说明
主要学习内容
- Learn how to implement the latest and most innovative AI features packed inside AutoCAD.
- Learn how to apply common AutoCAD commands in unique and creative ways to achieve dynamic outcomes.
- Discover the secret tips known only by AutoCAD veterans and gurus.
讲师
- Donnie GladfelterDonnie Gladfelter is a globally recognized Autodesk expert with 25 years of experience in the AEC industry, driving innovation in technology, organizational, and talent development. As an Autodesk Certified Instructor and an award-winning Autodesk University speaker presenting for 18 consecutive years, he is a proven communicator able to captivate audiences exceeding 60,000 people with impactful presentations. Named one of Autodesk's Top 35 Young Designers Under 35, he is well known for The CAD Geek Blog (www.thecadgeek.com), six Autodesk Official Press books (AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT: No Experience Required), and contributions to industry publications including Autodesk’s Official AutoCAD Blog. Honored as an Autodesk Expert Elite Member, he specializes in crafting user-centered content and technology strategies that pursue intersections between people enablement, process development, and technology innovation.
DONNIE GLADFELTER: All right. Well, good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to AutoCAD tips and tricks and in the spirit of San Diego, the most classy drafting techniques.
Hopefully you read the course description. I was kind of proud of that. So if you haven't, I'd encourage you to have that bit of entertainment there. But for those of you I haven't had the chance to meet before-- I've been doing this class for a few years now or a version of it for a few years now-- my name is Donnie Gladfelter. And I am the Virtual Design Manager at Dewberry, a national civil engineering firm with about 2,500 folks from coast to coast.
I'm also an Autodesk expert elite member. And this is my 18th consecutive AU speaking. So I just like to torture myself building AU classes. But I have so much fun sharing things with each of you and the dialogue that you guys gift me with back through your questions and connections throughout the year.
So I really appreciate that. And that's really what keeps me coming back every single year, is the dialogue from everybody here. So you can find me online pretty much any and everywhere that says anything about AutoCAD. But that's where you will find things there.
As for today, I don't have a lot of PowerPoints, so that's hopefully some good news for everybody in here. Really our objectives today is to have some fun and hopefully pick up a few new ways and maybe validate some old ways of better utilizing AutoCAD.
So I'm going to share a number of different tips and tricks across some abstract concepts, some more concrete concepts. But it's really about having fun and maybe learning-- hopefully learning at least a few things new about AutoCAD this afternoon.
Now, with that, I always like to open up this session with a few disclaimers, a few expectations. Did anyone here start using AutoCAD yesterday? OK, perfect. No hands went up. So chances are if you've used AutoCAD for more than a day or two, you've probably picked up a few tips and tricks yourself.
In fact, if you're attending this class, you are probably the poor soul that the people in your office come to expecting to know tips and tricks. Do I see my people in the audience? OK, perfect. So in that way, I also recognize that we all use AutoCAD in different ways.
My background is in the world of Civil engineering. But I know we probably have architects in the room. We have landscape architects. We've got maybe set designers that design stages, people that might do cabinetry, people that might do electronic circuits.
I would say that obviously AutoCAD is a tool that we can use to design the smallest microprocessor circuit to draw the whole solar system and basically everything in between. So in that way, I've tried to prepare tips in a way that hopefully you can imagine how you might apply them, regardless of what scope you are using AutoCAD in. But it's impossible for every tip that I'm going to share to apply to you.
Likewise, we all have some experience that we come to the table with with our AutoCAD knowledge. And so to that end, I certainly would not expect that every tip that I share today will be brand new to you. I will probably repeat some tips that you already know.
If you've attended this class before. I've certainly tried to add some new tips, but there's some repeats as well. So if I have any repeat attendees to this session, not every tip this year is new as well. And then ultimately, you have different experiences from my own. And this is what I was mentioning by really the gift of feedback with audiences like this and audiences from past years.
I love the dialogue that tends to happen after these sessions and throughout the rest of the conference and online and such throughout the year, as you share ways that you're putting some of these things to use and applying them to the way that you do work. It makes me kind of reimagine what I assume things are or what I assume AutoCAD is able to do.
So those are really my ground rules for today. And except for the Q&A slide at the very end, that basically concludes my PowerPoint. So with that, let's jump on over to good old AutoCAD. I have set my background to white, not because I prefer using white, but I find it works better on projectors.
Fun fact, I personally believe that AutoCAD runs better in dark mode. And my really only evidence for that is that, well, light attracts bugs. So to that end, to kick things off with some general just drafting tips. So you might know some of these, you might not know some of them.
But with that, especially if you're doing 2D drafting, you probably look at the drafting cube up at the top as just a nuisance or annoyance. But there is some functional use for it in the world of 2D drafting. If you select on objects, you can just select on the object.
If you click the top, it will zoom in to whatever you have selected. So this can be helpful for-- I need to zoom way out. And I know that those lines right there are going to be that whole frame that I have selected.
I can select on those and just click on that top of the viewcube. And it's going to zoom out to that whole thing that I have selected. So just another way to zoom. And I find that to be a really, really handy way to begin navigating the drawing. So I can select things like so and zoom in and zoom out just by using that viewcube.
Continuing on from that, isolating objects. Certainly, we have layers. You're probably familiar with those if you've used AutoCAD for more than maybe 10 and 1/2 seconds. However, in addition to that, we've got object isolation, which used to be something that was only in the vertical flavors of AutoCAD, not in the core AutoCAD, but it's in core AutoCAD now. And it's this nice little shape icon that we've got in the lower right corner of the status bar that has nothing to do with preschool shapes. It is our object isolation.
So what I find handy about this is you can select objects, do something maybe like select similar, whatever the case might be. I don't want to see the chairs right now. But I don't maybe want to turn off that layer.
