Tips and Tricks: Effective Ways to Improve Productivity Through AutoCAD Architecture

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: Good afternoon. My name is Sridhar. I'm working for Autodesk as product owner.

Thank you for joining the class. We'll take all the questions towards the end of the session. So let's get started.

So we all know about the class summary on the Tips and Tricks for AutoCAD Architecture. Some of the key learning objectives for today's class is, we'll see how to create and set up the display representations, perform wall cleanups and create walls sweeps, and then learn about schedule tags and wall openings. The first topic that we want to discuss is about the display systems.

So you may consider the display system as the heart of AutoCAD Architecture graphic system. We will see that, in the relation between the display representations, display sets, and the configurations, how they work with the views of our model and see what we want to view. Then at the lowest level of the display configuration is the representation by object. This is where we control the display of AC objects at the drawing default level.

Then comes the display sets. We group all these representations into display sets. And then comes the configuration, where we show which set to display for the current view direction. In AutoCAD, in most cases, the display of objects is controlled by the layers. Whereas in AutoCAD Architecture, the display of objects is controlled by the display configuration. Let's see a quick demo on how this works.

I have a drawing open, here. We can control the display configurations from the status bar. I'll change the display configuration from medium detail to high detail. And notice how the hatch pattern gets updated on the walls.

I want to change the configuration from high detail to low detail. And the hatch pattern is invisible in the drawing, as well as the number of details on the doors and windows are very low. Likewise, I'll switch the configuration to Presentation mode. And now you can see solid hatch patterns on the walls.

And now, I'll click on the Layer dropdown. Here we can see A-2 enabled. I'll switch to Reflected Configuration. And I don't see any of the doors in the drawing. However, I'll click on the layer dropdown, here, and we see the layer is still on. That means most of the AC objects the display is controlled through the display configuration.

So we'll see how to modify the display representation of an object, across the drawing. I'll change the display configuration to medium detail. I'll select a door, for example. Sorry.

From the Manage tab, select the Display Manager, Representation by Object. For a door object, I'll select the plan representation. Here, we can see all the properties like layer, color, line type, and the settings on the other tab are controlled at a drawing default level.

For example, I want to change the swing angle of all the doors from 90 degree to 45. I'll enable the override, enter 45 degree, and click OK in the drawing. We notice, all the drawings, all the doors in the drawing, have changed the swing angle to 45 degree. Click on the Undo button.

Right. Now we know how to change a property across a drawing. What if we want to change a property for a style? In this case, I'll select a double door, right mouse click, and select Edit the Door Style.

In the Door Style property dialog box, we have three columns, here. The display representations that we saw in the Display Manager, and the display source, which chose the settings are at the drawing default, now. And I'm going to modify at the style level.

Click on the check box. And here, at this style level, I want to change the swing angle to 45 degree. Click OK, and OK in the Style Property dialog box. All the doors, all the double-style doors, are changed to 45 degree.

Now-- close-- we were able to control the object display at the drawing level, again at the style level. What if you want to modify the display of an object, a single object? For example, I'll select the hinged door, here.

I want to modify the display of this particular door alone. I'll open the Property palette. This is where another place where you can modify the display of the objects.

I'll switch to the Display tab. In the general area, we have Display Controlled by. Click on the dropdown. We have few options, here-- whether we want to control the display at the object level, or at the style level, or across the drawing. In this case, I'm going to select this object. And we see a warning message saying that we are modifying the display at the object level. I'll pick OK.

From the Display Component dropdown, you can see all the properties here. For example, I want to see the door stop. Pick the light bulb, here. Click OK. The door stops are enabled for this door.

Right. Now we know how to select the display configurations. Now we'll see how to create our own display configurations. What we saw is the stock display configurations that are shipped with the product. Let's see how to create our own display configuration.

I'll open another drawing. In this drawing, I can see there are spaces in the plain view as well as in the model view. I'll switch to the plan view. Let's see how to create our display configuration, so that I don't want to see the spaces in the plan view as well as the model view.

