Subtitles of the Movie

What we're going to look at in this particular exercise is the Multiline Command in AutoCAD. It's a very underutilized, and also underrated, command in AutoCAD. It's not used that often but it does have some very useful specific uses. One of those is to draw the outline of a house with a cavity wall. Now you'll notice on the drawing here I've got a point stall set up of a circle with a cross in it, you can see there, and those are AutoCAD points on the Points Layer. Now you'll notice using the Layer pull-down here, I've got the Layer Walls as my Current drafting Layer. Now what we're going to do is we're going to set up a Multiline Style and then draw using that Style. Now, a Multiline is fantastic. It's like when you were a child and you cello-taped four or five colored crayons together and dragged them across a piece of paper; you've got four lines of different colors all following the same orientation and direction. Well you can do that on the screen with AutoCAD. Now the first thing we need to do is set up a Multiline Style. Now, make sure that your DYN, your Dynamic Input here is on, and then move your crosshair to the center of the screen and type ML for Multiline, and then Style. It's the quickest way to get there, and there's your Multiline Style dialog box. Now you'll notice there that we have two Multiline Styles in this drawing. I've created the Example one previously. The Standard one is two lines, like that. Let's have a look at the Example one because it explains more about what we're going to do. So I select Example there, click on Modify and you can see now that you've got the Modify Multiline Style. And there's our EXAMPLE Style there. Now I've said that I want the ends capped at the start and the end, and I want them both capped at 90 degrees to the Multiline. I have not set any Fill color, but you can fill the Multiline if you want to. In this case we're going to leave it set to None, and I'm not going to display the joints. However, I've got elements here. Now, the zero line is the datum line. Now, if I'm drawing a wall, I normally use that zero as the outside edge of the wall. Now this is coming in to the actual building itself, so if you mention zero as the outside edge of the wall, and then going in by 100 to the first inside edge of the cavity, then from the zero to 150 is the inside edge of the cavity, and then the zero to the 250 is the inside edge of the wall, so it's cumulative. So, it's zero, then 100. The cavity is between 100 and 150, so the cavity is 50 millimeters wide. And then from the outside edge of the wall to the inside edge is 250. I can add other lines if I want to. I'm not going to in this case. Notice I can also delete. So, let's create a New Multiline Style. I'm going to cancel this, the Modify, click on New, and my new stall name is going to be: CAVITY WALL, like so. So Cavity and then Wall. I always put mine in capitals like that so the new stall name is CAVITY WALL. I'm going to start with Example there and you'll notice I can't continue. Why is that? Because there is a space. Multiline stalls cannot have a space. So, what I'll do is I'll put a little underscore in there instead. Notice I now get the Continue button. You cannot have spaces in Multiline Styles. So I hit Continue and as you can see now, CAVITY WALL at the top there. Now it's taken onboard my Example settings, the 250, the 150, and the 100. I'm going to edit those now, so I click on 250, I'm going to change the Offset there to 275, like so, which means my inside edge of my wall will be smaller, but what I'm also going to do is click on the 150 there; I'm going to change that there to 175, like so. So I've now got a 75 cavity and a 100 inner wall skin. What I'm going to do is OK that now, and I now have my CAVITY WALL here as a Multiline Style. There's a Preview of it at the bottom. So what I do now is I OK that, and that's now loaded into the drawing. It's a good habit to get into saving that drawing. Now I'm not going to save it in this case, I don't have to because the Multiline Style is already loaded, but get into the habit of once you've created new Styles and things, saving your drawing. OK, so the Style is there. So what we do now is we type mline. Specify start point. I don't want to specify start point yet. I right-click, I go to Scale, and I make sure my Scale is at 1, first of all, 1 to 1. I then right-click again, go to Style and I type in the Style name that I'm going to use. So, it's cavity, remember the underscore, and then wall, like that. Press Enter. So now it knows that I'm using that cavity wall Style. I now just use my Node Snap, so on OSNAP here, down at the bottom of the screen, I'll go down to the bottom of the screen here like so, I right-click over Object Snap, and you can see there that Node has the blue square Ð can you see that? Ð so it's already on, so I can see that my Node Snap is on and if it isn't on just switch it on, and I'm going to go here and I'm just going to click around the nodes. Now notice I'm using the outside edge, can you see that? So my Multiline is going from the outside edge inwards, so I've started that in the orientation that I want it to go and I'm just working my way around the Nodes like so. When I get to there, like that, I don't want to close it, do I, because that would block the doorway, so I just press Enter, and there's my Multiline with my cavity walls with the 90 degree caps on the ends of the walls.