You can just come down here to that little shape icon. That's the object isolation. And you have the option to hide or isolate. So I could say hide. And those are hidden. It's not the layer, it's just the object. So whatever I had selected is what is hidden as a result. Unfortunately, this is not a way that you can play a prank on a coworker, because anything that you have isolated or hidden resets as you open up the drawing file.
So if you were hoping for a good way to prank your coworker, this is not one of them. But it is really handy for-- you've got a bunch of stuff going on. Maybe I'm having a hard time with these blocks or whatnot, I might select a bunch of stuff and say hide. And now I can maybe select those blocks a little bit easier. Whatever the case might be, I find using the isolation to be really, really handy there.
When you're done with things, any time you see a blue background in the status bar or really anything in AutoCAD, that means that thing is turned on. So when we have a blue icon or blue background on that object isolation here, that means that object isolation is in effect. And we can say end object isolation and it brings things back there for us.
All right. So continuing on, when I first started drafting, I was actually doing MEP work before I found my way into the world of civil. And I remember when I was doing MEP work, the first time I got a civil drawing, I said to myself, what are those folks smoking?
There's like 1,000 layers for everything. And what units is it in, it just blew my mind. And things are drawn on top of things, on top of other things. And then I ventured into that world, and it made sense to me, sort of.
But in, especially those civil drawings, we typically have things that are drawn on top of things that are drawn on top of things. How can we more easily select them? Selection cycling is one of those. It's not in the default composition of the status bar. But I find to be a really, really invaluable tool.
So if you click on the-- they call it the hamburger icon. I have no idea why they call it the hamburger icon. What heathen does that to their hamburgers? Who here puts their hamburgers in a panini press? Anyone? I never have. But anyway, pancake icon, maybe hamburger, you heathen.
Anyway, click on that icon. And in that list about midway is selection cycling. That's going to add the tool that we want to our status bar. And when we do that, it's going to be this little green box icon right here. So currently it's turned off.
If I turn this on, when AutoCAD gets confused-- and let's be honest, it gets confused a lot, right? When AutoCAD gets confused about what I want to select, it's going to display a little double square glyph in the upper right quadrant of my cursor. That means AutoCAD doesn't quite know what it thinks I want to select.
So if I select now, it will display all of the possible objects that it thinks I might want to select. So in this case, we've got a bunch of stuff drawn on top of things, drawn on top of things. And so I can very easily select that one that I want, maybe do something like use the move command to move it out of the way.
And I could continue on and move that out of the way. And if I uncover all of those, I can maybe make the Microsoft Office or Microsoft logo for a fraction of the cost that they paid to make their logo. But selection cycling, really handy for those really complex drawings. For whatever reason you are able to-- or you have a bunch of stuff that's overlapping, you can select it really easily.
So I mentioned that my background is in that civil side. We oftentimes have to do things draw curbs and gutters. They have different offsets for the curb, different offset for the gutters. But regardless of the type of work we do, we typically have stuff where we've got different offset values that we need.
And when we think about how we typically run the offset command, we come and we run offset. It asks me for a distance. And I type in some sort of value. And then I offset it. And then I say, you know what? Well, now I need to do 50 units or whatever that is. So we repeat it. And we do 50. And again that's fine. That works.
However, I think one of the options that we oftentimes overlook is the through option. So if you come down here to through I'd like to pair this with a dynamic input. So the little dimensions that pop up on the screen.
And if I do that using through, I can come in here. And basically, I get that little dimension. So I could type in 25. And then pick on that again and type in 50 or whatever that might be and go about things that way.
I also like the through a lot for times where I need to match geometry up, I need to maybe center a sidewalk between two things as an example. So if I needed to find the exact midpoint between these two offsets here and I didn't know what those dimensions were, I could once again do offset through. And I could say something like this. And then I love the mid between two points object snap here.
So I could do mid between two points and do something like snap to the midpoint and midpoint. And then that will figure out the exact middle between those two. So those are a few ways that I like to use through option. It's not typically the way we think about using the offset command. I was always trained you type in your values and you like it. And there's some good pieces to that. But that's not always the best way.
Now, I mentioned that I tried to make my tips so that they apply to any and everyone. But this one is a bit more civil-specific that I know we encounter quite a bit. And that is the fun that we get to have with hatches, especially the AR hatch patterns inside of AutoCAD in civil drawings.
And so if you don't know what's going on here, those AR hatch patterns, they stand for architecture. They are meant for the little tiny building drawings that architects create, not the millions of coordinate value drawings that civil engineers create.
And so when we get issues like this, where the hatch pattern does not look anything like the intended pattern, essentially what we've got going on here is rounding. So by default, AutoCAD creates hatch patterns from the origin point of the drawing, so 00. And when we get out to the millions of coordinates, we can have some rounding issues here.
So the fix to this is to set an origin closer to the hatch. There's a couple of ways that you can do that. First, just pick on the hatch. And in that contextual ribbon, there is a button that is Specify Origin. It doesn't really matter where you pick. But if I click on that, I could always just snap right there. And just like that the hatch is fixed.
We're going to talk a little bit more about multifunctional grips a little later. But hatches are another object that have multifunctional grips. So if I pick on this hatch, you'll see that there is a circle in the center of that area.
And if we hover over it-- don't click on it, but just hover on it-- you will get a little menu. And one of the options is origin point. And it's the exact same command as if you went up to the ribbon, except it's right there by my cursor. And now I can just go ahead and set that origin and fix that hatch pretty easily.
All right. So on that topic of hatch because I know we love hatches, and they are the easiest objects to work with inside of AutoCAD. Anyone have some gray hair or no hair because of working with hatches?
