle, it will show you parameters for circle. When you activate place line, it will show you all parameters for line. Not just for drawing, it’s also used for modify and view navigation tools.
Activate place circle and take a look at the tool settings for circle. You can see that there is a diameter parameter. But if you have been playing with MicroStation tools for a while, you’ll find out that you don’t need to input diameter when placing circle. You can simply use AccuDraw to place two data points. So how can tool settings and AccuDraw can work together?
They talk to each other. Let’s try to activate place circle from navigation bar. Place a data point anywhere on your screen as the circle center point. Now move your pointer. As we have discussed before, the value in AccuDraw will be updated instantly. You can move your pointer, type the radius, and click data point to place the circle. But don’t define the second data point yet! See your tool settings. The diameter value is also changing.
Click reset to cancel this circle placement. Now, with the place circle still active, lock the diameter value in your tool settings, and type the diameter value.

Move your pointer to drawing area. Now you can see a circle attached to your pointer! If you defined the diameter (or radius) before defining data point, you can click only once to place the circle. Very useful if you have to place many circle with the same radius.

Linear Elements

We will discuss more about circle later. Now, let’s discuss about linear elements.

Place SmartLine

We’ve been using SmartLine a couple of times. It’s named SmartLine, but we can place several elements type just using this tool. The elements can be:

Line, if it only has one line segment
Arc, if it only has one arc segment
Line string, if it has several line segments
Complex chain, if it has several line and arc segments
Complex shape, if it’s a closed element

A SmartLine can have arc and lines. You can change the segment type from line to arc and vice versa during placing the element. You can also change the vertex type to rounded or chamfered.
place smartline tool settings

A little tip: You can quickly change the top most parameter in tool settings by pressing [~] in your keyboard. See the animation for creating the profile below.

SmartLine Exercise
You can download an old animation here. They will show you how those profile were created. I created it using a free recorder when I still use V8 XM. Yes, it’s executable files, they have their own player.

Place Line

Another linear element that we can consider as basic is ‘place element’. You only can place a simple line using this tool. Every line you created only has one segment. You create four line segments, then it will be four separate lines.
Let’s take a look at the tool settings. There are only two parameters: length and angle. Try to lock the value for these two before you place your line.

What happen? You only need to place one data point, and it already has the length and angle you wanted!

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Source: CAD Notes – Using Tool Settings and Linear Elements
Go to Source: CAD Notes

Tags: basic elements, circle, diameter, drawing tools, line, linear elements, microstation tools, place, pointer type, Tool No Comments »

by CADcaster

How to extend a line

September 11, 2009 in AutoCAD, CAD

New tutorial on 2LearnCAD.com
Source: 2LearnCAD – How to extend a line
Go to Source: 2LearnCAD

Tags: com, LearnCAD, line, Source, Tutorial No Comments »

by CADcaster

Creating Your Own AutoCAD Palette

September 5, 2009 in AutoCAD, CAD, Revit

Autodesk has introduced palette since a long time ago. If I’m not mistaken, since AutoCAD 2005. Palette is a very easy way to manage (and create) your reusable content. We will place every blocks we’ve created to our palette in this step.

Later, this palette will be used to access the reusable contents when we draw.

Understanding Tool Palettes

Snipped from help file:

Tool palettes are used to manage blocks, hatches, and other custom tools.

If you see the palette that’s included with AutoCAD installation, you will see a collection of blocks, hatches, and other tools. This is a great way to you who want to customize your own workspace without a lot of work. You can access your blocks quickly, without having to use insert tool, find where your blocks are. It’s just a click away.

It’s not just blocks that can be managed by palettes. You can manage lines with different line type, line scale, etc dimension with different dimension styles, hatches with different scales, etc. That’s what I love about tool palette: simple but powerful.

Take a look at this example, I use 2 icon on palette to manage same pattern, but different scale. We don’t have to activate hatch, find the pattern type, or make adjustment to hatch scale. Simply 2 clicks: activate, and click on boundary.

You can also use it for dimension, lines, etc.

Creating Our Own Palette

Make sure your tool palette is opened. Right click on tool palette title bar. You will see a list of palettes group on your context menu. Select architecture to activate palette group. This will activate architecture palette group. By default, this sample group only have one palette in it. We will add new palette here.

Right click again on your palette title bar. Select Customize Palettes from context menu. You will see customize palette open.

