This tutorial provides a thorough step-by-step guide on how to work on the S100 sheet file in CAD, emphasizing the specifics of altering line types for wall and fixture layers. It takes you through the process of creating a new file, attaching your model file, inserting a title block, adjusting viewports, and adjusting layer styles and visibility among other tasks.
Key Insights
- The tutorial demonstrates how to create a new file from a template and save it in a specific folder, followed by attaching an existing model file for reference.
- It emphasizes the importance of checking your work by doing a quick print preview, identifying potential issues with line types, layer visibility, and object placement that may not match the desired output.
- The guide suggests altering layer visibility within the sheet file, not the original model file, to avoid confusion for other users. Changes to layer visibility in the sheet file do not impact the original drawing but allow for more customized viewing in your sheet file.
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In this video, we will work on the S100 sheet file. Let's go ahead and get started, and then we'll return to this drawing and discuss our linetypes for not only our wall layer but also our fixture layer.
Let's go File, New. Let's use the Fundamentals template, and let's go File, Save, and save this in our Sheets folder as CAD 201-S100. Let's hit Save. In this case, again, we want to XRef Attach our model file.
So let's go Insert, Reference Attach, choose our VDCI Plan Model. We can see our foundation there. I'll hit Open.
Again, these settings all look good to me, and I'll hit OK. Zoom Extents and Control + S to save. Remember, we're going to set our paper space linetype scale to one so that this dashed line will appear appropriately in paper space.
Now we can go activate our VDCI 8.5 × 11 paper space and insert our title block. I can go I, Enter, to open the Blocks dialog box. Again, we want to check our options before we insert our block. In this case, it's a paper space object coming into paper space, so we want to place it at 0 with a uniform scale of 1 and no rotation.
This looks great. Now notice it’s automatically opened my Recent options, and we can see it up here. We could click our recent block and click on the screen to place it. The name is going to be your name, today’s date, the sheet number is S1.0, and the drawing title will be FOUNDATION PLAN. I'll hit OK.
Let’s hit OK, and we can see that by clicking on the screen, I overwrote where the block was going to go relative to 0. This is an easy fix. I'll select my block, right-click, Properties, and under Position I can change this to 0 and 0. It will move the block to 0. Escape, Escape, Escape, and I can close the Block Editor. Once again, we can reload our XRef.
I’ll choose my save path, browse, and there’s my JPEG logo. Now to see our floor plan, we need to go to the Home tab, change to the A-NOPLOT layer, then go to Layout and draw our rectangular viewport from this endpoint to this endpoint. Remember, we need to jump into the viewport using a double-click, zoom out, Z, Enter, W, Enter, Shift + Right-Click Endpoints to the Shift + Right-Click Endpoints.
Now we can see the No Plot filled the screen. We can check our scale and lock the viewport, double-click out, and Zoom Extents. Control + S to save. Lastly, we know we can go to the Home tab and hide our No Plot layers by first selecting 0 as our current layer and then hiding A-NOPLOT and hiding VDCI Plan Model|A-NOPLOT.
Control + S to save. Now let’s do a quick print preview of this and see where our drawing does not match the handout. So I’ll go File, Plot, make sure you choose our VDCI Color Table file, and then hit Preview.
In this case, we can see that we actually want our spline on—not on the A-NOPLOT layer. We can see the boundary is on our handout. Additionally, the wall geometry is very thick, and the fixture geometry as well.
As we can see on the handout, these are grayed out and are the Hidden linetype. Finally, we can see that our paper space linetype object has not been updated. It is very helpful to do these kinds of checks early on when setting up a sheet file so that you can make a list of things to change as you move forward with your drawing.
I'll hit Escape and Escape. To begin, let's change our paper space line scale: PSLTSCALE, Enter, 1, Enter, and then regen all, which is REA, Enter. Now we can see our appropriate linetypes because our line scale has been updated.
Next, the biggest change we need to do is to our layers. This is the A-WALL layer and the A-FIXTURE layer. There are two ways we could approach this.
First is by going back to the VDCI Plan Model and changing the layers’ geometry there. We could save different layer settings per Layer State, but this eventually might confuse someone in our office. Even if you are the only one working on a drawing, you might accidentally change to a different Layer State and not understand what geometry you're seeing.
The best way to do this is in our CAD 201-S100 sheet file by changing the layer visibility here. In our Layer Properties, we can see that there are a series of XRef layers. You know that because they are grayed out and you see this vertical line with the file name before and the layer name after.
These visibility changes will not go back to the original drawing—it just helps you view the layers differently in your sheet file. So in this case, I can find VDCI Plan Model|A-WALL and VDCI Plan Model|A-FIXTURE and change their colors to 253. Additionally, we can go to the linetype, and you can see we need to load our Hidden line here.
So I’ll load Hidden and hit OK. Choose Hidden and hit OK. Now when I Zoom Extents, we can see that the layers have changed their styles just in this drawing.
This has not been updated in the other drawing—our VDCI Plan Model. Now let’s go back to Print Preview. I’ll go File, Plot, make sure we change our plot style table to our VDCI Color Table file, Preview—and that looks much better.
A couple of things we need to change in our drawing, though: we need to move this back to the S-FNDN layer, and it looks like the thickness of this outer line did not show up in this drawing. Let’s see if we can solve those by going back to our VDCI Plan Model. I’ll hit Escape and go to the VDCI Plan Model.
Now let’s fix these two broken pieces. First, the spline. We can simply pick the spline and migrate it back to the S-FNDN layer.
We can hit Escape, Escape, and that takes care of that. The more tricky question is why didn’t this with a thicker lineweight plot appropriately for our drawing? Well, it did and it didn’t—because there’s a hierarchy that AutoCAD uses. First, it checks to see if the line has a specified lineweight, and then it checks to see if there’s a color table file applied for that line.
In this case, the S-FNDN layer is white, and we know that white lines have a print thickness of 0.25 millimeter. AutoCAD views that as a more important distinction than the 0.6 millimeter option we’ve specified. So in this case, the easiest thing to do is to switch the color of this layer here from ByLayer to 2. Let’s Control + S to save.
Let’s go back to CAD 201-S100, and let’s choose our Manage XRefs bubble here with a right-click. Reload DWG XRefs. Now we can see this line has come in as yellow on the S-FNDN layer, and this line is now appearing as a solid line.
Let’s go back to File, Plot. Make sure we assign our color table file, and let’s Preview—and that is exactly what we were looking for. Our Foundation Plan is complete.
Let’s right-click Plot, and once again choose one of these names if you’d prefer to override it. This is going to be S100, and that’s CAD 201-S100 and then your initials. Let’s hit Save, and here is mine. We can see that it is fully printed.
Great! In the next video, we will start to work on the Electrical Plan.
