Discover the crucial techniques of working with user coordinate systems (UCS) and named views in AutoCAD. This article demonstrates how to add UCSs and named views to facilitate easy navigation between different side elevations with just a single click.
Key Insights
- The article discusses how to work with user coordinate systems (UCS) in AutoCAD. It explains how to manipulate the X, Y, and Z coordinates for 3D modeling in different disciplines, and how to rotate these coordinates to view drawings from various perspectives.
- It provides a detailed guide on creating a named view in AutoCAD. A named view saves the view itself, the user coordinate system (UCS), and the current layers that are on, enabling easy navigation between different side elevations in a drawing.
- The content also delves into the process of defining a new coordinate system. This not only changes the direction of the coordinates, but also establishes a new “center of the universe” at 0,0,0. The article highlights how to save this newly created coordinate system for future use and how to use it for creating a new named view.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video we are going to add our UCSs, User Coordinate Systems, and our named views so that we can go to each one of these side elevations by clicking a single view. So let's get started.
To begin, let's talk about what the User Coordinate System is in AutoCAD. In order to do that, I'm going to go to my View tab in the ribbon and look at the coordinates. Here, if you don't see coordinates, right-click, Show Panels, Coordinates.
We've talked about coordinates before in this course, but mainly we focused on the X and Y coordinates—that is, X going from right to left and Y going up and down. However, in AutoCAD the coordinates are not necessarily set with X to the right and left and Y up and down.
In fact, when modeling in 3D AutoCAD for mechanical or other disciplines, it's often the case that you change your 3D coordinates to have X, Y, and Z pointing in all sorts of different directions. In drafting, we typically leave the X and Y on a flat plane so Z is always facing straight up. Now with that in mind, X and Y are commonly rotated around the drawing so that we can see our drawing from different directions and still have X go from left to right along our drawing and Y go up and down.
If we zoom in on this left view, we can see that this aligns with our World Coordinate System. We can see that the World Coordinate System is in our drawing. It's also over here, WCS, World Coordinate System, and that it is X to the right and Y up in the positive direction.
We can also know that it's our World Coordinate System because we see this square around the bottom of our X and Y. Now if you can't see your UCS icon, it's this button here. And if you can't see your ViewCube, it's this button here. And there are many other view options in the View tab that you can explore if you'd like.
In this case, I want to start by creating a named view. A named view will do multiple things for us. It can save the view itself, what we're looking at, the UCS, and also a layer state or the current layers that are on.
Let's take a look at that in the View Manager. The View Manager says that there are currently no views in our model that are user-defined, but there are the top, bottom, left, right, front, back, and isometric views defined by essentially the ViewCube. We can find all of these by clicking around on the ViewCube, although do not do that in this course.
If we want to make a new view, let's hit New View right here. Now if your New View dialog box doesn't look like this, you probably have the extra options hidden under this arrow. Go ahead and hit this arrow to unroll it, and let's create our new view.
This is our left view that aligns with our World Coordinate System. So in the view name, I'll type Left. In this category, we don't have categories for this course, but the view type is still.
Notice there's a Cinematic and a Recorded Walk, but we won't use those in any of the VDCI courses. The boundary is interesting. Our current window is actually pretty good, but if we want to go even further, we could define a window and then choose our No Plot.
This is an excellent way to define a specific location for our view. So go ahead and hit Define Window, and then pick from this endpoint to this endpoint, Enter to lock it in. Under View Properties is where we make sure that we set everything up appropriately.
So in Settings, we do not want to save a layer snapshot. We want what we're working on to continue to be shown on the screen, even if we switch our named view, and make sure that your UCS says World. Now we only have World right now, but soon we'll be adding new UCSs, user-defined coordinate systems.
Let's hit OK, and go ahead and give it a shot. As I pan around, I can hit this dropdown here and select Left. Again, it's the black icon Left, and it will snap me back into my left view.
Okay, great. Let's come up here and look at this view. Now to rotate my screen, I'll come up to the ViewCube and hit this arrow—the down rotating arrow—and I will rotate around so that I see this part of the drawing.
Now notice what happened. We are still in the World Coordinate System, so my X and Y are facing with the world coordinates, down for X, and right for Y. Now I'd like to set up a new User Coordinate System, so that we can set our named view to activate that whenever we want to see this view. There's a lot of ways to do that.
The first way we'll try is here, under our Coordinate System dropdown in the ViewCube. You can see here we have New UCS, and this activates the Three-Point UCS option. So let's choose our ground line here.
Positive X is always left to right along our drawing, so I'll choose here, and then positive Y is always straight up. I can choose the endpoint here or perpendicular. Now you can see my X is going along the right in this direction, and my Y is going up my drawing.
If I go to the Home tab and go to Utilities > ID Point, I can pick this point here, which is an endpoint, and I can see that that is my new 0,0,0. Defining a new coordinate system does not just change the direction of the coordinates, but also establishes a new center of the universe—0,0,0. Okay, I'll go back to the View tab, and I can see here that I'm now working in an unnamed UCS. I can also see that here. In order to add this UCS to our drawing and save it for future use, let's hit this button here, which is the UCS Named UCS option.
You can type in UCS as well, and then you can click the Named UCS tab, but here we're in an unnamed UCS. This is because we haven't saved it yet. In order to save it, simply click the word Unnamed, and type in the view name.
This is Front, so we're going to type in Front, and hit OK. Now we are in the Front UCS. I can switch back and forth between my coordinate systems, and you can see the coordinate system change, but there's no named view.
Remember, setting a named view does not automatically update the coordinate system. But now that we have the coordinate system in place, we can add our new view. So I'll add a view. This one is going to be named Front.
I'll define a window, choosing my No Plot here and here, Enter to lock it in. Now we're going to use the UCS Front, so please make sure that Front is selected, and uncheck Save Layer Snapshot. Okay, now we can try to change our view to Left—there we go—and Front.
There we go, and we can see that our UCS has updated both times. Okay, I'll go to my Left view to activate my World Coordinate System, and then Zoom Extents and CTRL + S to save. It's not necessary, but it is a good idea to activate a World Coordinate System view if you are saving your drawing and walking away from it.
That way, when you come back, there isn't any question of which drawing am I in, or what is my coordinate system? Starting with the World Coordinate System is a great way to start your day. In the next video, we will finish adding our coordinate systems and our other named views. See you there!
