20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
In this example I am using AutoCAD for Mac 2013 but it is also applicable to AutoCAD for Windows.
AutoCAD Drawing with Hatched Area
So you have an area of a drawing in AutoCAD that is closed and has a Hatch pattern applied. What you want is an easy updated way to show the area in text even when the area hatched is changed. No problem use an AutoCAD Field.
Have you ever ended up with two drawings of the same name, just different time stamps on the file or an added suffix on the file name? Perhaps another team member was trying to be helpful (or not) and edited the file and you need to know what changed?
Lucky for you there is an Autodesk App for that, and FREE.
I received several great tips covering both AutoCAD and Revit and had to pick just one to give the license of Techsmith Snagit to. I chose Owen Wengerd for his type on cycling through objects.
Are you a visual or semantic person, pictures or text? You do have the choice to select your preference.
Back a few AutoCAD releases ago, we made the default for the Drawing Tools buttons in the status bar display as graphical icons instead of the text. I am going to show you how to change these to what you prefer.
A commenter on this blog asked how they could change several objects without having to select one by one and modify them. I did not ask if they were paid hourly wages as that might make the long method beneficial on the paycheck, but for this tip we will show how to save time and get out of the office faster and make the boss happy.
Back in 2009 I wrote a blog post showing one method to get the X and Y coordinates from AutoCAD into Excel using a script.
Import X,Y Coordinates from Excel into AutoCAD
While this was a workable method, AutoCAD is well known to have several ways to accomplish anything. Between the Lines reader Brian Glackin PE provided a much easier method this week in an email to me.
For Autodesk products there are knowledge base articles generated by our experts in Product Support. These Knowledge Base articles can provide you will helpful tips and troubleshoot known issues to help make using Autodesk products easier and more productive. Some product’s Knowledge Base articles are updated more frequently than others.
You can get the Knowledge Base at the Autodesk documentation web page or by Autodesk RSS feeds. Also check out the Autodesk discussion forums as many of the expert product users are in there and help each other in the community.
Secret Tip: OK it isn't really a secret just not well known. Each product has a Autodesk Product Feedback Form on this page. You select the product and then in clear and concise detail explain your problem or feedback good & bad and it sends an email to most product managers and some on the product teams. Just let them know what they are doing right and should keep doing, suggestions, or issues.
One of the new features of AutoCAD 2013 is the ability to import 3D models from a variety of sources including Autodesk Inventor. All versions of Inventor Part (.ipt) and Assembly (.iam) files are supported.
ScriptPro for AutoCAD has been around for many years and for those that have tried it, it is a very valuable time saving free tool. ScriptPro is used to batch process files in AutoCAD using a script so perhaps a minor edit to DWG files such as adding company standard layers, a stamp, a title block, audit and repairs and much more.
ScriptPro for AutoCAD is free and now available in both Windows 32bit and 64bit for 2008 and up releases of AutoCAD based products.
Import Rhino 3DM files and many other formats into AutoCAD.