Click on the Display Manager. Under [INAUDIBLE], I want to just make a copy of this plan and just switch off the space in this plan display set. Right mouse click, Copy, Paste. We can rename this display set as "Example AU Plan."

Likewise, I'm going to repeat the steps for the model display set. Select the model, and make a copy of that. Paste it. I'll rename the model representation as "AU_AU model."

So now we have created two display sets-- one for the plan view; the second one is for the model view. Let's see how to enable this as a configuration. Under the Configurations, right-click and say-- want to create a new configuration and call this as "AU2017."

For this configuration, we can select the display sets that we want. Plan view, or the top view, we want the new display set that we created. That is AU_plan. And, for the model view, I want to select AU_model.

And, under AU_plan, space is what we wanted to switch off. I'll select Space. Under the plan, I'm going to switch off the check box for space, under Plan Representation. And, for the modern representation, I'm going to select Space again. Switch off. And I also don't want to see the volume. Click Apply, and OK.

Now I'm going to change the display configuration from medium detail to AU_plan, where the space is switched off in this configuration. I'll change the viewpoint to a model space where I don't see the space as well. So this is how we create and modify the display representations in AutoCAD Architecture.

The next topic that we want to see is material quantity. At times, in your architecture projects, you create material take offs. You want to insert a table with the number of materials and the net volume as well as the gross volume. We'll see how to create a material take off. By default, AutoCAD Architecture doesn't ship a style with net volume or gross volume. Let's see how to create a style, so that we can insert a schedule with net volume and gross volume.

I'm going to open a drawing file. In this drawing, I have drawn three walls. And there are three layers of walls, here. Open the Control Property palette.

So there's a brick wall. There's a striped wall. There's a GWB wall. I want to extract the quantity of these three walls. From the Style Manager, click on the Documentation Objects. And, if you see, we don't have a properly set definition for the wall. I'll right-click and create a new property set definition. Call this as "Wall Volume."

And this style is applied for a wall. And select to select the definition tab. Here is where we define the properties. Click on the Add Property, Add Automatic Property Definition.

In this dialog box is where we select the properties that we want to show in a schedule table. All I want to see is the style of the wall, the gross volume, and the net volume of the walls. Click OK.

So, now that we have created a property set definition for the wall, we need to define a schedule style, as well. From the Schedule table, right-click and create a new style. Call this as "Wall Volume."

Under the Apply [INAUDIBLE], this style is applied against a wall. I'm going to pick Wall from the list. And, for the table, I want to see the columns. Click on the Add button, and select Style is the first property that I want to see. Click OK.

Click the Add Column again. The next property that I want to list is the net volume. While I'm selecting the net volume, I also want to sum up similar wall materials. So, in this case, I'll select sum up all the materials for me.

I'll repeat the same step for the gross volume, and sum it up. Click OK. Now that we have created the columns, so we want to sort all these columns, based on the style. Click OK. So I want to group all the similar wall types and display subtotal of each type of wall component. Click Apply. And OK.

So now let's go ahead and insert a schedule table. From the Annotate tab, Scheduling dropdown, select Wall Schedule. Pick all the objects in the drawing. Press Enter.

And the table is empty. Can anyone tell me why the table is empty?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: Properties or definition is not assigned? And?

AUDIENCE: The walls don't have [INAUDIBLE]

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: That's right. Right? What I'm going to do is, I'll open Property palette. I want the style as the one which I created, the wall volume. And still there are no values in the table. That's because the properties or definition is not yet assigned.

What we can do is, from the Schedule table contextual menu, click on Add All Properties. As soon as we add, for each of the wall style we can see the individual net volume and gross volume and the sum of each of the style. This is how you can create a material take off. The only disadvantage in AutoCAD Architecture is, if you have a wall style of multiple layers with different materials, we cannot extract the schedule table. What we have to do is we have to split the wall style into multiple styles and then extract the material take off. Right?

So the next topic that we want to discuss is on the wall cleanups. At times, you might end up having contiguous walls in your drawing. So we can easily join two or more contiguous walls into a single wall.

The next one is, either you want to trim or extend walls to form a T-section or an L-section. And we'll see how to do grip editing on the walls, as well.

