From the course: AutoCAD: Tips & Tricks

397 LAYOUT - Working with named views and viewports - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD: Tips & Tricks

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397 LAYOUT - Working with named views and viewports

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- Welcome to another tip and trick for AutoCAD. In this particular Tips and Tricks video, we're going to be taking a look at how we can work with named views and put those named views automatically into view ports in the layout tab. So we have a drawing for you. It's called 397namedViewsandviewports.dwg. You can download it from the library to follow along with the tips and tricks video. When you open up the drawing, just make sure that you are initially in the model tab because that's where we're going to be setting up our named views. Now you'll notice this is quite a large floor plan. It's a big building and you can see the 2D floor plan there. You can see the stairs, you can see the desks, you can see the cubicles and so on. Now the whole idea is to navigate a large drawing like this, you need to set up some named views and then those named views can automatically be made into view ports working with them in your layout tabs. Now the idea is, is that we can do that quickly and easily from what is known as the view manager. Now in later versions of AutoCAD, you can go to the view tab on the ribbon and there's the view manager right there in the named views panel. Older versions of AutoCAD don't have that. So what you do is you go to where it says top here in the view controls and you'll see that view manager is on the dropdown menu right there. That opens up the view manager dialogue box. And you'll notice if I go to view here and view manager there on the name views panel, it does exactly the same thing. Now we are going to be generating model views. So if I click on that little plus sign there, you can see there is a model view there called one. You can ignore the one view. Now what we could do there is actually select it, right click on it, and you could delete it if you wanted to like so. But make sure you select model views and click on new, like so. Now you'll notice it's quite a small dialogue box. Click on the little fly out there and you can see that there's lots of other settings that can apply to your new named view. This is a really nice feature. Save layer snapshot with view. So your named view will remember the layer settings and properties from when you created the named view. So the view name for the first name view is going to be entrance. So it's going to be the entrance to the building. So the view category, there aren't any in there at the moment, but we might call these plan views for example. Bear in mind you can also create named views in a 3D model as well. The view type will be still, it won't be cinematic or recorded walk. It will be still. And then notice we can click on this button here to define the view window or we can just click on define window here. I always click on the button, takes us into the drawing. The entrance is there. This black area is the boundary of the default view that AutoCAD does to the extents of the drawn elements. So I'm going to zoom in a bit. There's our entrance there, so I'm going to pick a point, try not to snap to an object. Snap if you can obviously help it. So I'll go in there, let's go there where Janice Ford is like that. And then we'll come out and come out to let's say the middle of that cubicle there, about there like that. I want to zoom out now. Can you see that black area is my named view? I'll press enter to confirm and that basically sets up that particular view. So I'll click o, okay. You don't need to worry about any of these settings in the view properties or shop properties. They tend to be a lot more for cinematic effects and 3D settings. So you can ignore all of those. Just click on okay, and you can see entrance has been added there to the list. So we're going to click on new again and this time we're going to call this one stairs west and then a dash. And then I'm going to put west in caps like that. Again, the view category will be plan views, but you can click on the dropdown now. It's in there already 'cause you've already put it in there. Plan views and it will be still again. Click on the button to define the boundary, zoom out a bit and the west stairs are there. So I'm going to click there, drag it across to about there. That'll do there. That's fine. Enter to confirm and click on okay. And you can see we've got the stairs west in there like so. So that gives us a couple of named model views to play with. So I'll click on okay now and what I can do now is I can go here on the dropdown in the named views panel. I can go to stairs west, which are there. I can click there. I can go to the entrance and you can see those named views. I can zoom in and out of them using the dropdown menu there. For those of you that don't have the named views panel, you can go here like so, go to custom model views. Stairs west is there and do the same again, click again, custom model views entrance like so. When I zoom out, double click on the wheel like that. Can you see it goes back to the top view there in the view control. So it's quick and easy to get around with these. Now one of the nice things that you can do when you're creating a new view port in your layout tab, is you can assign one of these named views to a view port. So what I'm going to do now, I'm going to go to the NCD landscape layout tab. There it is there like so, and I'm going to go to the layout tab on the ribbon like that. Now this is the best bit. I can just go insert view or what I can do is create a rectangular view like so, and perhaps possibly go to that named view in the view port. Now the quicker way of doing this is just insert view. If I click there like that, there's entrance, there's stairs west. So I'll click on entrance, bring that in. That sits nicely there. Have you noticed that it also sets up a scale for you for that particular view port as well. So if I just pan up a little bit now, I should be able to get the stairs just underneath. So again, insert view stairs west. It's a little bit too big there. So what I could do is right click to change the scale. At the moment that's coming in at one to 30. So what I could potentially do there is change that. I should really be using imperial scales anyway. So let's have a little play with these and go with something like that one there. That's a bit small, isn't it really? Let's try one 16th. Again, a bit small, we could come down a bit more. Let's go for a quarter, and a quarter works quite nicely. That'll fit just under the GA there like so. Now again, this one here, I'm going to select the view port and notice when you bring them in, they're locked. So that is currently at a quarter of an inch to one foot. That's great. That's a good scale to work with. This one here, you'll notice as well, also locked at a quarter of an inch to one foot. So you can see there now that we've got some really nice view ports going on with specific scales. So what I've done is I've inserted those view ports using my named views in my model tab. It's a very useful little feature to have. Get into those named views, especially when you're working on large general arrangement floor plans like this one that we've got in this particular drawing.

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