Rotate View

I see a lot of questions out there (in fact, I got one by e-mail just last week) on how to rotate a view now that DVIEW is no longer available. Fortunately, it's still easy to do.

The two commands you'll need are UCS and PLAN. UCS stands for User Coordinate System, and is both a noun (i.e. "the current UCS") and a command name (i.e. "use the UCS command).

The most common scenario I see for this is that "north", which is typically "up" in model space, needs to point in a different direction on a sheet, usually to accommodate the shape of a building or site. In this case, "north" would correspond to the direction of the Y-axis in a 2D coordinate system.

So in order to rotate our view, we need to rotate the X and Y axes to a new direction. The easiest way to do this to rotate the UCS about the Z-axis. The Z-axis is perpendicular to both the X and Y axes, so in a 2D system like LT, that means it points straight out of the screen. (It's the same axis uses by the Rotate command, in case the previous sentence didn't help.)

Conveniently enough, there's a button on the UCS panel of the View tab of the Ribbon that will do exactly that. So if you want "north" to point right instead of up, click the "Z" button (or type UCS-->Z) and enter 90 (remember that positive rotations are counterclockwise). Now we have a rotated coordinate system.

Notice that the little square at the intersection of the axes has disappeared. That's becuase the current UCS no longer corresponds to the World UCS. But you'll also notice that your view hasn't changed. We've only changed the UCS, not the view.

That's where the PLAN command comes in. PLAN aligns the current view to a coordinate system, either the current one, the world one, or a previously-saved named one. It's available from the command line or through the Menu Browser, Tools menu, but not from the Ribbon.

Using it is simple. Just start the command and press enter to align the view to the current UCS. Notice that although the axes are back in their "normal" orientation, the square that indicates World UCS is still missing. This is a helpful visual cue to show you that you're in a different UCS.

If you've run this sequence in a viewport, I highly recommend locking it after you've finished panning and scaling your view. This just helps avoid any unexpected changes.

Also, if you need to continue working in the drawing, you'll probably want to set your UCS back to World (there's a big button on the Ribbon to do this) to put the axes back to normal.