Learn the step-by-step process of integrating CAD designs into an extraction model, focusing on inserting fixtures into the drawing. Discover how to navigate and utilize specific functions such as the blocks palette, design center, and more to streamline your design workflow.
Key Insights
- The blocks palette and design center are critical tools for integrating components into CAD designs. They provide access to recently used blocks and other resources from an extraction model.
- Efficient navigation of the CAD environment is facilitated by understanding and manipulating layer zero, the assembly layer where all drawings are inserted. This layer ensures uniformity in scale and orientation when inserting components like fixtures.
- The process of inserting fixtures such as bathroom and kitchen components into a CAD design involves strategic placement and adjustments using the design center and tracking. Components can be inserted one by one, adjusted for scale and orientation, and placed accurately using tracking.
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 will insert our fixtures. In order to do this, let's first make sure that our active layer is layer zero.
Remember, we always want to insert our drawings on layer zero. Layer zero is our assembly layer. Now that we've done that, we can open our blocks palette by going I enter.
And you can see that we only have a tick mark and our no plot inserted into the current drawing. You'll notice that there are some other tabs on the side of our blocks palette. I'm going to pan this out of the way a little bit.
We have recent, favorites, and libraries. If I go to recent, you will see that I have all of my blocks from the CAD 101 and the extraction model. These include all of the fixtures we need for this project.
Now, I could easily start to bring them in by clicking and placing on the screen. However, I understand that you might not have the same blocks in your recent tab. If you are working with a lot of similar blocks in many projects, you can favorite blocks, although I don't have any favorite blocks set up.
And finally, libraries is something we'll look at later in this course, but we're not going to use it in this case. For now, I'd like to use the design center to bring in the blocks from our extraction model. I will go control 2 on my keyboard to open design center.
Now, you might be still looking at open drawings, and if you are, you'll notice that our VDCI extraction model has now been closed. So, how do we see our model if it's not open? How can we pull objects from it? Well, I can go over to my folders tab on the left. And if your folders aren't showing, please activate this tree button here.
But I will go to folders, and you might be pulled into some strange folder location. If you are, go ahead and scroll to the top and start to close or hide some of these folders. Now, you should be able to find this PC, local disk C, and then I will unroll CAD 201 file downloads, and now I can see my VDCI extraction model.
If I unroll it, I can go into blocks, and then we can see the blocks we want to add to this drawing. I can select my block, right click insert block, and then this brings up classic insert. However, it also adds it into my current drawing.
So, I can simply hit cancel, and it will still add it into my current drawing. I will go down the list, including my door and window symbols, and I will add these one by one, hitting cancel each time classic insert opens, and then we can insert them from our drawing blocks window. I will insert the door symbol, and hit cancel, the kitchen sink, and hit cancel, the range, cancel, refrigerator, cancel, shower stall, cancel, toilet, cancel, and window symbol, cancel.
Now, they are all inserted into the drawing, and we can start to bring them in using our insert options here. So, for now, I will close the design sensor, and we can start to insert our blocks. Let's start with the bathroom sink.
Check your options. Remember, these are real-world drawings coming into a real-world space, which is model space, so we're bringing them in at a uniform scale, and I can see their previews here. If I want to make the previews a little larger, I can switch to extra large icons.
That's this switcher here. I'll choose my bathroom sink, seeing that it is in the correct orientation, and I can simply place it here at the midpoint. Next, let's bring in our shower stall.
This time, we see it needs to rotate 90 degrees, so I will update my rotation angle to 90 degrees, choose my shower stall, and place it at this corner here. Next, we remember that the toilet needs to be placed at the middle of these two points, and we can use our shift-right-click mid-between two points. With our angle still set to 90, I can choose the toilet, shift-right-click, mid-between two points, and I'll pick this point here and the endpoint here.
There we go. Now we can place our sink, and in this case, I'm going to place it at the midpoint of this wall, and then we'll move it up using tracking. This time, the sink needs to rotate not to the left, but to the right, so this angle can be an angle of 270 to rotate all the way around, or in this case, I'll do negative 90.
You can see that it's updated to 270 automatically. I'll choose my kitchen sink, and I'll place it at the midpoint here. Now let's move it up using tracking.
I'll go move, pick my kitchen sink, enter to lock it in, and from here, I need to use tracking. T-R-A, enter to activate tracking, and my first tracking point will be the shift-right-click nearest of this point right here. Now I can see that I'm moving up with my tracking point.
I'll go up a distance of 12 enter, and enter to lock it in. Now you can see the sink is 12 inches away from my crosshairs. I'll move to the shift-right-click perpendicular of my countertop here.
Excellent. Now let's reset our insert angle to zero, and let's bring in the refrigerator and the range. In this case, I'm going to bring them in and simply place them on the screen.
Remember, in this course, we do a lot of workflows that seem to be perfect, but you can do things in single steps. Simply placing them on the screen now gives me movable blocks that I can move in different ways. I'll turn off ortho by clicking this here, and now I can move these into place.
In this case, I'm going to track from this point down one inch and over one inch. I'll choose my block and go move, and I'll do T-R-A enter to start tracking. This is my first endpoint.
I'll go down one enter, and now to the left one enter. This is where I would like to track from, so I'll go enter to lock it in, and now I can simply choose the endpoint of the countertop here. The refrigerator can be moved in the same way, but it's a little bit easier.
From this back endpoint, we only need to track to the left one inch. I'll select my refrigerator, go move, and I'll go T-R-A enter. My first tracking point will be this point here.
Go to the left one enter, enter to lock it in, and now I can choose the endpoint of the bottom of my range. I'll do a zoom extents, close my block library, and control s to save. In the next video, we will begin our annotations.
