Subtitles of the Movie

Now that you've completed Exercise 1, the valve, we're going to move on to Exercise 2, the workstation where we're going to incorporate a rotation and flip parameter and action in the block so that we can build up with our container here of our workstation within let's say a facilities management drawing, for example. Now, I must stress that you must do these exercises. They're important for you so that you can understand how your dynamic blocks work and how your rotation and flip parameters and actions work also. So let's build our workstation block. Now, the trick here is to create a block. I'm going to select all of the objects first using my Noun Verb Selection and I'm going to go to Create Block. In older versions of AutoCAD, this will be on the Draw Toolbar. Now, the objects have already been selected there. That's great and we will Convert to Block. Base point though, my pick point and I'm going to pick that corner there. So now I've got a base point, my objects, it's not annotative, I scale uniformly and allow exploding and I'm going to open it in the Block Editor. I'm also going to give it a name. All blocks must have a name so we'll call it Workstation and then -D-y-n, following the dynamic consistency there where we always put D-y-n for a dynamic block. I click on OK now and as you can see, all the objects appear in my Block Editor space now and there's my zero zero there. So we go to the Parameters Tab. I want a flip parameter first so I click on Flip and I want to be able to flip this particular workstation dynamic block about a vertical center line. So what I'm going to do here is just go for the midpoint snap here and drag down my polar tracking vertically and left click again. It's says specify label location. I'll just drop that up here. There is my flip arrow so now I need to add an action to that so I go to the Action Tab, select my flip action, select the parameter there, select the objects, all of them, right click to confirm, job done. My flip is done. I now go to Parameters here, select my Rotation Parameter. The base point is going to be here at 00. And what I'll do there, I'll just drag the radius of the parameter out to here. I want it outside of my little workstation container there so it's going to go there. It says specify default rotation angle. I want to be able to rotate all the way 360 degrees so I type in 360 as the angle and press Enter. So there's my parameter. I now need to go to Actions again and select Rotate, select this particular rotation parameter here, select everything including the flip action and parameter. I then right click to confirm. In AutoCAD 2010 I can go to Test Block so I'll zoom in now, click on my block. I can flip my block, as you can see. I can hand it either side and I can also click on the Rotation Parameter and rotate my little workstation container there through whichever angle within 360 I wish to choose. So I'll hit Escape there, hit Escape again, close the Test Block Window, save my block, close the Block Editor and that is now a dynamic block with rotation and flip. There's the flip, there's the rotation. So as you can see there, quick and easy and a little workstation environment there. I can then build many of those workstations by bringing them in as dynamic blocks but it also saves me time. I can flip and rotate at leisure now with those dynamic block capabilities. So as I stressed at the beginning this exercise, you must do these exercises to understand how easy they are to create your dynamic block, but more importantly to understand how productive you will be using dynamic blocks.