There are two column in this dialog box. The left column, consist all the palettes available. On the right column, we can see how we group our palettes. Architectural group still only have one palette. We will use it as our tool group.

Right click on left column, then select new palette from context menu. Rename it to something like ‘My Architectural Objects’. Find Architectural group on the right column. Your new palette should’ve already been placed here. To your active palette group. If it’s not, drag and drop your new palette under Architectural group.

Close this dialog box.

Adding Objects to Our Palette

Before adding objects to our palette, let’s discuss about objects, blocks, files, and tool palettes.

For objects like lines, dimension, hatches, you don’t need to keep your file. But if you intend to insert blocks to your palette, don’t loose your file. Let’s say it this way: That file is your library, and tool in palette will load that block. So plan where you will put your file. If you want to put it on server, do it before you start placing tool to your palette. Now we can pretend our previous file that has our wall, column, and door has been save at appropriate place. Open it.

Let’s create a new layer. Name it ‘A-Centerlines’. Use magenta as it color, and lineweight 0. For linetype use ‘center’.

On command line, type LTS then [enter]. Enter value 10 then [enter]. Set A-Centerlines as current layer, then draw a line in your drawing area. Size doesn’t matter.

Now, click and drag the line to our palette. By default, it will be named Line. Right click on that tool, select rename. Give it new name: Centerline.

If you want your tool palette to look more informative, you can change the ugly line icon with an image (jpg, bmp, etc)

Drag and drop all your blocks to this palette.

These tools will be named after blocks. There you go. Easy right?

Testing Our Palette

If you have more tools and blocks, you can arrange your palette further. You can create more palette if you need to. After you’ve done, try to create a new file.

Check on your layer manager, make sure you only have layer 0 (by default).
Draw using Centerline tool we’ve just created. It will be created using A-Centerlines layer, with it’s properties! You don’t even need to create a layer! Check your layer properties now. Tool palette can be very useful for maintaining your CAD standard.
Place all other blocks to your drawing.

Very easy right? Next, we will discuss about template, cad standard
. And finally using them all in our design.

I would like to know your opinion about this tutorial series. If there’s anything you would like to add, i wrote something wrong, yours doesn’t work as expected… anything… feel free to write in comments form.

Source: CAD Notes – Creating Your Own AutoCAD Palette
Go to Source: CAD Notes

Tags: click, dimension lines, dimension styles, Group, line, Palette, reusable content, Tool, tool palette, tool palettes No Comments »

by CADcaster

How to Hide/Unhide Command Line

August 21, 2009 in AutoCAD, CAD

Sometimes while doing our job in AutoCAD there is some instances that happens unexpectedly. And one of that is the accidental turning off of the command line, and with that, you are unable to see the command that you’re keying-in.

Fig.1

There is two way actually to hide the command window of AutoCAD or in these case to unhide. One of these is on the keyboard shortcut, by pressing CTRL+9. The other is at the Tools pulldown menu, then Command Line (fig.1). Alternatively if you are using AutoCAD Architecture 2008 and beyond, you can find the command line in Window pulldown menu as well (fig.2).

Fig.2

Thats all for now.

Random Posts

Source: PinoyCAD[dot]net | Your Daily dose of AutoCAD Tutorials – How to Hide/Unhide Command Line
Go to Source: PinoyCAD[dot]net | Your Daily dose of AutoCAD Tutorials

Tags: AutoCAD, autocad tutorials, command, dimension text, fig, Hide, ison, keyboard shortcut, line, random posts, Window No Comments »

by CADcaster

Where Can I See AutoCAD Command Alias List?

August 20, 2009 in AutoCAD, CAD, Revit

Command line is a very powerful feature in AutoCAD, and I don’t think replaceable. I know there are a lot of pros and cons about using command line in AutoCAD. Personally I like using shortcut key when using AutoCAD, but I found that it’s difficult for people who rely heavily on this when learning other CAD application.

But doesn’t matter. When you use AutoCAD, you’ll want to use it optimally right?

You can see and customize your aliases by accessing edit aliases in AutoCAD ribbon, manage tab, customization section.

Or if you use AutoCAD classic interface, you can access it from menu tool>customize>edit program parameters (acad.pgp)

This will open your acad.pgp file in text editor (by default it’s notepad).

As you can see, this is a list of all your command aliases. Mine is default, so aliases for line is L. When I type L then [enter] will activate the line tool. Typing LA [enter] will open the layer manager. Etc.