Not all the times, we see standard walls like this. We may come across walls with different layers, as well as a different priority set for the walls. And we'll see how to clean up such kind of walls. And we'll see what is the wall-cleanup radius playing a role in this cleanup work.

Close this drawing. I'll create a new drawing. Switch to the Home tab, and quickly create two walls.

So, if we notice, here, these are two different walls. I want to join these two walls into a single wall. Select a wall. From the Cleanup dropdown, pick the Join option and pick the other wall.

So this object is converted into one single wall. So let me go ahead and draw a few more walls here. I have a few more walls drawn here.

You can also use your grips, to do the cleanup, presuming here the walls are automatically cleaned up. Likewise, I'll select this wall, click on the intelligent cleanup, to form L-shaped or a T-shaped wall cleanup. So I want to clean up with this wall, so the wall is extended.

Similarly, I want to clean up the other wall, as well. I'll select this as the boundary wall. And you can see the walls form an L shape. I'll undo.

Is there any other easy way that we can clean up an L shape?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: Yeah. Or we may also use fillet zero. You can use a fillet, the A is your fillet here. The radius is zero. Pick these two walls, to clean up the walls, as well.

Right. These are fairly simple walls that are getting cleaned up automatically. So what if there are complicated walls? I'm going to insert a CMU wall. I'm going to insert another stud wall, to the right of this CMU wall.

No. I'm not able to pick the point, here, so let me go ahead and open a drawing. So I have two sets of walls, here. Since the justification lines are matching, here, and still the walls are not getting cleaned up, that's because there are different type of layers for each type of wall. I want to clean up the corner, here. The lower component of this one, I want to wrap around the corner of the stud wall.

So what I'm going to do is pick the wall, click on the Cleanup tool. So now, for me to clean up the corner of this wall, I need to extend this layer.

So I'm going to measure the distance. It's 7/8 of an inch. I'm going to measure the next layer. It's 5/8 of an inch.

So I'm going to draw construction lines now. From the Home tab, in the Line dropdown, I'm going to Draw Construction Lines. I want to draw a construction line at a distance of 7/8 of an inch. And the second one is the 5/8 of an inch. Right?

I have two construction lines, here. So I'm going to extend these edges to the construction lines. Pick on the first edge. Select the edge grip here, and drag the mouse to the construction line.

So we were able to extend the edge. Now I want to extend the top edge to the stud wall. So I don't have a grip point, here, so I'm going to add a vertex point. From the Edit in Place menu, click the Add Vertex and pick a point, here. Press Enter.

Once you grip-select here, you can see an edge grip. Pick the edge grip. Drag it to the stud wall.

Right. I'm going to repeat the same step for the next layer. Drag the edge grip to the construction line, and add a vertex point. Press Enter key, and drag the edge grip to the stud wall. Right?

We were able to clean up the corner, now. So I can go ahead and erase the construction lines. Once I erase, you can see the corner is cleaned up, here. Once you are OK with the results, you can go ahead and finish the cleanup work.

I'll select the wall and switch off the justification lines. If you notice here, the coordinate is automatically cleaned up, here. And the triangles that we saw earlier are not seen on the walls. So there are no more warnings on this type of wall.

I'm going to open another drawing. In Architecture, when I did a grip editing, the walls were automatically cleaning up. That's because we have an option, here, for the cleanup. Under the wall settings, I have the Auto Snap turned on. Whenever I do grip select, just automatically snap to the nearest wall.

The second thing is, the auto-snap radius is set to 6 inches. Whenever the radius of the justification lines are within 6 inches, the walls will automatically clean up. If it's more than 6 inches, then we have to manually do the cleanup work.

So, in this case, I'll select a wall, enable the justification display. If you notice, here, these two walls have different justification. One is on the left, and the other one is on the right. Let's see how we can clean up these type of walls.

I'll select the wall, here. If you hover over on the arrow, here, the cleanup radius is set to 0. That means it couldn't cleanup on its own. I'll pick this grip, drag the mouse. As soon as I drag the mouse and the circle touches the blue justification line, you can see the cyan lines getting cleaned up.