So one thing I like is the gap tolerance. It's not terribly uncommon that we will have a hatch area that isn't completely watertight. And by default, AutoCAD doesn't really like that too much. However, if I come up here, I'll just make that hatch layer current.
Let me come up here to the hatch command. And if I click in here, sorry, there are some updates to hatches this year that we're going to talk about here in a second as well. If I click on the inside there, that is not at all what I want. I just wanted to hatch the room, not that whole box.
So how can I do that without having to draw the boundary? If you expand out-- not boundaries, sorry, options. If you expand out the Options panel of that contextual ribbon tab, there is an option up here that is gap tolerance. So the door openings in this case are 2 foot 11. Let me do 3 feet so it's just a little bit bigger than the actual measurement there.
So if I type in the hatch gap tolerance-- say that 10 times fast-- and I click in here, it should call me a liar. Let's try that again. I'll do ANSI. Gap tolerance. And let me do pick points. Let's try that again.
All right. Well, it should give me-- it should call me names. It should call me names and say, this doesn't make a watertight region. But based on your gap tolerance, it will fill things in. The beauty of live presentations is it worked 20 minutes ago but not now. So we're just going to continue on.
But that is a great segue to a new feature in 2025. In 2025, we don't need no stinking hatch boundary to create hatches anymore. So if we go to the hatch command, you'll notice in the command line there is a new option called draw. And this will allow you to add hatch to your drawing without first creating a boundary, or filling a boundary, or selecting and all those conventional bits.
This can be really handy for more rectangular or at least simple-ish polygonal areas. So if I do draw here-- let me make sure my mode is set to area, and it is. And what I can do is tell it I want to do a rectangle as an example. And with that, I could just snap to things in here. And whoops, let me do a rectangle again.
And I can just use a rectangle version to draw various hatches across the draw. And you have some line and arc options as well. I have personally found the most success and most time savings versus maybe the old ways die-hard method of using this more for rectangular areas. But you can use it for more complex areas as well. But if it gets too complex, I tend to fall still into the older ways of doing things.
Now, continuing on speaking about those sort of older ways, this is another one that I think we've run into quite often. It would be really handy. And granted, this is a simplified example. But we oftentimes have objects that are really hard, or there's a lot of objects that we can't necessarily turn off very easily. But we need to hatch that area.
It'd be really nice if I could just use the pinpoint option to hatch that area without having to create a custom polyline. Now, if I come in here and-- you know what, I think that might be part of my issue. I think I might have turned normal island detection off over here. That might have been the issue.
So anyway, if I come in here and I click-- oops. Sorry, they have changed the hatch pad. There we go. Pick internal point. I pick in there, and you get what you expect. It hatches around the circles. But I don't want to consider the circles. How do I tell AutoCAD to ignore the circles?
The secret here is the Boundaries tab that you have probably never even realized can be expanded, to expand it because if you expand it out, there is an option at the very bottom. And it says Use Current Viewport. That is the default geometry that AutoCAD is evaluating for boundaries. But you can tell AutoCAD only to consider certain geometry as you hatch.
So if you click the little button next to it, that will allow you to create a new boundary set. The advantage of this is in this case, I could come in and just select these green lines, like so. And when I do that, now AutoCAD is only considering those green lines for the purpose of hatching.
Those circles don't exist in the eyes of the hatch command. And what that now means is if I come in here and I click, I have now hatched, completely ignoring those interior objects. Certainly you could maybe do something similar with island detection and so forth as well. But again, I find this really handy for pavement areas. That's where I use it a lot in civil drawings.
Continuing on here. Parking Islands and Pills using FILLET. So typically, when we use FILLET, we either use a radius or we do no radius to make a corner. But if the two objects that you are filleting between are parallel, you don't need to worry about any radii. You can just pick those two. And it will just calculate the radius between them and create that pill shape.
Continuing on here, path arrays. Fun fact, you know the number one reason that AutoCAD users quit their job? They don't get a raise. So I'll be here all week, folks. So when we think about arrays, we typically think of the rectangular and polar arrays. I think the path arrays oftentimes are overlooked.
I have really come to appreciate path arrays in my work for things like parking lots, especially when I have curves in the geometry that I need to accommodate for to make sure that my parking stalls are the right width.
And so what I can do here is set a stall width as an example and basically create my parking stall. So if I use the path array option. And I will pick this green line. I can then hit Enter and then pick a path to follow.
And just like that, I have basically those parking stalls. The good news is this is an associative array. So I can modify. I can come up here and set a specific distance of maybe 8 feet or 9 feet or whatever number of units that you want.
It is going past because it's not quite exact. But I could say items. If I toggle that off here, I get another grip at the very end that I could pull in to get things set up like that. So for drawing parking stalls. I find this to be really, really handy, and I'm sure there's 1,000 other uses as well. But drawing parking stalls is where I use this one the most.
The other one here, just real quick. The JOIN command, we typically think about the JOIN command to create-- heal an object. So if I use the JOIN command here, I can pick these two arc segments. And it makes it into one continuous arc or these two line segments and it makes it into a continuous line.
I like the JOIN command because it's just one keystroke. The default keystroke is just J, so I could just type in J, Enter. And if I needed to make polylines out of these, I could just select them. As long as they have coincident endpoints-- so they actually create a continuous piece-- this will work exactly the same as the PEDIT command. And this will allow you to create a continuous polyline.
I tend to use the JOIN command if I have good geometry. If I have questionable geometry, I'll still use the PEDIT command with that fuzzy distance that you can do for the PEDIT there. But for good clean geometry, I do tend to prefer the good old JOIN command.
