LT Unlimited

Happy New Year!

Okay, I'm a couple days early with my New Year's wish, but I'm hoping most of you won't be at work tomorrow or Friday to read the blog. :-)

In honor of the new year, I thought I'd post about the NEW and QNEW commands.

There are a ton of different ways to start a new drawing: from the Application Menu, Quick Access Toolbar, Ctrl+N, and of course typing NEW and QNEW. (Did I leave any out?) Most of these ways involve choosing a template from a dialog box.

 
But with a little help from the Options dialog, you can suppress this dialog when using the QNEW command.

To do this, you need to specify a file for the "Default Template File Name for QNEW".

 
As you see above, the default is "none", but you can put in the path to your own DWT file instead. (Note: DWT, not DWG.)

Once you have a file in there, clicking the New icon on the Quick Access toolbar or typing QNEW automatically starts a new drawing from your specified template, without sending you through the dialog box first.

You can also use the CUI editor to change Ctrl+N to call QNEW instead of NEW, thereby bypassing the dialog box every time. Just go to Keyboard Shortcuts, Shortcut Keys, and change the command for Ctrl+N to QNEW instead of NEW. (Click on the image to see it full-size.)

Hope everybody has a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend -- see you in 2010!

LT Tips on the AutoCAD Exchange

I may be on vacation, but that doesn't mean I'll leave you hanging when it comes to AutoCAD LT tips & tricks. To find them, just head over to the AutoCAD Exchange. Haven't visited lately? It's worth a look. New content keeps getting added all the time, from "Ask the Expert" segments to CAD humor (if you didn't think AutoCAD could be funny, watch the Teknochronicles of Z) to AutoCAD LT tips and tricks. We're in the middle of posting our third series of tips designed especially for LT users. New ones show up about every week or so.

Random Trivia of the Day

I was browsing through the Help file looking for blogging inspiration when I realized the following:

1. There are no AutoCAD LT commands that begin with the letters K or Y.
2. There are no AutoCAD LT system variables that begin with the letters J, K, N, or Y.

Take this bit of knowledge to your next cocktail party, use it to impress your friends and baffle your enemies.

Autodesk on vacation (again)

Autodesk is closed for the next two weeks for our annual Week of Rest (plus a few cost-cutting days). It's a bit of deja vu, since we did the same thing about a month ago for Thanksgiving week, but that's the holiday season for you -- just one thing right after another.

I won't be posting on the usual schedule, but look for a few posts to appear during the downtime. (I didn't really want to neglect the blog for two whole weeks). The tips & tricks should resume their normal schedule after the New Year.

Isometric Dimensions

In the last two posts, you've seen how to set isometric planes and draw isometric circles. Now, let's add some dimensions.

Here's our starting cube:

And after I add some aligned dimensions...

But clearly that's not quite right. The dimension line is parallel to the object being measured, as it should be, but we'd also like the extension lines to be parallel with the edges of the cube.

To accomplish this, I'll use the Oblique option of the DIMEDIT command. Obliquing a dimension angles the extension lines away from their normal alignment.You can type it on the command line, or find it on the flyout of the Dimensions panel on the ribbon.

After you select your dimension to oblique, you need to enter an obliquing angle. This angle represents the new, absolute angle of the extension lines -- not a delta from whatever the current angle is.

So to get my cube dimensioned correctly, I obliqued two dimensions to 30 degrees and the third to 150 degrees.

I hope you enjoyed this mini crash-course in isometric drawing & dimensioning!

Isometric Circles

In the last post, I showed you how to turn on and cycle through the three isometric planes to help create 3D-looking drawings in 2D. But what if you need more than straight lines? What if you need circles?

The regular Circle command can't help you in an isometric drawing. What can is the Ellipse command, since circles projected in an isometric view appears as ellipses.

First, make sure your snap type is set to Isometric. Then, when you start the ellipse command, you'll see the following options:

Specify axis endpoint of ellipse or [Arc/Center/Isocircle]:

(If your snap style is set to Rectangular, you won't see Isocircle).

Once you enter I for Isocircle, you're prompted for the center point and a radius. You can either use snapping & tracking to specify these, or enter coordinates as usual. If you enter a number for the radius, you can just use the "real" radius of the circle -- you don't have to worry about doing any math to figure out the ellipse properties. The object you end up with is an ellipse whose axes are rotated to match the isometric angles.

The angle of the isocircle depends on your isoplane setting.

Need arcs instead? Just trim your isocircles.

(Don't ask me what the back side of this "cube" looks like now...I just trimmed some corners to make isometric arcs. But if one of you wants to draw the other side I'll post it...)

Isometric Planes

When you create an isometric drawing, "vertical" lines stay vertical, but "horizontal" lines are drawn at either 30 degrees or 150 degrees to give the impression of depth to the drawing. Here's an isometric "cube":

It has a 3D appearance, but really it's just 2D lines.

Now, you could do this by setting your polar tracking increment angle to 30, but that would let you snap to non-isometric angles like 60 and 120. You could also manually set individual polar tracking angles, but you'd have to take them off manually when you were done.

So instead, you can use the "Snap type" setting of the Snap and Grid tab of the Drafting Settings dialog box. (To find it, right-click on any status bar icon and choose "Settings".)