So I can clean up this corner and switch off the justification lines, so that the unequal-thickness walls can also be cleaned up in a drawing. I'll close some of the drawings. I'll switch to the presentation.

So we were able to see how to join walls and clean up the intersection walls, as well. The next topic that we want to see is a wall sweep. I have a wall. I want to create a complex facade on top of another wall component. Let's see how we can do that.

The next topic that we want to see is the roofline. Sometimes you may want to extend the wall to the roofline. So we'll see how easy it is to do that in AutoCAD Architecture.

I'll open a drawing. I'll select the Wall Sweep drawing. Now, here, I have a wall, down here. And I want to sweep this complex profile as a facade.

So I'll select the profile, right mouse click, and convert this into a profile, first. And I want an insertion point as the bottom, right-hand corner here. I'll call this profile as maybe "a complex facade." Pick OK.

So now I want to sweep this profile against one of the wall component. I'll select the wall, here. From the contextual tab, Sweep dropdown, pick on Add.

Now, I want to sweep this profile against the brick component. And the profile definition is the one that we created now. And pick OK.

So I'll change the display configuration. I'll change the viewport to [INAUDIBLE] Isometric, and change the viewpoint to Realistic, to see the profile that we swept across the brick component. I'll switch back to 2D wireframe. I'll switch to the front view.

So I have this wall, here. I'm going to quickly draw a polyline, which indicates as a roofline. Now, I want to extend-- I want to extend this wall to this roofline.

Pick the wall. From the Roof Floor Line dropdown, pick on Modify Roofline. And you have several options, at the command line. I'll select Project to a Polyline. Pick the Polyline.

And you can see the roof, the wall getting extended to the roofline which I created now. I'll change the wireframe configuration as wireframe display to Realistic. And if you see, only the wall component has been extended.

So the next thing is, we want to discuss about the wall endcaps. In AutoCAD Architecture, the wall endcaps and the wall-opening endcaps are very powerful tools. But sometimes I want to create an automatic endcap with a particular profile-- maybe a polyline, here. Let's see how we can do that.

I'll open a drawing. On this wall component, I've inserted a window. Now, I want to create an opening endcap in the shape of this polyline. Select the wall. And I pick the Calculate Automatically option. And you are prompted to select a polyline.

I want to select this polyline as the cleanup tool. Pick the polyline. Press Enter. Here, I want to save this endcap style. I'll pick OK for all the defaults.

And if you notice, here, the endcap has been automatically created, here. The advantage of that is, at any point of time, you can move the opening and see the endcap is still retained within the wall. All right.

This is one example for the endcaps. I've made a copy of this drawing of this wall here, but I've extended the thickness of the stud layer here. But it did not clean up on its own. Let's see how to clean up these kind of walls.

Pick the wall, and just say, Edit in Place. Now, we need to pick a point where exactly we want to clean it up. I'll pick a point, here. Although I picked a point here, a different layer has been enabled. Press the Escape key, and select the edge that you want to clean up.

So I'll pick this particular edge. You can drag this edge to the wall layer. Once you have dragged the edge, I'll pick Finish button.

So I want to update this endcap style, so that wherever these endcap style is used within the drawing will also get updated. Click on the Update the Style button. And you can see the stud layer has been cleaned up, here. And it's also cleaned up on the other side of the wall, as well.

So the next topic that we want to discuss is openings through multiple walls. At times, you might have multiple walls adjacent to each other. Whenever we insert an opening, it's always applicable for that particular wall alone. What if I want to extend the opening throughout the remaining walls, so that I have only one door or wall component in the drawing? The moment we insert more doors or openings, the quantity increases. Let's see how to create an opening across adjacent walls.

In this drawing, I'm going to quickly insert a door opening. I'll pick the lower layer. Pick OK. I'll change the viewport to Southwest Isometric and change the visual style to Realistic.

And see, this opening is applicable only for the first wall that I have created. What if I want to put this opening across all the other walls? I'll switch back to the top view and 2D wireframe. I'll select all the ones. Right mouse click.

