LESSON 2-1

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PLANNING A PROJECT This lesson will have you using the tools you learned in the first level. Believe it or not, if you understand the commands taught in the first level, you understand almost all of the common commands used in AutoCAD - for any version. For this lesson, you will be drawing a floor plan of an office layout. There are two different plans to choose between. Choose the one that you feel most comfortable with. Click on the icons below to view the projects. PROJECT Project # 1 - Computer Room Project # 2 - Office Space Project # 3 - Office Metric Project #4 - Cabin You can complete all 3 if you like, and Option #1 is the simplest project if you want to start off easy. The first thing you want to do is set up your drawing. There are a few basic steps to approaching EVERY drawing you do in CAD. Make sure you have the ability to draw it. See if there is anything in the drawing that you would not be able to reproduce. You should also see if you have all the information you need to complete the drawing. One missing dimension can make the entire drawing very difficult. See what units are used. Is it Architectural, Decimal, Standard, Metric? This will need to be known so you can set the drawing units. What area is needed? Again, you may want to set up the initial drawing area (or limits). What layers will you need to start with? Remember that you can always add more, or delete the ones you don't need. Once you have this basic information, you can begin. As you can see, there is a bit you have to do before drawing your first line. Get into the good habit of beginning your drawings properly and not with the attitude that you can always "Fix it later!" If you have a prototype (or template) drawing already set up, use it. If you feel that you will be doing this type of drawing often, make a template drawing once you have set up all the parameters you need. Do this by saving the file with a DWT extension. This is AutoCAD's standard for template files. AutoCAD also has a large number of templates to get you started. You can find these through the New Drawing dialog box. Once your drawing is set up, think about how you will actually draw it. You should start with the most basic components first. Remember that it is just like building a structure. Start with the foundation and add more detail as you go. Look at the outer walls and start there. Next draw the inside walls. Then add more details such as the door openings, doors, windows, etc. Finish up with the furnishings. Be careful with your measurements, because if you make a mistake at the start, it will cause BIG problems later on as you continue through the drawing. A general rule I use is to draw like I would build it. This basic approach will at least give you a starting point for any project in any discipline. The first two projects are designed using imperial, architectural units (ie: 3'-6") as opposed to metric units. Just like in Previous Lessons, start AutoCAD and a new drawing by using the menu optionFile > New. You will see a dialog box open that asks you to select a template drawing to use (as shown below): To set up a template drawing, use the procedure you did in Level 1, except that you will set all the parameters that you will need for your drawings. These would include: layers, text styles, dimensions styles, units, area and possibly a title block layout. Once this is done, you are ready to begin drawing. For Imperial Drawings (Computer Room and Office): Start a new drawing and use the acad.dwt template. Set the units by typing in UNITS and setting the "Length Type" to Architectural. Next set your dimension scale by typing in DIMSCALE and entering 48 at the prompt (More on this in a later lesson). This enlarges the dimensions to match size of your drawing. Now you want to set your dimension text to read in Architectural units. To do this, type inDDIM and press the Modify... button. Then pick on the Primary Units tab. Your dialog box should look like this at this point: Change the Unit Format to "Architectural", press OK and then close the dialog box to return to your drawing area. Next create the layers you think you will be needing. Take time to give them understandable names, unique colours, etc. If you want, you can now save this as a template drawing (details in this lesson).. Setup for drawing the Office Metric Project: This will similar to the steps above, with these changes. Open a new drawing and use the acadiso template (as shown in the dialog box above). You don't need to change the units, but change the DIMSCALE to 10. Where to start: You're ready to start drawing now. As mentioned above, start with the outside and work your way in. If you are drawing the first project, you can easily draw the outside walls (using DDE), then offset them by the thickness of the wall. From there, it's just a matter of inserting the door openings. I usually do that by offsetting lines, then trimming away what I don't need. For the doors themselves, just draw a rectangle and rotate it. For drawing the desks, remember the array command. So with just a few commands, you can draw this room - all the commands you learned in Level 1 Of course, there are many ways to draw the same project. When you are drawing these projects, you may want to move around the drawing and go to closer views. Feel free to jump ahead to the next lesson on Zooming and Panning when you need to. Once you have drawn the basic plan, dimension it (refer to Level 1-8 lessons). From the "Computer Room" plan you will be adding computers and other accessories to the desks later in the course, so save the file when you are done..