From the course: AutoCAD MEP Essential Training

Setting up a plumbing drawing - AutoCAD MEP Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD MEP Essential Training

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Setting up a plumbing drawing

It's time to talk about plumbing. The first thing we need to think about is setting up the drawings, and where are we going to save these little guys. The objective of this video is to start a new drawing from a basic AutoCAD MEP template, change the display configuration to plumbing, and save it in a convenient location. So to get started, let's fire up Auto Cad MEP. Under the New Tab, in the getting started area, let's click the templates drop down. The template I want to use is AECB model US imperial CTB.bwt. Once you see that, go ahead and click it. This opens up a brand new drawing. The next thing I'd like to do is save this. So go ahead and click on the Save button, and Save it somewhere convenient, and lets call it MEP-Plumbing and let's click Save. The reason we did this first, is because when we specify a relative path in our external reference, AutoCAD's going to force us to save the drawing anyway. Speaking of Xref, type in x + r and hit Enter to bring up the External Reference dialog. With the External References Tool palette open, go ahead and click on the DWG icon, which allows us to attach a drawing. Find your NEP-Architectural drawing, or whatever drawing you happen to be using. Once it's selected, click Open. Reference type wants to be an overlay. For the path type, let's make sure we select relative path. On the bottom left hand corner, click Show Details. Because we selected Relative Path, the saved path will go to the root folder and then to your file. Let's not specify on screen for the scale, or for the insertion point. Click OK. You can close out of your External References Dialogue. The next think I want to do is change our display configuration to plumbing. So, where it says MEP Design, click this fly-out, and let's just select Plumbing. Notice the rooms are turned off, the ceilings are turned off, and we have a nice, clean floor plan to start our plumbing in. Now that, that's out of the way, we can put in a toilet and start laying some pipe.

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