And we have something called "interference condition," here. Click on Add. I want to remove the material from the walls. Pick the Add option, and you are prompted to select the AC object that you want to remove. You can pick one of the AC objects, like door, window, or a door opening. In this case, I'm going to pick the opening and press the Enter key.

Now I want to subtract the material. As soon as I pick the subtract, you can see the opening is cut through the remaining walls in the drawing. You can see that, in the southwest isometric view, a wall opening is cut across all the adjacent walls. Even if there is slight gap between the walls, we can still go ahead and create an interference condition. At any point of time you want to delete this, you can repeat the same steps and add the material back.

So the next topic that we want to discuss is on the schedule tags. In your drawing, you always create the schedule tags. When you are modifying the drawings, sometimes your tags move from the actual location to a different location. And when you try to create a new tag on the object, it says the tag already exists-- do you want to create another new one?

So, in this case, if you want to know where is a tag located in the drawing, we can enable a graphic line showing the tag linked to the wall object. The second thing is, in the drawing the tags are always created straight. What if you want to create a tag aligned doors? Let's see how to do that.

I'll open a drawing. In this drawing, I can move this tag here. Now, I am not sure where this tag is linking to. So we can enable the graphic line. That can be done from the Manage tab, Display Manager.

Click on the sets. For the plan representation, I'm going to enable the [INAUDIBLE] tag. Pick the [INAUDIBLE] option. So you can see a graphic line extended from the tag to the anchor point of the door. You can move the tag now to a new location, wherever you want. Right.

Now I'll go ahead and create a new tag on this door. I'll switch to Documentation tool palette. Tags. I'm going to create a door tag on the wall, here. Click OK.

So now that you can see the tag is straight. So I'll go ahead and delete this tag. I can modify the tool, here, pick the properties. In the Rotate to Object, select Yes from the dropdown. Pick OK. So now we can pick the door tag, select the door, and insert the tag, so that the tag text is rotated as per the wall inclination.

Right. I want to create another wall, here. I'll select this drawing. Maybe switch to low details.

Now, I have four doors, here. I'm going to click Create a Door Tag on this wall component-- sorry, the door component.

And now I've inserted a tag here. What if I want to quickly insert multiple tags, across a drawing file? We can pick the Multiple Options. And you can select doors that you want to tag. Press the Enter key.

So now the tags are automatically created on all the doors. You can also drag a window and select all the doors, to create the tags. At any point of time, if you prefer to renumber the tags, you can pick the Renumber tool. And maybe I want to renumber the tags from 1 to starting from 101. Click one. As soon as you pick the tags, you can see the tags getting renumbered.

So these are the quickest ways how you can insert multiple tags. And, if required, you can renumber. The Renumber tool will be very useful when you create multiple tags using the window option. In this case, I selected the doors. That means I know the sequence of the tags that I want to create, whereas in case of a window selection they're randomly inserted across the drawing. That is when we can use the renumber tool.

So the last topic is on the multiview blocks. We can insert the multiview blocks, or MvBlocks, from the AutoCAD Design Center. What if I want a different insertion point on a multiview block?

I'll switch to a drawing. I'll open the AutoCAD Design Center. Switch to the AC tab. And I'll pick one of the MvBlocks and Insert. I'll zoom to the MvBlock.

Press the Control key, and you can see the insertion point shifting between center to top left and the bottom right. So this is how you can quickly toggle between an MvBlock insertion point.

So I think I have covered all the tips and tricks that I wanted to show in this session. I have two more tricks which, if you're OK, I can show them, as well, that is related to section. Is that OK with you all? OK? All right, so let's continue.

I'll switch to one of the drawings. So I have a floor plan, here. I can quickly create four section views, on four different places. So I can select the tools, here.

From the Documentation tool, switch to the callouts. And I'll insert a callout on the four corners of this floor plan. And I want to insert the four section views in the same drawing, so that I'll pick the current drawing option, here.

It's prompting me to specify the insertion point. I'll pick one insertion point, here, towards the right of the floor plan. And the distance between each section view, I'm going to pick another point. And it's going to quickly create four different section views in the drawing.

