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Autodesk AutoCAD 2010: Basic 2D Concepts Tutorials
Creating a Title Block / Setting Your LAYERS
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Subtitles of the Movie (Autodesk AutoCAD 2010: Basic 2D Concepts / Creating a Title Block / Setting Your LAYERS)
What you'll notice now from the previous exercise is I've actually saved the drawing now. You can see it has a drawing name of 06Layers. Now, what we're going to look at are the Layers. Now let's do a quick sanity check first though. Make sure that those Limits are where they should be. Move the crosshair to the top right of the screen there. You can see as I move the crosshair closer to the top of the screen there I'm pretty close to 6,000 there in the Y direction, and the X direction is 8,005. That's because of the Aspect Ratio of my screen. I'm using what they call a wide screen laptop. Now, the good thing is I know that I can fit my office that is 6,000 millimeters by 6,000 millimeters into that space. However, at the moment I'm only using the Zero default Layer. It's up here on the Home tab on your Layers Panel, and there's my Zero Layer there. If I click on the down arrow here and look at my pull-down menu I've only got the Zero Layer. It is the Default Layer in any new drawing. Now when you start drawing in AutoCAD you need to be able to distinguish one object for another. So what you do there is you put the objects that you're drawing on the Layers. So if you're drawing, let's say, a window, you would put that on the Layer Windows, perhaps give it a color or a line type so that you can distinguish it on the drawing. So what we're going to do, we're going to go into our Layer Properties Manager and develop some new Layers. Now, the first part of this drawing is that we're going to develop a Title Block so that we can put our Name, our Organization, some Dates, some Revisions, what those revisions are on the drawing. So we need to work towards that on this particular drawing. So, on the Layers Panel here, Layer Properties is this Icon here. Let's click on Layer Properties. That will actually bring the Layer Properties Manager Palette onto the screen. Now there's quite a lot to look at here. The first thing you look at is at the top: Current Layer. You can see there it is zero. That's because it is the only Layer. Now what we need to do is we need to work with this Icon here: New Layer. So I'm going to click on New Layer and what it does now in the Layer Properties Manager there is it offers me a Default name of Layer1. That's not really what I want. If I had them all Layer1, Layer2, Layer3, I wouldn't know what those Layers were and what they did, so we have to give them recognizable names, and work to a naming convention. The good thing is in AutoCAD 2010 you can have up to 255 characters in each Layer Name so you can be pretty descriptive if you need to. Now, we're working with a Title Block, so my first Layer is going to be Title Block, and I'm going to place all of the lines and objects that form my Title Block on that Layer. Now, here's a trick. Don't press Enter after you've typed your Layer Name. Instead, hit the comma key on the keyboard. It automatically creates another New Layer. Don't worry about the Colors or the Line Types on the right; we will look at those in a moment. So, we've got Title Block. We need text on the Title Block so we'll have Title Text, like so. Again, comma. We're also going to have a Layer called Points. Now, that Layer is where we're going to place Points that we use as points of reference to place text on the Title Block; so we'll have a Layer called Points as well. Now those at the moment are the only layers that we're really going to need, so I'm going to press Enter now after putting in that third layer, Points, and what you'll notice there is AutoCAD alphabetizes your Layer Names for you, so they're all in alphabetical order. Now, let's do some Colors. We want our Points to stand out so I'm going to select Points there. Notice the little gray box here. That indicates that that Layer hasn't been used yet. If it was highlighted in a blue color it would indicate that the Layer is in use on the drawing. The green tick there indicates that zero is the current drafting Layer, so if I draw anything it will be on the zero Layer. What I can do, I can just click on each Layer Name and it highlights it with a blue bar. I'm going to click on the word Points once, click on the word White there for the color, and I'm going to change this color to a very sort of pinky, obvious color. I'm going for that color there, which is actually Color 210. I can type in 210 there if I want to as well. I click on OK. and you'll see that that color there is now 210 for my Points there. My Title Block now. I click on the word Title Block, I click on the White there, again takes me into the AutoCAD Color Index. There is also True Color and Color Books. I'm not going to complicate matters with those just yet. Let's just work with Index Colors now. Now, my Title Block itself, I want that to be a color that stands out on a white background. I'm going to go for this color here: Color 40. That one there. It's like a sort of orangy-tan sort of type color. I click on OK. Color 40 is applied to my Title Block. Now, Title Text. Click on the Title Text, like that, click on the word White, and what I'm going to do then now, is I'm going to give that a color red. All my text and my dimensions I'm going to use the color red as a convention, so all text on the drawing will be the color red so it can be easily distinguished but it will be on different Layers. Text for the Title Block for example will be on the Title Text Layer. There will be a Text Layer for normal text on the drawing later on. So, we click on OK there and all the Title Block text is going to go on that red Title Text Layer there. Now what I'm going to do is make Title Block my current Layer. All I do there is I double-click on this little gray box here. Double-click, that makes Title Block my current layer as you can see. I then close the Layer Properties Manager by clicking on the cross on the Palette there, and you can see now in my Layers Panel here, Title Block is now my current layer. I can click on the Layer pull-down here and select any Layer to be my Current Layer. Notice as well now, a new feature of AutoCAD 2010, I can click on the little Color Icon there, and as you can see it takes me straight to the Color Table to change the color of the Layer. So I can do that very quickly now. I don't have to go into the Layer Properties Manager anymore.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Autodesk AutoCAD 2010: Basic 2D Concepts |
| Author: | Shaun Bryant |
| SKU: | 34013 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-56-4 |
| Release Date: | 2009-07-03 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 107 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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