Saturday, October 05, 2013
An AutoCAD Hip Tip on Rectangular Arrays
Lynn Allen's Blog: Autodesk did a major overhaul on the ARRAY command in AutoCAD 2012...then took it even further in AutoCAD 2013.
Check out my latest video on the new and improved ARRAY command (and check out everything you can do with those array grips!).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
I've been fighting with the new array command since they first did that overhaul. Thankfully they kept the old version alive within the program and you can still use it if you enter 'ARRAYCLASSIC' into the command line. Before seeing this tutorial I hadn't noticed the grips; (probably because within the first few of minutes of updating to 2012 and discovering the change in the way the command interfaces and immediately searched the internet for a way to use the old one). It also appears that I was at a bit of disadvantage because I work in the AutoCAD Classic setup, so I don't have all the ribbons. Which means that some features like editing the array in the ribbon aren't available to me, it either have to work via the command line to edit the array settings or find an alternative method (i.e. ARRAYCLASSIC). Additionally I hadn't noticed the grips yet, which seem incredibly useful when manipulating the array after creating the default, especially because you can change you spacing between rows or columns by basepoint. This will allow you to be more accurate by hard entering the distance of the move or offset between rows and columns from a designated point, ultimately allowing your work to be much more accurate.
I've never been clear on how to really use the new array command since I started working with 2013. This video actually explains some key points that I never even noticed. First off, I didn't realize the grips changed row and such like that. That makes things so much easier now that I don't have to enter numbers each and every time. To add to that, it is a huge relief to know that I don't have to just explode the array whenever I want to edit an individual object.The control click is going to save me tons of time now.
I was already familiar with the rectangular array feature, as anyone who took Studiocraft AutoCAD would be. However, I wasn't aware of the grips because I like to do more things by numbers. However, now that I do, I will probably be using them in the near future. I always marvel at how great of a tool AutoCAD is. I'm more used to Solidworks and Vectorworks, but AutoCAD is sort of like both of those combined.
Im kinda surprised how few people have noticed the grips. I use them from time to time but I prefer to just use the command line. However the thing that this video was very helpful with is the ability to select individual units from the array without having to explode it but instead by control clicking individual objects in the array. I need to test it out to see if the modified objects in the array will still interact as part of the array.
The grips are very nice. I recently used the array command as was loving the selection in the top of the screen to choose the number of rows and such but being able to manually set the row number and placement seems much more efficient. What I was really excited to see was the selection of individual objects within the array by holding down the CTRL key while selecting. I wonder if this is exclusive to arrays or it if will also work in other scenarios, like blocks or groups.
Post a Comment