All right. Now that I have four different section views in this drawing, what I'll do is I'll update the floor plan. Maybe randomly, I'll insert a few doors.

I've inserted a few doors, here. Or maybe I'll insert another door, here. I've inserted.

Now that I want to update my section views. So, in this case, I have four section views, here. And I can have any number of section views in this drawing. Or, you know, if you are using a project-based workflow there can be multiple section views, across multiple sheets. And you may not know whether this particular section is in the other sheet or not.

The best way to do that is, from the Section and Elevation dropdown, refresh the current drawing. So what it does is it will update all the four section views and insert the update the doors. And in 2016 we had introduced another new functionality as, like, whenever you modify your floor plan, you need to manually update the section view, as clicking on the Refresh button. Whereas we have introduced a new value in the Property palette. You can select the section view and set it as Refresh On Open. All right?

So we'll close this. And maybe I'll insert a door here, maybe another door here, a few more here. Right? I'll save the drawing. I'm not updating the section views. Maybe I'll mark this also as Refresh On Open mark to S.

So these two section views are marked as S. Save the drawing. Close it. I'll reopen the drawing, to see whether the section views will get updated.

So, if you notice, on this section view, as soon as I open the drawing the section view got updated. Intentionally, we set this option as Off. Not all users want to update the section views every time. So they want to do it manually, because they want to view the section, then see whether they want to modify the section view or not.

That's the reason we have set the option to No. So if you are sure that you always want to update the section views across the drawing, so you can mark all the section views as Yes. Whenever you reopen the drawing, all the views will be updated automatically.

So that's all I wanted to cover today. I can take any questions on the topics that we have covered.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. Is there a variable?

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: Yeah. The question, for this option, is, is there a system variable to control this? And there is no system variable to control this option. We can only control through Property palette. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] multiple insertion points on the multiview block [INAUDIBLE] control, how do you define the [INAUDIBLE]

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: Yeah. So that is when you're creating the multiview block. You need to define the insertion points. And we have a procedure, here. I mean, it takes a long time to show that. Yeah.

So maybe I can, uh-- I'll probably create a technical solution and put it on the support site. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I had a question on [INAUDIBLE] We have a structural [INAUDIBLE], if we go in and, for instance, represent [INAUDIBLE] property-set definitions attached, we want to [INAUDIBLE] one [INAUDIBLE]. It appears that one half of that [INAUDIBLE] property-set definition. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to [INAUDIBLE] that property-set definition on both [INAUDIBLE]?

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: Probably I need an example of a drawing. Maybe if you can send me an example, I can take a look at that. Because I haven't heard this kind of things happening. Yeah.

So we appreciate if you can give some feedback on this session, to see if there are any new topics that we want to cover in the upcoming AU sessions. So I think this is the only architecture class across the AU, yeah.

AUDIENCE: As far as [INAUDIBLE] architecture?

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: Yeah. So we-- yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: No. A still active development is going on. We are improving on the content, as well as we are integrating all the AutoCAD features that are coming from the newer versions into AutoCAD Architecture. And AutoCAD Architecture is going to stay for some time.

AUDIENCE: No plans to do any [INAUDIBLE]?

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: Sorry?

AUDIENCE: No plans to add tools for roofs?

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: In the last release, that is in 2017, we added some enhancements to the roof, in making it easy to [INAUDIBLE] grip editing. And we don't have any future plans, but again we haven't heard specific requirements from users asking for roof editing. I know roof editing is one of the complex things in AutoCAD Architecture.

AUDIENCE: Can you take just part of the objects in AutoCAD Architecture to Revit and [INAUDIBLE], without [INAUDIBLE]?

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: Yeah. I am-- so probably you might have heard about IFC?

AUDIENCE: Yes. [INAUDIBLE].

SRIDHAR SUBRAMANI: So we need to convert to IFC format, export in IFC format, and then import back into Revit in IFC format. The same thing we can do from Revit to AutoCAD Architecture, as well. Well, OK. Thank you all.

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