All right. So continuing on, talking about some different ways that we can analyze drawings. So who here has ever had a drawing? You know it is xref throughout the project. But you don't quite every drawing that it is x-referenced into. Have you ever wanted to figure out how you could figure out or find out what drawings that drawing is x-referenced into?
So to demonstrate this one, let me come into here. I've got this drawing here. So I know this drawing is x-referenced into some other drawings. But I don't know which ones they're referenced into.
What I can do to find the answer to that is to turn to DesignCenter. We typically think about DesignCenter as a way to import layers and blocks and whatnot between drawings. But if I bring up DesignCenter-- probably an icon that I know I skipped over for the longest time-- is there is a search icon there in the toolbar of DesignCenter. And it will allow us to search for things, including xrefs.
So if I click on this, what I'm going to do is browse out to my project directory. In this case, right here. And that's the folder. And what drawing am I looking for? This is where I will go to Windows Explorer and just copy the file name.
So I am in level 00 in this case. Let me just click on that. And I'll copy that to the clipboard. If I come back over here to AutoCAD, under the search dialog, these are all the things that you can search for across multiple drawings.
So you know that there's a block somewhere that's named something and some other drawing file, but you don't know where it is. Use this method as well-- so blocks and detail views, layers, layouts. All of these things, you can search for across a number of drawings. But where I'd like to use this is xrefs, that very bottom option.
And if I come here, I can then paste in the name of that xref and say search now. And it will search that directory and tell me that this drawing, level 0, is referenced into my level 1 and site plan drawings across those different drawings that I had. So this is a good way to figure out if I modified this drawing, what other drawings am I also modifying by changing the geometry here? So that is a handy one there.
Another one, dynamic inquiry with quick measure. So you're probably familiar with the Measure command. There is a quick option that was added a few releases ago. And I'd like to use this in a couple of ways. The most basic way is just hovering over stuff. And it gives you this real-time preview of what those dimensions might be.
The other thing I really like this for is if I am drawing stuff that needs to be perpendicular or create right angles, I love this as just a quick way to analyze the geometry because as I hover over the thing, notice the little right angle icons in the bottom corners of-- all the corners. If you see that, that means that is a nice 90-degree angle. If you don't see it, it might be an 89.9-degree angle.
So this is a great way, I think, just to come in. And I can just very quickly hover over my geometry and just check it. And it all looks pretty good. So I like to use it just for that basic validation of I've got right angles. But you also have access to things like area where you could click in here. And I'll calculate that area and such. But I use it mostly for the right angle checking in addition just to those upfront measurements.
Another tool I really like is the Quick Calculator. So we oftentimes forget it. But also over here under the palette panel on the View tab, there's a calculator built into AutoCAD called Quick Calculator. And this is a palette interface. It allows you to do things like unit conversions and a bunch of other good stuff.
But let's imagine for a moment I've got this box and I want to divide it into thirds. I don't know how long it is, so how could I divide it into thirds? Yes, we have measure, divide. There's some other ways. But what I can do here as an example and what I like about the Quick Calculator is that it interacts with AutoCAD itself.
So here, I have the option of distance between two points. What I can do with this is come in and measure between two points. And it's going to calculate that value between two points and input it into my calculator. No fat fingers here at all.
And if I wanted to do something simple like divide it into thirds, I could say divide it by 3 and get that value. So 83 repeating. And now if I come up to something like the Offset command, it asks me for the offset distance. I don't have to type in this number. There is a icon here which will allow me to paste it to the command line.
So whatever that result is, I can then paste that to whatever command I need to input a value for. It could be Offset. It could be FILLET. It could be whatever command that you need. But I can paste that in at the command line, hit Enter. And now in this case, I'm able to create nice one third divided areas there by using the Quick Calculator.
All right. So continuing on, another one I really like here is using fields. I love fields for all different types of things. But probably one of my favorite uses is to get linear quantities that aren't x number of feet. I want a quantity, not a number of feet. So I want to count basically how many parking stalls there are here using fields.
So what I'm going to do is let's add some text in. And I am going to add a field. Actually, before I do that, let me get the measurement here. So that's 50 units. All right. So let's come back in here. Let's add some text. And I'm going to say Add a field.
And with fields, we can report on all different types of things. I'm going to come down here to objects and then choose object. Now since there's lots of objects in Civil 3D or AutoCAD, I should say. We need to tell it what object I want to report on. So I'm going to say select Object. In this case, I'm going to do this back line right there. So that rear line right there.
And these are all the properties that we would get in the properties dialog or properties palette inside of AutoCAD. One of those is, of course, length. And here it's telling me that it is 300 units long. But I want this to be measured in quantities of 50. How many units of 50 fit into 300 in this case? And so this is where I can come down to additional format. And there is a conversion factor for fields.
So what I can do here is say equals 50 divided by 1. And another quick tip here is most dialogues in AutoCAD where you need to input a value, you can do some basic arithmetic. So I notice I put in equals 50 divided by 1. I can hit Alt-Enter. Sorry, 1 divided by 50. Let's do it the other way.
And I'll get it right. So I'll hit Alt-Enter. And that will give me the conversion factor. So I want 1 to be every 50, so 1 divided by 50. Not the most difficult math here. But it creates that conversion factor. And I can say maybe in the trailing spaces OK, OK.
And now that is 6. Now, if I were to increase this by some number here, it is going to count how many units of 50? So this is a way that I like to use fields to do parking counts very quickly and easily. If they're, again, a fixed width apart, you can use this trick there.
So continuing on here. Block quantities. So there's lots of ways that we can count blocks in AutoCAD. There's BCOUNT and a bunch of tools out there. And this is one of my favorite additions to AutoCAD in the last few years, is the COUNT command. It makes me think of Sesame Street, Count Dracula. [LAUGHS]
In that way, let me come back over here. Under the View tab under Palettes, there is a button here for Count now. If you click on that, it is going to open up. If you actually click on it and not, I guess, right-click it, it's going to open up a new palette called count. And this is a real-time quantity of every block in your drawing.
