Explore how to adjust and tag wires in a BIM 322 course using CAD Teacher VDCI course content. Learn the detailed process of moving and bending wires, selecting specific elements to tag and adjusting tags for clear readability.
Key Insights
- The course content covers the procedure of adjusting wires within a project, this involves selecting the wire, moving the vertex of the arrow to the desired position, and using the different tools provided to adjust the bulge of the arc.
- Tagging is another crucial process highlighted in the content. This involves going to the annotate tab and selecting "tag by category", then selecting the wires with the arrowhead on them. It's important to avoid using "tag all" as it does not provide the needed specificity.
- The final step of the process is adjusting the tags for clear readability. This involves moving the tags manually so they read cleanly with the wires. Tags provide information like the panel name and circuit number, helping to identify which circuit the wire is going to on the circuit breaker.
Welcome back to the CAD Teacher VDCI video course content for the BIM 322 course. In the previous video, we went ahead and actually started getting our wires together, and so what we're going to do now is, let's go back and adjust some of these wires. They're very easy and very simple to adjust. So I'm going to go ahead and zoom back in on this bathroom where we started, and I just want—I don't really—I'm not too worried about these ones here; these look fine.
What I'm more worried about is the one going back to the panel. And so what I'm going to do is, I'm going to select that one here, and as you can see, there are a couple of different shape handles that show up. I have the connection point here and the vertex out here—those are our vertexes—and then I have this one in the middle. And what this one in the middle here does is it adjusts the bulge of the arc. So what I can do is, I'm going to go ahead and drag that up, and as you can see, I adjust the bulge of that arc.
I'm going to go ahead and take this guy like that, okay? I'm going to go ahead and adjust it to where it has kind of a nice bend to it. It doesn't necessarily need to be pointing directly to the actual panel, but just in its general direction. So what I'd like you to go ahead and do is, I'm going to go ahead and pause the video and go ahead and use these different tools—these little grip handles and everything—and use those to go ahead and bring around these different wires and adjust them.
Again, all you need to do is, really, you just need to move the vertex here of the arrow to a position that you want it, and then grab this vertex here, and that's going to go ahead and adjust your bulge just a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and pause the video. When I come back, I'll have all my wires adjusted.
Go ahead and pause the video on your machine, adjust your wires, and then we'll continue from there. Welcome back, and I've actually gone ahead and finished adjusting all my wires. Just a couple of little notes.
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I've made most of the wires in these offices look about the same—that they're all kind of nice, clean, looking well together, and everything's kind of just organized in a good location—and we're ready to go on with the next step. What we want to go ahead and do for the next step is, I want to go ahead and start tagging these wires so that I can actually tell the installer which panels they're going to.
Very simple thing to do. I'm going to go ahead, go to the Annotate tab. I'm going to go to Tag by Category.
Now, I can always tag these lights here. I can always tag them here, but I typically want to tag it on the one with the arrowhead. So I'm just going to go ahead and pick, pick, pick, pick.
I'm just going around and picking the actual wire. Again, I don't want to use Tag All because it's going to tag every piece of wire that I have, and it doesn't really facilitate what I need it to do. So I can just go around and pick the actual arrows with only the arrowhead on it—or the wires with the arrowhead on it—and we're good to go.
It doesn't take that long to go ahead and tag all these. Just make sure you get them all done. And I think we've got it.
Yes, we do. Perfect. Now I'm going to go ahead and hit Escape twice, and let's go ahead and adjust these tags so that they read cleanly with everything else.
I'm going to go in here. I'm going to bring this guy up to here. Now, one thing that you may notice is that it wants to attach to maybe an odd end, and if something like this is going on—where it's not really attaching to the wire itself but looks like it may be pointing to the wire or the light—what I'm going to do is, I'm going to go up to here.
I'm going to change this from Attached End to Free End, and then I'm going to go ahead and move it manually. There's absolutely no problem with that. It just kind of comes down to what you want it to look like.
Like this one here, it's pointing to the middle of the wire. I'm going to go ahead and leave it as is and just adjust the tag. This one's fine.
Just need to do a tiny bit of adjustment. And as you notice, what these wire tags have is they have both the panel name and the circuit number in there. So it's telling you exactly which circuit it's going to on the circuit breaker.
And if you move it just slightly, you can kind of get it to fit correctly. Let's go ahead and bring this guy up here. Again, if this kind of thing happens, just go up to Free End, change this tag to a Free End tag, and then go ahead and do whatever you need to.
Now, these tags we can't really stack at all because of the fact that they all have to go to different circuits. So don't try and stack any of these tags. What you need to do is, you need to make sure that you're actually going to go ahead and have each individual tag being shown.
There we go. I'm going to bring this guy down just a little bit. There's that.
And I'm just going around quickly adjusting these tags just so that they look good. I'm not too concerned about exact placement, but I want to make sure that they're all looking cleanly. I need to get this guy here.
And again, I'm not really concerned if my tags are actually going over the architectural information. The architectural information, when printed, will be in grayscale, while my information will be fully 100% black. I think I've got them all adjusted, and I do.
I'm going to go ahead and Zoom Extents. Control-S, save the file. And in the next video, we're going to go ahead and actually start tagging the lighting fixtures.
See you then.