From the course: AutoCAD: 2D & 3D Elevations

Setting up an accurate 2D plan - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD: 2D & 3D Elevations

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Setting up an accurate 2D plan

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- [Instructor] We're now starting a new chapter in our AutoCAD 2D and 3D Elevations course, and what we're going to start doing now is setting up for our 2D elevations in AutoCAD. Now you'll notice I've got a new drawing open. It's 02_Elevations2D_House.dwg, and you may recognize it from previous videos. It's a very, very cut down version of the 3D house that you may have seen earlier. Now what we're going to do is we're going to develop this up so that all our elevations start to appear in our AutoCAD drawing, and we're working in 2D this time I hasten to add, so it will be flat 2D elevations, and plans, and so on. Now, we've got the new drawing open. The first thing you need is an accurate 2D plan, because you need to have setting out points from the 2D plan that then transpose across to the elevations, and as we work through this chapter all of that will become clear. So let's have a look at our 2D plan. There's a couple of bits here that need tidying up. If I hover over the edge here in the model tab, you can see there's a Polyline there, and the properties are a 2D slab, so that's our foundation for our house. All of these red lines are 2D walls, but can you see? They kind of need tidying up a bit. So what you do is you make sure that all of this is accurate by using the AutoCAD tools. So if I zoom in a bit, you can see here, look we need to just trim and tidy up a little bit. Now you can see, look, there's a polyline there for example instead of a regular line. So there's a polyline there, there's a regular line there. We just need to tidy everything up so that it's all consistent. So let's have a look at that first. Let's just click on that polyline there. I'm going to go up to the Modify panel in the Home tab and I'm going to explode it first of all. Then I'm going to use the Trim command. Now the quick way to use the Trim command, just type TR, like that, and you can see the keyboard shortcut is Trim, press Enter, and I'm gonna press Enter again using that Select All option you can see there on the dynamic input. That creates what they call a dirty trim so that all the intersections now are cutting edges. So if I come up here like this, I can just hover there, click, hover there, click. I don't have to worry about setting up the cutting edges. If I come down here, click. Can you see, I'm tidying as I go, like that, and it's all clicking and it's all clearing, like so. If I press Enter now just to finish that Trim command you can see that's all neat and tidy. If I zoom out slightly now, pan up a little bit, we need to make sure this is all accurate. Things like this, look, where the lines have gone over each other. It all needs tidying up, so again I'll zoom in a little bit more, and just make sure that these are all tidied up. Again, TR for Trim, Enter once, and then use that Select All option just by pressing Enter again. You can see it down on the command line as well, and it just gives you that dirty trim option, and you can just trim out the bits you don't need, like that, without worrying about running around selecting cutting edges left, right, and center. So just click on the bits you don't want, like that, press Enter to finish, and if I zoom out now, you can see that that's all neat and tidy, and all the walls are consistent, and everything joins together, and it just looks nicer. It just looks more professional that way. So, what we've got now is our nice accurate 2D plan. So we can now start thinking about generating some elevations from this plan view, of our house in our AutoCAD drawing.

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