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

Using 2D elevations in AutoCAD - AutoCAD Tutorial

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

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Using 2D elevations in AutoCAD

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- [Instructor] In this particular chapter, we're just going to look at why we use elevations in AutoCAD. And you'll see that we've got a drawing open already. It's 01_Elevations_2D.dwg and you may recognize it from the introductory videos. You can see there that we have a 2D elevation of a building and that particular elevation is showing us all of the doors, the windows, the brickwork. You can see the glass there. You can see the curved roof. You can see the concrete bases there, where the roof is attached as well, and all of that information allows you to actually see what the building looks like. A plan view sometimes doesn't give you enough information. So, you develop elevations and sometimes sections in AutoCAD to give more information to the guy constructing the building in this particular case. So, you see there, we've got our grid lines and all the information we need. Now, that's only one elevation in 2D. If I just roll back on the wheel in the model space, you can see I've actually got four elevations in this particular drawing. Now, if I go to something, like, the mono layout tab down here, you'll see now that all those elevations are arranged nice and neatly on a sheet in the layout, ready to be plotted. And you can see there that if you look at those elevations, you get a really good idea of what the building looks like. And that's why we use elevations in AutoCAD. To just basically portray our design intent, so that people can actually see what we want built, what we want manufactured. And the whole idea of these elevations is to allow people to gain more information. Now, there's not a lot of annotation on these particular elevations. There's not a lot of dimensioning. There's not a lot of anything else to be seen, really, apart from the grid lines. However, this is a part elevation, it's not fully complete. But, what you would normally do is start dimensioning between the grid lines, dimensioning from ground level up to roof level, for example, and you give that information to the person who needs it at the time. So, that's why 2D elevation is used. Now, if I just jump back into the model tab, what you'll see is if I decide to do an isometric view over here on the view cube, you'll see that all of these are completely flat. If I zoom in now, can you see they are flat 2D elevations? Now, what you can do is you can also work in 3D when you've got a 3D model. Developing views, as you can see, on the view cube there, you've got left, front and so on. So, you can develop a left view, a right view, a front view, and a back view. And then the next video, what we'll look at is we'll look at a 3D model and we'll develop the elevations out a little bit further. These ones are just purely 2D. So, what I'll do now is I'll jump back to the top view and rotate the view cube so that it's all set with north at the top. And there's my elevations back in my drawing, like so.

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