Subtitles of the Movie

A new feature in AutoCAD is the Action Recorder. Now in AutoCAD 2011 you now have the option to add user messages to any recordings that you make using the Action Recorder. So let's go to the Action Recorder first. It's up here on the Manage tab and that's in the 2D Drafting and Annotation Workspace here. Now, there's the Action Recorder right there. Now, before I start the first thing that you must do is hit the Record button. As soon as you hit the Record button and come down here into the Drawing area, what you'll find is that you get a little red Can you see that there? Just like the old fashioned tape recorders, the little red light comes on when you hit the Record button. You can also see that the Action Recorder fly-out is pinned out while you record. Very useful. Now, I'm going to type line, for the Line command and press Enter. As you can see it's prompting me to specify the first point and the Line command appears in the Action Recorder Menu there. I'm going to draw a line from this point here, so I left-click and I drag. So there's my line there. As you can see it's prompting me for the next point of my line. Now, before I go to that corner of that green building there where the circle is, I'm going to go over here to the Navigation Bar, come down to my Zoom commands, just here and click and I want Zoom Window. So I do a Zoom Window now, it's prompting me to specify the first corner, so I'll hover over there, click, drag, click. It zooms in and I want to go to that corner, right there. Notice, as soon as I click those things have been added to the Action Recorder as I go. I'm not going to move out from there and draw the next part of my line, but I'm going to roll back on the wheel mouse a couple of notches, like so. See the view change? And then I'm going to pan. Can you see that? So as I pan upwards there, see the 3DPAN2 come up on the Action Recorder there. Now I need the corner of this building so I'll pan again. Two changes there, can you see that? And as I come out I need that corner of that building. So, I need to change that Orbit view, so I come into Orbit here and again, this will all be added to the Action Recorder, so I click there, Orbit and I click and I drag, can you see and the Orbit is just changing there so I can see the corner of the building, like so and I release. So there's the corner now. Can you see that? So I right-click and I exit and I select my corner, like so, like that and I come away. The next thing I need is the Top view, so I come over here to the View Cube, click on Top and there's my Top view there. I need to tack my line to this point here where I finish and then I right-click and I enter. So I've drawn my lines now. They're all done and dusted. What I'm going to do now is stop recording. So I go up here to Stop, job done and then it asks me for a Macro Command Name. I'll call it Macro1 just for ease of use, like so and I click on OK. So that is now done, that's recorded and finished. What I'm going to do quickly here is just change my View Cube background to North and go to a Top view, like so. Now, what I'm going to do is look here at these objects here. I'm going to delete that one, that one and also that one, like so and you'll notice that things have changed. I've gone to what looks like a Wireframe view here. It does happen when you go into an Orbit when you're in the Action Recorder, so what I need to do there is change my Visual Styles back so I go to Home and I need to change my Visual Styles. Now how do I do that? How do I change those Visual Styles? Well, I go to View here on the Ribbon, takes a few seconds and there's my Visual Styles there. So I want my Realistic Visual Style back, so I click there, or maybe I want the Shaded view, or the Conceptual view. Let's go with Conceptual, and as you can see it comes back and also if I go back to Realistic that we had before, it comes back as well. Sometimes happens when you're doing Action Recorder work. Now, let's just zoom in a little bit and let's run that macro. So we go back to Manage, there's my Macro1, always above the line, the last Macro you created and I click on Play. Now there won't be any user messages right now. As you can see it's asking for that pan, so I pan a little bit and I come up, I right-click and exit the pan and as you can see that User Input, it's asking for Input each time, so I can just pan if I want to there a bit more, right-click and exit pan again and it's finished the playback of the Action Macro. Notice there were no User Messages, though. OK, let's have a look at that now. Let's pick this out here like so, let's pin it open and what I'll do, I'll just go for that one pan that I did here. So you've got a View Change there, right, so that's a right-click, Insert User Message and I'll put there: Zooming to corner of building. Make sure you spell things right because this does come up on the screen. You look kind of silly if you've got spelling mistakes in there. So I'll OK that one there. So there's my User Message in the Action Recorder. So now let's unpin that, let's get this back to where it was before cause obviously it's remembered everything. Let's delete those lines again, like so, I'll just delete those and I'll run my Macro1 again here. Zoom into corner of building. There's the Action Macro User Message. Now I could add that for every single bit of the macro if I wanted to. You've seen how to do it once, you just do it each time in the macro when you edit the macro, so I'll pan, right-click, exit, pan again, right-click exit and it finishes the macro for me and it leaves it in that view where it was when we finished. Obviously you could make the macro longer, rotate the View Cube and so on and add that to the macro as well if you wanted to. But that's how you can add those User Messages to your Macros in the Action Recorder.