There's a couple of things that we can do with this though. Well, having quantities across the entire drawing is great, but what if I only want to count some areas of the drawing? Well, that's what this little blue icon-- or this green icon is. I can count in a specified area. So I could just draw a box around the area that I want to count. And now this is just giving me the quantities for the area that I drew a boundary around.
If I wanted to get a head start on making a schedule out of this, notice at the bottom there is a button that says create a table. So I can say Create Table. I can now pick what I want to create a table for. So maybe I just want to create a schedule for the furniture. So I'll do the chairs and the desks and maybe a sofa as well, maybe some other bits.
So you can choose the blocks that you would like to put into a table and hit Insert and then put an insertion point. I made it really small. But we can use that little select and zoom. And just like that, I now have a table that has those quantities for things as well.
However, we also know that the quality of the drawings that we typically have to do quantity takeoffs on can be a little questionable. So you might notice here that in addition to the quantities, that some of these blocks have a little shield on them, a little warning icon.
So what AutoCAD is also doing with this-- and this is something the BCOUNT command can't do for you. If you click on this, it is finding areas where you might be getting incorrect or inaccurate quantities.
So in this case, somebody put two doors on top of each other. Of course, it just looks like one door in the drawing. However, it's found where two doors were placed on top of each other. And so I can say overlapping object, and it will zoom into it. And there it is.
And I could go ahead and select on that. But I verify that it is in fact two block references. They are the exact same name and all that. And so to resolve that, we can just go ahead and pick on one of them, hit Delete. And now that issue is cleared up.
In addition to that, you'll notice there's another error here. And it's RECTANG. Let's go ahead and pick on that. So in this case, it has detected where somebody has inserted a block but then exploded it. We've never encountered that one.
So in this case, it has detected that this is just a regular polyline, not a block. But there is a block with the same exact geometry. So in this case, I would want to erase this and insert the appropriate block to make my quantities accurate.
So the COUNT command, I love not just for the convenience of giving me the quantities but also giving me a little bit of a safety net to make sure that the numbers that I'm reporting on are, in fact, accurate. Where am I?
The other one here that I like is the Activity Insights. So this one is a command that I really love in a CAD management role. You get a user that says, my drawing is crashing. And your first response is have you audited and purged? Yes. You get the drawing, you audit, you purge 100 errors. And they haven't purged.
So this is where Activity Insights can tell you what's going on. So if you click on this, this will show you the whole life cycle of this drawing. It's going to record events like when the file was renamed, when it was saved as, when people create, when people audit it, when people purge it.
All of these various events are recorded under Activity Insights. And so this can be a wonderful troubleshooting tool if that's part of your role to just understand, how did this drawing get to its current state? And that can be a huge amount of insight as you are getting started with things there.
All right. So continuing on here to keep things rolling. Collaboration. So sharing our current drawings. Let me come back over here to this Villa Project here. And actually let me go into one that has an xref in it. So let me do site plan here. There we go.
So in this case, we have an xref in this drawing. And maybe I just want to share this with somebody else to get maybe quick insights on it, whatever the case might be. If you go into the Collaborate tab of AutoCAD, there is a Share Drawing button here.
Now, if this drawing is stored on local file storage, it is going to upload a copy of it to Autodesk Docs and publish it. And you have the option to make it a view-only link or a edit and save a copy link. So if I just want you to be able to look at it, I will create a view-only link.
And here, I could go ahead and click on that link. And it is going to open this up in a web browser. I could share this link with somebody. And what AutoCAD has done is taken that drawing, pushed it up to Autodesk Docs in the background, both the drawing I shared and any xrefs with it.
And apparently, there's a lot of people on the Wi-Fi right now, so it's taking a little bit longer than usual. But this is going to be that full drawing. And I can do basic inquiry commands with that view-only piece of measuring things and whatnot and interacting with it right here with the AutoCAD for web. And we'll see how long-- it looks like it's-- there we go.
So there is that drawing that I just clicked to upload. And again, I can't download it. But I can interact with it, take measurements, do basic things in here. And that can be a really handy thing for just quickly sharing things with somebody you might not trust with the drawing file.
If you are using one of the Autodesk cloud services-- so Autodesk Docs or Construction Cloud and the various flavors there-- something new in '25 is it is the direct drawing file. It's not a copy of the drawing file any longer. So that's a new option that we have in '25 if the file is stored in Docs.
Let me open up another drawing here. Let's open up both of these real quick. Perfect. All right. So we'll just start with this one drawing. So here is a sample drawing and pretty common scenario. You might have printed this out, taken it out to the jobsite, made some observations.
And you have now taken a photo of that printed drawing with your phone or whatever the case might be. Wouldn't it be nice if all of those red marks that you took out in the field, you could overlay on top of the drawing inside of AutoCAD to make those updates? Well, that's what Markup Assist will allow you to do. This was introduced in '23 or '24. I forget the exact version now.
But the way this works is this. Under the Collaborate tab in AutoCAD, under Traces, you have a button here that is Markup Import. And if you click on that, I can pick on that image that was just taken with a mobile phone, hit Open. And it is going to take a look at that image, compare it to the geometry in this drawing, and do its best guess at its alignment.
Tends to do a pretty good job. It's not always perfectly accurate. But that's where you can come in and correct things. You can see the border here is a little off. So this is where you can do things like align and do some basic rubber shading between the actual boundary and the scanned boundary, so to speak.
