From the course: AutoCAD Mechanical Essential Training

Explore the AutoCAD Mechanical user Interface - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Mechanical Essential Training

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Explore the AutoCAD Mechanical user Interface

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- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our AutoCAD Mechanical Essential Training course. And what we're going to look at is the AutoCAD Mechanical user interface. Now bear in mind, for this chapter you do not need to download any drawings, any folders, or anything like that at all. I'm just taking you through the interface and showing you where things are, and the differences between this interface and the regular AutoCAD interface. So let's have a look at this interface, just in brief first, and then we'll get into a bit more detail in some of the other videos in the chapter. So when we first look at AutoCAD Mechanical, the layout of everything is still the same as regular AutoCAD. So over here we've got our Application menu, Top of the screen, top-left, we've got our Quick Access toolbar. We've got the tabs on the ribbon you'll notice, and we've got the ribbon at the top of the screen. Got the info bar on the right-hand side where we can sign into our Autodesk account. And then, as we come down into the drawing area, you'll see it doesn't look any different, and also you'll notice the big difference is over on the left-hand side we have a thing called the Mechanical Browser. Now what this allows us to do is it allows us to work with our mechanical assemblies. So, you'll notice in this drawing it's a robot arm assembly So, you can see here, if I expand these out we've got the Parts List for the Main robot assembly the Robot, the Plastic Tray, and also the Gripper Assembly as well. So there's all these different parts of the robot arm and they can all be defined as different parts of an assembly. And then what happens is you pull them all together It's a bit like, I suppose, using external references in AutoCAD, but you're kind of linking them all together in the one model in AutoCAD Mechanical. Now the whole idea of this interface is that the interface is the same for each Autodesk product. The ribbon at the top of the screen, command line at the bottom of the screen, Model and Layout tabs bottom-left, status bar down here, bottom-right. So you can see how everything is familiar to you from your regular AutoCAD, but there are subtle differences with your AutoCAD Mechanical.

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