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Thursday, October 20, 2016

Real-life AutoCAD drawing tips | AutoCAD Blog Tuesday Tip

blogs.autodesk.com: Wow, was I ever delighted by the responses I received from last week’s gate design challenge! The first correct answer came from Emre Cengizoglu, a MSc civil engineer from Turkey. Emre, who works for a company doing steel projects, started with a reference circle with the radius of the diagonal length, created a 1-1/2” brace with that diagonal, and then used the Align command to place it.

6 comments:

Kelly Simons said...

I probably maybe should have read the first gate challenge to understand exactly what this article was talking about. However, I wanted to read this article because I know very little about Auto CAD. My undergrad was all Vectorworks, so it’s been quite a challenging cross over to switch to Auto CAD. My biggest difficulty with Auto CAD is learning to type my commands instead of clicking on a picture of a tool like in Vectorworks. I’m slowly breaking myself of the habit, but sometimes it’s all too easy to fall back into looking for a tool in the drop down menus rather than typing a command out. Sometimes I don’t know the command name I’m looking for which can lead to a certain amount of frustration. I guess it just takes more practice to become a fast draftsperson in Auto Cad. Like anything, it’ll take a little while to learn this new skill.

Drew H said...

I am kind of confused by this article. It seems as though the challenge that was posed was not that complicated. I was expecting some crazy trick I had never seen or heard of. But I think I probably could have figured out how to do this gate myself. I like the idea of this real life drawing tips section though because it gives practical answers to problems that I might see on a daily basis while drafting. I think I may subscribe to “AutoCAD Tuesday Tips” because I know there is so much about AutoCAD that I have no idea how to use. I am hoping to really improve my skills and become a faster, better draftsman, since that is what I will be spending a lot of my future doing. I am hoping that looking at random tips will be helpful to me since you never know when a easy little trick will do exactly what you need to do that next day and I am hoping that these tips will help me daily.

Chris Calder said...

These gate design challenges actually seem very cool. It is amazing how many different ways you can get to the same result in Autocad or any drafting software for that matter. If I were in this challenge I would probably use the second option mainly because it makes sense to me. I had to read the first one two or three times to really grasp how it worked. The coolest thing about this article is that anyone can come up with a method and there are so many different people that use the same program and have a different way of getting there. During my CAD class last year one of the main things that the professor emphasized was the ability to achieve the same end result but having many different ways to get there. When I was reading this I also had in the back of my mind how I would go about doing this if I was hand drafting. My method would be even more technical and would probably involve many more reference lines.

Unknown said...

There is still quite a bit to Autocad I don’t know yet, and what’s great is I’m still learning. This tip has been pretty useful to me in the past. Or at least tried to do something similar when I am unable to get something to line up the way I want. What better way to go about doing what I want than to work with a simple tip like this? I should probably take advantage of the tutorial videos of tips and tricks for Autocad. Plenty of Youtubers out there wanting to share their knowledge, and plenty of ways to do something to get the same result. It’s all about efficiency. So why try to make your own life difficult. Now you’ve got to compete with those using Vectorworks, Solidworks, Rhino, you name it. The software programs just keep on coming, so it wouldn’t hurt to try to take advantage of another program.

Daniel Silverman said...

There really isn’t much substance to this tip. In fact, there really isn’t a tip at all. This seems to be the solution to a proposed problem in the past. The article does offer a few pieces of advice, but they are really pretty basic tips that apply to pretty much any CAD program I appreciate the author saying that there are different ways to solve the problem and, especially in AutoCAD, there is generally more than one way to do something. The offset, trim, and rotate commands are all very basic. While someone just starting in AutoCAD might not understand these, it doesn’t take much to figure it out. The one thing it does say that people might not be aware of is using a reference line to rotate an object. This is actually my preferred method because it allows me to see exactly where I am rotating an object from and to.

Unknown said...

I'm just learning CAD, but I connect it to other programs I have used to fully understand the programs. CAD has a lot of the same principals as photoshop and illustrator, and just like the article says, in all of these programs there are a million ways to get to the end result and it's all about how you interpret each step of the draft/what tools and commands you know/what you want as your end result. I'm glad this website is putting out a lot of these tips too because sometimes tutorials will just try to cover every command quickly but this shows little hacks to make the process more streamlined.