So the scan boundary is right there. My border is right there. And now I can say scale based on the alignment points, yes. And that is now aligned up with it. And all of those markups, it erased the drawing itself. And it has overlaid the scanned or the handwritten stuff that you took out in the field, which I think is super handy.
The other part that I really love about this is it's not just for images, it's for PDFs as well. So if you're like a lot of folks and you use Bluebeam and you want to maybe get your Bluebeam markups overlaid on top of your AutoCAD drawings, well, you can do that with Markup Assist as well or Markup Import.
So with that, let me open up another drawing here. And I'll do the same thing, Markup Import. And here is a PDF that has some markups in it. Let's open that up. And same basic idea here. It's going to take a look at the PDF, even if it is a flattened PDF, so even if it doesn't have all the layers and whatnot to it. And it's going to overlay things.
So this will do generally a little bit better of a job than the photographs. But you'll notice that the markups from that PDF are overlaid in here. And some other pieces that I think are really handy. If you toggle here to where it says Drawing, there's a little lightning bolt right here.
And what it's going to do right now, it is detecting markup objects. So it is taking a look at all of those markups that were made inside of the PDF or also the image, by the way. And now that the lightning bolt is filled in, you'll see that there are some dashed outlines for a lot of the areas.
So for instance, right here, there is a red mark to remove this stuff. Well, I can just come in here and basically select that. Oops, let's click in there. Let's go ahead and select all of that. Hit Delete. And if I come in here and I click on that little outline, I can say Rectangular Revcloud. And now it has made the Revcloud for that as well.
If I have a markup here about updating this text, I could come in here and say click on that. It recognizes that that is 14. And I could say update existing text. Come in here. And let's do select. Oops. Well, let's just do append. There we go.
I'll just Control-X and V. There we go. So now I have updated that. And once again, I can just pick on that piece and say Revcloud. And I now have that update. And you can continue through with all of those markups here overlaid on top of the drawing.
So here, for instance, is heritage. It's going to do some OCR on it. And I can say update existing text. This one is multiple text objects, so I could say replace. And now that is updated there. So even handwritten text, as long as it's semi legible, it will do a pretty good job at doing OCR on it. And you can just select the text to update it, which I think is outstanding to make those markups a little bit faster to complete.
Alrighty. So that is what we've got there. Let me jump ahead here because we've got about 15 minutes left and talk about an area that I think AutoCAD has made some really awesome additions. And that is with blocks.
So starting in '23 or '24, we started getting these features called smart blocks. And these are just some bits that will allow me to more easily work with blocks. So I'll be talking about the smart blocks pieces first, and we'll maybe get back to the others here in a moment.
So the first one we got in '23 or '4 was this ability to intelligently place blocks. So in this case, let me-- let's say I want to add some more of these desks. So this is DESK2. If I go into my Insert command-- or insert here, I can find that DESK2 right here.
Now, what you want to look at is down here in this blocks palette. I know a lot of us long-time AutoCAD users, we might still like classic insert, not the palette. But I really like some of the additions that we have to the palette here.
So one of them here is auto-placement. And that's what we're going to do here for this automated placement. And then there's also the repeat placement. So with those two checked, I'm going to click on DESK2. And I'm just going to hover over the corner of that cube. And it's going to find the alignment for me.
So I can just click there if that looks good. I'll come over here. And you can see it actually did a pretty good job of figuring out how I wanted that to be arranged. And I can just continue on and place these blocks like so.
I'm actually trying to get it not to figure it out for a second. But it's not breaking for me right now. Darn it, AutoCAD team. You made too good of a tool. Oops. Of course, now it's being finicky.
So the point I'm trying to show here is that if the rotation here is wrong, you can hit Control and rotate it as well. So if it guesses incorrectly and I wanted the short edge towards the main wall there, I could just hit Control and cycle through the different rotation options until it gets the right one and then go ahead and place it like so, which I think is really handy. And it makes the move, copy, rotate functionality not quite as helpful as it used to be.
All right. So some other tools that we have. Here, we've got some poor people that are definitely dealing with some very dated technology with their CRT monitors. Anyone still have a CRT monitor? You poor person if you do. I'm sorry.
So we're finally going to move these people into-- I don't know-- the early aughts. We're not going to give them 16 by 9 flat screens. But we're going to give them a flat screen nonetheless. And so I've got a updated version of that block right here.
Under the block palette under-- or panel under the Insert tab, there's a Replace command. What I can do is select one or more blocks to be replaced. So maybe the budget's really tight, so I can only upgrade these four people.
So I will select those four computers, hit Enter. And it is going to try to guess. It wants to put a chair because that's how up to date this technology is or the computers are. But I happen to have a good workstation here. So I'm going to say pick and just pick on that monitor.
And it has now replaced all of the blocks that I selected. So this is really handy for-- I need to replace things. But I don't need to replace every insertion of it, just a few that I selected. And you're able to do that with the Block Replace command. So I find that one really, really handy for those times that we need to swap things out.
Here's another one I could do in this drawing. But I'm going to do in the dedicated drawing here real quick. So in this case, we had a drafter that we were apparently paying by the hour because they manually drew every single chair in this drawing as opposed to using a block. And I would like to make all of those chairs into block insertions.
And maybe you've encountered a similar scenario here. This is new for '25. What we can do is we have A. I don't know of a button in the ribbon, but it's BCONVERT. So this is a new command that we have in 2025 called Block Convert, or BCONVERT.
And what this will allow you to do is to select objects that you would like to make into a block. So I'm just going to select one of these chairs or the geometry for that chair, like so. I will hit Enter. And then AutoCAD is going to go out and find all the other copies of that in the entire drawing and identify them and highlight them and say, did I get it right?
I think you did. I will go ahead and hit Enter. If there is an existing block that already exists in this drawing, I could say existing block and tell it which one to do. Or if I need to create a new block, I could just say chair.