AutoCAD commands don’t work like any other Windows applications. In Revit or Inventor, you simply type two character to activate a tool. No need to press [enter]. But in AutoCAD you can use single character, or more than two. MicroStation can do some similar key-in, but command line is not always have the input focus. Using command line in other application might not be as comfortable as in AutoCAD for AutoCAD users. I suggest you not depends on command line so much, unless you don’t plan to use other CAD applications.

You can edit the aliases and change them to what you want. After you finish, save this file. You might need to restart your AutoCAD after doing your modification.

Where’s the Complete List of AutoCAD Command?

You can see the whole AutoCAD command in AutoCAD help file. See under command reference>commands.

But do you really want to remember all of them?

Source: CAD Notes – Where Can I See AutoCAD Command Alias List?
Go to Source: CAD Notes

Tags: AutoCAD, autocad users, CAD, classic interface, command, command aliases, L. When, line, menu tool, program parameters, Tool No Comments »

by CADcaster

Adding Command to Your Right Click

August 13, 2009 in AutoCAD, CAD, Revit

We have discussed how to add new command to AutoCAD. We added our new command to Now let’s discuss how to add it to context menu. We want this command appear when we select particular type of object. This is what a contextual menu all about, right?

This time we will create a command to automatically convert line(s) to polyline. This is not something new. I’ve seen a lot of people have discuss it in forum or blogs. One of them is in Autodesk evangelist, Lynn Allen blog. But we are going to do it slightly different: put it to our context menu.

Open your CUI browser. You might want to read the previous post about creating a new command before you continue.

Right click on command list area, select new command from context menu. Rename it. Let’s call it Line to Pline. Or if it’s sound ridiculous to you, you can use another name that suit you.

Now in properties area, macro field, type this value:

^C^C_pedit;;;^C

A little explanation:

^C is similar to pressing [esc], pressing [esc] twice will cancel a running command (if any).
PEDIT is activating polyline edit command
;;; means you press [enter] three times. ; will execute [enter]

In Lynn’s blog she use ^C^CPEDIT;y;; It would work fine too. What’s the difference? Let’s compare to what we do.

^C^C is just the same to what we do.
she use PEDIT instead of _PEDIT. Mostly using either one of it works fine. Adding underscore is an AutoCAD convention so this command can be used by AutoCAD in any other language. If you use English, then there’s no difference with or without underscore.
She use Y after the first ; If you activate PEDIT and select a line or arc, then AutoCAD will ask you: Object selected is not a polyline Do you want to turn it into one? <Y>
By default the answer is yes. So pressing [enter] without typing Y will return the value of Yes. She decided to make sure AutoCAD will accept yes as the answer, so add Y then [enter] to do this.

Not different at all, aren’t they?

Now we have done with creating command. Now we have to define a new shortcut menu. Look at customize section. Find shortcut menus group. Right click on it, and click new shortcut menu. Rename it to Line Object Menu.

What are we doing? We define a condition, when this menu should appear. We want this menu appear when we select line. But it won’t appear when we select other type of objects. We have created the menu, but haven’t define the condition. Now we add this condition on properties section, aliases field.

Click ‘…’ button on this field. Use it, don’t type directly on the text field. Type on each line as follow:

OBJECT_LINE –> this will enable your menu appear when you select a single line
OBJECTS_LINE –> this will enable your menu appear when you select multiple lines

Adding both of them will enable your menu to appear on both conditions.

Click OK. You will see your aliases as below. You might have different ID than mine (mine POP520), but that’s not a problem.

Now, drag and drop our new command to this shortcut menu.

Click OK to close your CUI browser. Now try to draw some lines. Select it, then right click. See if your command show up in your context menu.

Kinda fun, isn’t it?

Source: CAD Notes – Adding Command to Your Right Click
Go to Source: CAD Notes

Tags: AutoCAD, C A, click, command, context menu, contextual menu, evangelist, line, Lynn, Lynn Allen, menu, one lt, pedit No Comments »

by CADcaster

Layer 0, ByLayer and ByBlock

August 6, 2009 in AutoCAD, CAD, Revit

Every time you create a new drawing, you will see a default layer: Layer 0. You can’t delete this layer.

Then when you define layer properties such as color, line weight, etc, you will see ByLayer and ByBlock property. Most of you might already know what is ByLayer means. But do you also know what is ByBlock behavior?

