Subtitles of the Movie

We're now in Exercise 2 of the last section of dynamic blocks in this particular course. I must stress that you must do these exercises. They will make you more familiar with your dynamic blocks and more importantly, once you've learned how to use dynamic blocks, you'll be a lot more productive. We're going to combine some parameters and actions again, this time on our bathtub here and what we're going to do, that's actually a block right now so what I'm going to do is I'm going to explode that. So if you've got a block that you want to change and perhaps make into a dynamic block or make some changes to, select the block like so and just go to Explode here on the Modify Panel. Explode is on the Modify Toolbar in older versions of AutoCAD. So I explode that back to its component parts. Now, a trick here as well, there is obviously an old block in drawing somewhere so what we'll do, we'll purge as well by typing Purge and pressing Enter. As you can see, there are some blocks there that we can purge. There's lots of information in there so let's select all those blocks and purge all of those out. So do a Purge All, Purge All Items and they all go. So now there's no blocks in there at all. And that isn't a block anymore either. So we now go to Create Block. The name of the block is going to be Bathtub for obvious reasons and I'm going to put -D-y-n for Dynamic. Pick a Point; I'm going to pick that point there as the insertion point. Select the Objects; I select all the objects that make up the bathtub. Easy; make sure that I put Convert to Block here, Scale Uniformly and Allow Exploding and make sure that you open it in the Block Editor. I'm going to OK that now, zoom out slightly and what I'm going to do now is go to the Parameters Tab and add an alignment parameter. Now, I'm going to add two alignment parameters; one from here to here like so and then another alignment parameter; one from this corner here to here. So I can align both vertically and horizontally with my bar. I'm also going to add a rotation parameter and the base point of that is going to be here and then I'm going to take the radius out to about here. The angle now is going to be 360 because I want to rotate all the way around the insertion point here of the bath. So I now go to Actions, I find my Rotate Action here and what I do now is I select this Angle 1 Parameter, my Rotate Parameter, select all of the objects including the alignment parameters and right click to confirm. Notice there are no exclamation marks anymore. I'll quickly go to my Test Block area in AutoCAD 2010, zoom in a bit and click now. I can test my rotation parameter here like so. That's all working fine. I'll hit Escape there to deselect. What I'll also do now is just quickly draw some lines. Now, I bet you never thought you could do that in the Test Area. So I've drawn a couple of lines there and what I can do now is I can test the alignment of my bath as well so that aligns with that wall there like so or I can align it perhaps with that corner there and so on. Or I can align it this way like that using that alignment parameter. I can still rotate my bath if I need to around that insertion point. So you can draw objects in the Test Area as well. So I'll close the Test Block Window, save my block, close the Block Editor. I'm now in the Drawing. Now, there's my block there. Let's align that to the wall. As you can see, I can align it that way or I can align it this way. I can rotate it in any which way I want and I can still use my insertion grip and just drag it around the drawing using the grip as well. So as you can see there, I've combined two alignment parameters and a rotation parameter plus a rotate action to create a dynamic block of a bathtub that I can utilize in any house planning drawing that I create. This now brings to a close the section in this course on dynamic blocks. We're going to move on to tool palettes and how they combine with blocks and dynamic blocks but I must stress; make sure you do these exercises. They're there for you for your dynamic block skill set.