By default, it's going to use the centroid-- the geometric center of the block-- to define the insertion point. However, you have the ability to override that as well, just as if you were creating the block using conventional methods.
So you can select your insertion point or a base point here as you prefer. And the current layer, it should default to your current layer here as well. But you could always change that to something else. So I've set that to the chair layer. And with that, I'll say convert. And just like that, all of those individually drawn chairs are now blocks and they are on the correct layer, which is a huge time savings there.
Now, here's another one that you might encounter. I know a lot of us probably turn to things like the PDF Import command. Now, this is handy for taking a PDF and making a drawing file back out of it. But then to get that into a real drawing file that I might actually want to use with things like blocks for all the symbols, a little bit more of a tedious affair.
So let me run this. And I'm going to import a version of this drawing into a brand new drawing like so. So this is that PDF import. Now, in here, we, of course, have lots of things that ideally should be blocks.
This is a technology preview in 2025. But there's a button here called Detect under the Insert tab. And what that will do if you click on that, it's going to scan the drawing. And it's going to try to identify the various things in the drawing that are supposed to be blocks and give you the opportunity to make them into blocks.
It'll take a little bit of time. It's a technology preview, so it's certainly not 100% just yet. But in my experience, it does an admirably good job for a first version here. So in this case, it found 19 sets of objects with 72 instances. I can say review objects. And here, it found a bunch of doors.
One of these is the primary. So right here is the primary. Now, in this case, I can go ahead and convert that into a block, which is probably what I want to do. However, this is a door block. I don't want to use that centroid. I want to use the door swing for the door.
So this is where we can come in and say instead of using the geometric center, pick a base point. And I'll go ahead and pick that swing right there. And we'll just call this door. I'll just call it one for sake of discussion.
And I should have a door layer in here. Maybe I don't. I'll just use zero for right now. But I'll say convert. And now all of those blocks that it found and identified as a door are now Door 1 Block. And I can continue through with the other blocks or symbols that it has detected.
So here it's detected another door that might technically need to be the same door that we just did. So it might have some false positives here. But you can continue moving through and take a look at all the various symbols that it has identified. There's obviously a false positive. I thought that was a symbol. And it's just a letter. But again, pretty darn handy for going through, especially a PDF import, and cleaning that up a bit.
Let's see the other one I want to show here. Block attributes, we probably use them quite a bit. In this case, I have some room tags. And let's say that we need to change the numbering for this. Instead of 100 numbering convention, I want to do 1,000 numbering conventions. So instead of office 177, I want that to be office 1,077 and so forth down the run here.
How can I do that in an efficient manner? Well, two commands that I really, really love are over here on the express tools. We have export and import attributes. What this will allow you to do is select blocks with attributes and export them to a tab-delimited text file. And as a tab-delimited text file, you can modify those in Excel, and then import them back into AutoCAD.
So to take a look at that real quick, let me select one of these. I'll do select similar just to get all of those selected. I will say export. The name is fine. And hit Save. Let me open up Excel. And if we come in here, say data. Let's just open it. That'll be probably easier to browse.
Come down and say text files. There's the text file that we just exported. Let's just open that up. We're going to tell it that it is a tab-delimited text file. Hit finish. And what I can do here is just do a very simple formula of equals that minus 100 plus 1,000. And do some basic fill down.
And I could certainly get more fancy with this if I wanted. But I'm just going to paste the values over there and erase this real quick. And so I've updated this tab file. I'm going to go ahead and hit Save now.
With that file updated, if I come back into AutoCAD and I say import attributes, I will go ahead and pick on that tab-delimited file that I modified and say open. And when I do, you should see all of those blocks update to their 1,000 numbering convention. So when you need to make batch updates to lots of blocks, the export, import routine through Excel can be really, really handy.
So with that, so we have more tips I prepared than we've got time for. We are down to about five minutes, so I'd like to go ahead and pause here and transition into our Q&A segment here real quick.
So as we mentioned beforehand, if you do have questions, for those of you who are attending in person, I would ask you to line up behind one of the two microphones. And we will take your questions there so the folks listening online can also hear your question.
As you maybe make your way up to the microphones with any questions that you've got. I will turn things over to our moderator here to maybe take our first online question. And for those of you in the meantime, if you'd like to connect with me, this is a QR code to my LinkedIn. I'd love to continue the conversation after today as well.
MODERATOR: OK. I think this is working. So the first and most upvoted question was, can you share a handout with these tricks?
DONNIE GLADFELTER: Yes, I missed the batch update for the handout. But that would be published to the site in the update there. So there will be a handout, yes.
MODERATOR: Very good. Another question was circling back to the hatch topic in the beginning. If a text is placed on a hatch, how we can make the text clearly visible.
DONNIE GLADFELTER: Oh, yes. So that is a good one. And so in this case, if you do have some text here and-- let me just copy this text down as an example. It is not uncommon that when you add-- oops, did I draw order? Bring it to front. There we go.
That's not a terribly uncommon scenario where you might have solid hatch that's on top of your text. What's an easy way that you can fix this? This is a great tip. And I've included it in some past versions of this session as well.
But if you go to the Draw Order command in the ribbon, and it is tucked away. We usually get to draw order by selecting on objects and right-clicking. But there's also draw order in the ribbon. If you expand out that modify panel on the Home tab, this is draw order right here. And it's got a couple of really awesome tools. We have bring text to front, dimensions to front, leaders to front, or just all annotations to front, and then hatches to back.
So this is a great way to get the draw order quickly set across an entire drawing at once, is by using the annotations to front, hatch to back. There's still some probably nuances that you'll have to do. But that's probably 80% of the draw order set for your drawing with that. I think that is maybe what they were asking there. Do we have a question here?