In a nut shell, here is the explanation

Layer 0 is a default layer. You can create geometry in your blocks using this layer. When you insert those blocks, they will use active layer. When you move this block to different layer, the objects in it will use the layer and ignore Layer 0.
When you define object properties (color, line weight, etc) to ByLayer, all of it properties will use the same properties as it’s defined in layer properties.
When you create geometries in your block using ByBlock, then you can override it’s properties after the block has been placed.
When you create geometries in your block other than ByLayer or ByBlock, then you can’t override them after your block has been placed.

Confused? Let’s create some example to comprehend this better.

Open your AutoCAD, in a new file create two layers, you can give them any name. Set different color and lineweight so we can easily distinguish them later.

Now we will create 4 objects, in this example I use circle.

First circle use layer 0, color: by layer, line weight: by layer
Second circle use layer 0, color: by block, line weight: by block.
Third circle use layer 0, color: red, line weight: 0.5 (we set this high so can be easier to see).
The last one use layer 1, color: by layer, line weight: by layer.

Create 4 blocks from each of the circle. Now select all those four, then change their layer to Layer 2. You can see block 1 and 2 use the layer properties, but block 3 and 4 still using it’s own properties.

Now override the color and line weight. Use color green, and line weight 2. You can see that the only block using the overridden properties is block no. 2!

Only block no.2 using the block properties, because we set it the geometry properties to by block.

Now freeze Layer 1. We can see the block no. 4 disappeared, because the object in it was created in Layer 1.

Unfreeze Layer 1, so we can see block no. 4 back. Now freeze layer 2. Remember, we have moved all of the blocks to Layer 2. What happen? All of the blocks disappear, including block no. 4! This block also disappear because the block itself using Layer 2. When we freeze Layer 1, the block is actually still showing. But the geometry inside it will be disappeared. This will be clearer if we have another object with different layer in that block.

Unfreeze Layer 2, then freeze Layer 0. None of the blocks is disappear! Remember that we created geometry in block 1,2, and 3 using Layer 0? They will ignore that layer and use the new layer properties.

If you want to understand more about this behavior, try to create more objects in your blocks. Set them to different properties. And play some more with layer properties. But I hope this is clear enough

Source: CAD Notes – Layer 0, ByLayer and ByBlock
Go to Source: CAD Notes

Tags: AutoCAD, Block, Color, different color, geometry, layer, line, nut shell, red line, weight No Comments »

by CADcaster

Negative Buffer Values

August 5, 2009 in AutoCAD, CAD

A while back the question came up if anyone used negative values to create a buffer in another forum. I thought WHAT? Most of the buffers I create are with point or line type objects, if you do a -10 distance buffer of a point or line object what do you get? Nothing! However you can create a negative buffer from a polygon object. Michael Schlosser from the Autodesk north of the border team shows how to use it and provides a good example of why you might want to here on his blog.

Source: Map 3D and Murphs Law – Negative Buffer Values
Go to Source: Map 3D and Murphs Law

Tags: buffer, buffer values, line, Map, Michael Schlosser, negative values, north of the border, point, polygon object, Source No Comments »

by CADcaster

Tip: Making Better Use of the Right-mouse button

August 4, 2009 in AutoCAD, CAD

AutoCAD communicates with its user through the command line. Long ago, when AutoCAD used to run on DOS, using the keyboard was a lot more important than it is today. As the user interface improve, the command line is losing its appeal. It still provides important feedback though.
The SPACE, ENTER and right-click button can all [...]

Source: All About CAD – Tip: Making Better Use of the Right-mouse button
Go to Source: All About CAD

Tags: AutoCAD, button, command, keyboard, line, mouse button, Source, User, user interface No Comments »

by CADcaster

Trimming Filleted Objects in AutoCAD

July 28, 2009 in AutoCAD, CAD

By default, all objects except circles, full ellipses, closed polylines, and splines are trimmed when filleted. You can use the Trim option to specify that filleted objects remain untrimmed.

To fillet without trimming

From the Modify menu, choose Fillet.
Enter t (Trim).
Enter n (No Trim).
Select the first line and then the second line.

The filleted object is untrimmed.
System variables [...]
Source: CAD Blog.Net – Trimming Filleted Objects in AutoCAD
Go to Source: CAD Blog.Net

Tags: blog, CAD, circles, ellipses, fillet, line, polylines, Source, splines, system variables No Comments »