From the course: AutoCAD Facilities Management: Areas

Drawing units - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Facilities Management: Areas

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Drawing units

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- [Voiceover] We're starting a new chapter now, in our AutoCAD Facilities Management 101 Areas course. And we're going to be looking at getting your FM settings right for your FM drawing. Now you'll notice, I've started us off in a blank FM drawing. You'll notice, at the top of the screen there, it's 00_GND_FM_SETTINGS.dwg. Now I've deliberately created a whole new drawing, so that we can go in, reference in the structural drawing, and then go from scratch again in this particular chapter. So go to the Home tab on the ribbon, to go the Layers panel, and just make sure, in the Layer pulldown, that you're set to Layer 0 before we reference in the structural plan. So like before, we go to the Insert tab here, and then we go Attach in the reference panel. And that will take us to our folder, so we just go up a level, and there's my Getting Your FM Settings Right folder, there's my Drawings folder, and I'm drilling down to find my GA drawing there, my 00_GND_GA_SETTINGS.dwg file. Now, you must make sure that the GA settings drawing and the FM settings drawing are in the same folder, because we're using relative paths for the external references, the xrefs. So there's my GA settings, Open, leave all the settings as they are, just as we did last time, making sure that the path type is a relative path. Click on OK, and that's now in the drawing. Now you might need to just double-click on the wheel to do a zoom extents, to make sure you get that particular view that you can see on my screen at the moment. So there is our reference, our structural plan in our FM drawing. Now again, we go back to the Home tab now, and we go to the Layers panel, I'll have to expand mine out because of the resolution of my screen, and the Layer properties, and you can see that we've got all those 00_GND_GA settings layers again. So I'm going to close the Layer Properties manager, type Rename, like we did before, and we're going to select Blocks, and then select our 00_GND_GA_SETTINGS, and rename it to FP, just to shorten those layer names. Click on OK, back into the Layers panel, Layer Properties, and there we go. FP, and they've all got the little line, and they go to the layer name, like so. It just tidies up, and if you get into this particular workflow, when you're creating your facilities drawings, it's much, much easier to use the drawing. Now what we're going to do is, we're going to use this drawing for the whole of the chapter. So the 00_GND_FM_SETTINGS drawing, make sure that you save what you've done each time you finish one of the videos. Then you can just follow along with the video each time, and not have to keep re-setting up the drawing. So first thing we're going to look at in our FM drawing is making sure that our units are set up correctly in the model space. So make sure that you're in the Model tab. Now the way to check your units is to move the crosshair around. Can you see the coordinate readout there? It's also down bottom left on the status bar, giving you the same readout. And you can see that our coordinates are going to four decimal places. That's a bit much, really, for facilities management, bearing in mind we're working with big rooms that are meters squared. So, we just need to type the word Units, press enter, and it brings up our Drawing Units dialog box. Now most of the time, when you're working with lengths in your FM drawing, you'll probably only need one decimal place at the most. Think about it, if you're measuring in meters, you're probably only going to need to go to something like 9.5 meters. You may possibly need to go to two decimal places, absolute maximum. Now degrees, when you're measuring degrees in a room like this, you're not really working with actual, like, ordinance survey coordinates, or actual surveyor's coordinates, or anything like that. So you might go to one decimal place on your angles. Always measure anticlockwise, which is the default, so don't tick the Clockwise box. And I'm working in millimeters, so any units of anything that comes in are going to be in millimeters, as well. Now that's pretty much all I need to worry about, apart from direction, make sure that your direction control is working, as well, and make sure that horizontally, to the east, is set to zero, and click on OK. I'll click on OK again for the units there, and you'll notice down on the status bar, and on the crosshair now, you can see that I'm going to two decimal places, which is what we just set up in our units. So we've set up our units now, we've brought in the structural plan by way of xrefing it into the Facilities Management drawing. Save what you've done so far, and then what we can do is work through this particular drawing all the way through the chapter.

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