MODERATOR: So you demonstrated searching for where xrefs exists like on your C drive. Can you also do that in Vault? My drawings exist in Vault.
DONNIE GLADFELTER: So yes. And actually that was what made me get that curiosity. So that is a built-in feature of Vault. It's been a little while since I actually used Vault. But there is a-- because every time you check a drawing into Vault, it's making sure those xrefs are valid, like when we check things into Construction Cloud or something like that.
And it's been a few-- it's been a hot minute since I've used Vault. But I believe if you right-click on the drawing file, there is a right-click option that's find this in the other places. It's something like that. Don't quote me on the exact terminology, whereas the drawing xref is a native feature inside of Vault. But if you're not using Vault, this is an AutoCAD way of doing it
MODERATOR: OK, thank you.
DONNIE GLADFELTER: Good question. We'll go ahead and--
AUDIENCE: This in regards to Markup Assist bringing in a PDF. I give sheets to a third-party utility company in civil world. They give them back to me with marked up where they want new tool or DT poles or whatever. How does that work, bringing those sheets into a model space? We'll find the alignments that line?
DONNIE GLADFELTER: So the Markup Assist is meant to be for paper space. So it's going to do it in paper space. But you can always use the Change Space Command to push that into model space to push it through your viewports.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
DONNIE GLADFELTER: I don't know if the broadcast cuts off exactly at the hour. I know we've got 40 seconds. But we'll do another online one here real quick.
MODERATOR: OK. Is there a way to eradicate proxy objects from Civil, DWT plans and bring it in a clean WT into Revit in AutoCAD 2025?
DONNIE GLADFELTER: No. [LAUGHS] That's my 30-second answer. I will say it's not specifically proxy objects. But in the Purge command-- I didn't talk about this today-- we now have nonpurgeable objects. And this can be really handy as well, not specifically the proxies.
But if you have something and you don't quite know why the drawing is so large, you can pick on blocks and it will tell you how much size things are taking. So this is something if you've just got a really bloated drawing and you don't quite know why, in the spirit of the symptoms of proxy objects, you can do this. And it will tell you, oh this is taking up 100 megabytes.
Well, you can then select on that object in the drawing and get rid of it and then get it purged. So if you haven't used the nonpurgeable items toggle of purge. That is another one there, I guess.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I have maybe two quick questions. The first one is when counting blocks and making a table for like a quantities list or something, can it find blocks within Civil 3D objects like manholes or?
DONNIE GLADFELTER: So the count is only going to use AutoCAD blocks. So if it's an AutoCAD block, it will pick it up right. If it is a Civil 3D object, so like a point, oftentimes you might use points in Civil 3D to be blocks.
That is not going to be seen by the count command because it sees that as a proxy object that you would need to use a Civil 3D table in order to do that. I haven't played with it too much. But the Project Explorer might also help you on the Civil 3D front for in between the COUNT command and the Civil 3D functionality there.
AUDIENCE: OK. My other quick question was-- actually, I just forgot it.
[DONNIE LAUGHS]
DONNIE GLADFELTER: I'll be here all week.
AUDIENCE: It was about the concrete hatch. Whenever you set the origin, have you ever had any issues with plotting that? Because at my company, we've set the origin to the right location. And it looks good. But the minute you hit Print, it's like it resets the origin or something. And it looks wrong again.
DONNIE GLADFELTER: Without seeing it, my guess there would be that the viewport has a custom UCS associated to it that is now further away from the hatch origin. So you set the hatch origin in just regular world UCS in model space. But now maybe you have a custom UCS that's in paper space that's rotating the sheet. That would my first guess without directly seeing it.
AUDIENCE: OK. Thank you.
DONNIE GLADFELTER: I don't know when we get cut off or how much time we have. But I'm happy to keep going a little bit until they tell me to leave the stage.
MODERATOR: Why does AutoCAD sometimes create splines instead of polylines with join? And how can you prevent that?
DONNIE GLADFELTER: Polylines, say that again please.
MODERATOR: Why does AutoCAD sometimes create splines instead of polylines?
DONNIE GLADFELTER: Oh, splines. So when you are doing PEDIT, it is an option when we are doing something like I've got some lines here and I'm doing PEDIT. Do I want to make it into one? Yes.
I'm going to join. And so if I have a polyline here, there is an option here called spline. And so this is a nice good polyline. As soon as I hit spline-- oops, PEDIT. Spline. And now that's put a lot of people will sometimes do. And then you have something that looks really good. And now it's garbage.
So typically, it's that somebody to fake it being nice and smooth. Instead of actually putting fillets, real curves on it, they use the PEDIT spline to fake it, in my experience, what's happened there. Another question here?
AUDIENCE: We're going to turn it around.
DONNIE GLADFELTER: OK. Last question, and I'll certainly be happy to take people in the hallway as well.
AUDIENCE: When the hatches lose their boundary association, like when you have a very complex boundary and then you adjust the hatch and all of a sudden it's not connected to the polyline anymore, maybe you added vertices or you had to break it, is there a simple way to fix that with have it being associated to that blind then?
DONNIE GLADFELTER: What I'll typically do in that case is before I modify it, I'll select on the hatch. There is an option up in the ribbon to recreate the boundary. Do that. And then that new boundary that it creates is now associated with the hatch. And you can modify it that way.
All right, thank you, folks. Please complete your surveys. It really helps me out. I hope this was helpful for you guys. I really enjoyed sharing it. And again, I'd love to continue the conversation and hear ways that you're using this.
So thanks for playing along. I'm going to have to pack up because I know that they need the room. But I will certainly probably continue things in the hallway here in a second.
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