Set it to Grid, Isometric, and close the dialog. You don't have to turn on the grid or snap. Suddenly, your cursor changes. One of the axes is still vertical, but the other is aligned at a 150-degree angle, and it's changed colors.

When you turn Ortho on, you'll see that a "horizontal" line is now at 150 degrees instead of 0.

This curso mode is called "isoplane left". It's "left" because it's lined up with the left side of an isometric "cube". The other available isoplanes are "right" and "top". To switch between them, press F5.

          

With the help of isometric snap and ortho, you can quickly draw in any of the three isometric planes.

To get your regular, square cursor back again, change the snap type back to Rectangular.

Later this week, we'll draw some isometric circles, then add some dimensions to an isometric drawing.

Defining Combinations of Object Snaps

In addition to a checkbox in the Drafting Settings dialog, an icon on the status bar, and a 3-letter keyboard shortcut, each Object Snap has its own unique numeric identifier.

• 0 - NONe
• 1 - ENDpoint
• 2 - MIDpoint
• 4 - CENter
• 8 - NODe
• 16 - QUAdrant
• 32 - INTersection
• 64 - INSertion
• 128 - PERpendicular
• 256 - TANgent
• 512 - NEArest
• 1024 - Clears all object snaps
• 2048 - APParent Intersection
• 4096 - EXTension
• 8192 - PARallel
• 16383 - All object snaps

When you turn on a running object snap, it gets added to the value of the OSMODE system variable. For example, if you had only Endpoints and Centers turned on, OSMODE would be 5. The way that the values are defined means that every possible combination yields a unique sum.

According to Help, the default is 4133, which corresponds to End, Center, Intersection, and Extension. Once you get your own preferred snaps, you can check the value of OSMODE and save it for future reference. You could just remember it, or you could assign different values to buttons on the ribbon to activate different combinations for different tasks.

My favorite OSMODE is 4223 -- what's yours?

Scale Objects in One Direction Only

Usually when you scale something, you want to apply the same scale factor to all your objects in all directions. For instance, two rectangles that were 4x6 and 5x7 might become 8x12 and 10x14 after scaling.

But what if you wanted the rectangles to become 4x12 and 5x14 -- so they were scaled in only one direction? Okay, you could use the stretch command, but you'd have to do it twice, since the change in the rectangles isn't the same.

Instead, you can make a temporary block consisting of the objects you want to scale, and change its properties so that it has non-uniform scales in the X and Y directions. Then, when you explode the block, you get your original objects back, but scaled in one direction only (or by different factors for each direction).

As usual, there are a couple things to keep in mind. You have to watch out for polylines with arc segments. Non-uniformly scaled arcs become elliptical arcs, and polylines don't support those. So when you explode your temporary block, any polylines with arcs will be exploded into their component lines and (elliptical) arcs.

Also, for the last few releases, you have been able to specify that blocks can only be scaled uniformly -- obviously you need to turn that off to use this tip. You can either do that when you create the block, or from the Properties palette inside the Block Editor with no objects selected.

AU 2009 -- the wrap-up

Whew, what a week! AU 2009 is over and done, and now I'm back home again, trying to remember where I left off before the Thanksgiving break. (Sometimes I think I reach my own personal memory storage limits at AU, there's so much good stuff to learn and new people to meet.)

When I left off blogging on Wednesday, I was about to present my Introduction to Macro Writing class. It ended up going quite well, I think. If you're curious as to what was covered, you can find my handout, PPT, and sample CUIx file on the class page at AU Online. Later that day, I went to the AUGI annual meeting and watched the presentation of the official wishlists for AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Inventor, and Revit Architecture. AUGI also announced that CAD Camps will be returning next year -- very exciting! They have over 25 cities on the tentative schedule, so odds are good that there'll be one near you (if you're in the US). Details are still being finalized, so stay tuned...

On Thursday, things finally settled down a little. I spent time in the AutoCAD booth, did some more AutoCAD Exchange taping, and finally attended the AU party, where the main attractions were the Shark Reef exhibit and a caricature artist whose medium was Sketchbook Pro. Unfortunately the line was really long and I didn't get a caricature done. Maybe next time...

My favorite part of every AU is meeting people. It's so much fun to share AutoCAD stories, travel tales, or just chat. I met a lot of people from outside the US this year, including Lasse from Finland...

...Jose from Switzerland...

 

...Dario from Italy, Bill from Australia, Luciana from Brazil...

 

...and a ton more that I didn't get pictures with. Hope to see you all again next year!

Last but not least, I brought home a new friend & traveling companion from Australia:

(If you're wondering, "What the heck IS that?", it's an echidna. Much furrier (and blue-r) than the real thing, though. Thanks again, Bill!)

The arrival of Friday meant it was time to get back on the plane...

...and say goodbye to Vegas and AU until next year.

 
Of course, you know that AU never *really* ends, right? How can it, with all the content available at AU Online and AU Virtual? Handouts, datasets, presentations, session recordings, and so much more...all for free! (Or for $99, if you buy the AUv Premier pass.) There's plenty there to keep you busy & well-informed until next time.

And speaking of next time, tips & tricks will resume in the next post.

For now, though, signing off from AU 2009!