Placing precise dimensions in your AutoCAD drawings - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Instructor] As per the previous videos in the chapter, we're still in our annotation.dwg file. Now, in the previous video we went through how a dimension style is set up and I took you through the key parts of an existing dimension style in the drawing. That dimension style is called LinkedIn_Learning. So on the home tab on the ribbon, just click on the annotation flyout. Just make sure that you are using LinkedIn_Learning as your current dimension style. If you're not, click on the arrow, select LinkedIn_Learning, like so, and make sure it's the current dimension style. We're staying on the A-010-D_DIM layer as well. Just to make sure you're still using that layer too. Now we're going to take a look at placing just a few precise, accurate dimensions on the drawing. Now they will be annotative. Now that's a really important thing to consider because we need to mention how annotation scales work. Now, you'll find in the model tab where you are now, on the status bar, there's a little scale readout here. Can you see it says one to one at the moment? Click on the little arrow next to it and it will give you a list of all the scales available. Now in this particular case, you're setting your scale in the model tab. Now this is your annotation scale. If I just move away from that and hit escape, hover over it and it should tell you that it's the annotation scale of the current view. Click to adjust scale. So we click on it and we're going to select 1:100, like so. So now you'll see that 1:100 displays on the status bar. Now why have we set it up as 1:100? Well, we're starting to think now about how we communicate our design, how we output our drawings at this point, because people need to be able to read that annotation. You'll notice there is a tab in the drawing, ISO A1-Landscape. Click on it. That is an A1 sheet of paper, which is normally 841 by 594 millimeters. So how are you going to get that massive floor plan onto a sheet of paper that is that small? Well this is where you start scaling your views to fit them onto a sheet of paper and output them as sheets, so that people can see your design intent. You're communicating your design intent. Now we do go into this in a lot more depth in the AutoCAD Essential Training course. This is the Learning AutoCAD course, it's your taster. So what we've got is a simple sheet of paper with one scaled view port. Now if I hover over that scaled view port, can you see the standard scale is 1:100. So if we want our annotative dimensions using our annotative dimension style to display, they need to use an annotation scale of 1:100 to work in this scaled viewport of 1:100. That's kind of it in a nutshell. I don't want to embellish on it 'cause it can get complicated. So as long as you make sure that your ISO A1-Landscape tab has that 1:100 viewport there, just hover over it, it'll highlight and you'll get a readout like that. Can you see it's 1:100? We now go back down to the model tab and click on the model tab and we're back into our view. Now we're drawing everything real life full size in the model tab. It then gets scaled by 1:100 in that view port on the sheet of paper in the ISO A1-Landscape layout tab. Now we'll cover that a little bit more in the next chapter as well, but what I want to get back to is placing precise annotation. Now that we've got our annotation scale set to 1:100 in the model tab, we know it will display n the 1:100 viewport. I'm going to zoom in on our conference table that we created previously, like so and I'm simply going to add a couple of simple, precise dimensions to the table. Now before I do that, make sure that object snap here is on and you've got the appropriate object snaps that you want to use. So normally endpoint, midpoint, center are on, intersection and extension are on. And then you can just click once in the drawing and just make sure that object snaps is blue like that. It's on, O snap needs to be on. I'm going to simply dimension just a few little pieces on the table itself. So I might zoom in a little bit more actually. There we go. That's better. Now you can see it bigger on the screen. We're on the right layer, the DIM layer and annotation flyer, we're using LinkedIn-Learning. Now I can place dimensions using the tools in the annotation panel here. Now I always think they're a bit limited, so I go to the annotate tab on the ribbon and there's all of my dimensioning tools in the dimensions panel. If I click on this little fly out here where it says linear, there's all my dimension types. So I'm going to use linear. Click on linear. We're going to go midpoint here. On that arc left click. Midpoint here. On that arc left click. That's our two origin points and there is our linear dimension. So rolled back on the wheel one notch and I'll just take that up a little bit and the dimension can sit there like that. Now you'll notice our conference room text is kind of getting in the way a little bit. No problem there, click on it, click on the grip. Let's pop that down in that corner there like that. Hit escape a couple of times to deselect. That's how quick and easy it is to start fooling around with your annotation and your dimension annotation on a drawing. Now the reason that that text looks quite big there is because we're using that 1:100 annotation scale, you might possibly set up some different scales, different view ports, different dimension styles to make that look less large, to use a phrase. I'm going to zoom in on the table again. And what I'm going to do now is do another linear dimension here. I might go from this end point on the arc to this end point on the arc. Again, two clicks. As I drag that outwards, you'll notice something about this particular dimension. The text is too big to fit in between the arrows. Now that goes back to that fit tab in the dimension style. Good thing is, I can hover over the dimension and click on it like so. When I click on it, I get various grips. There is a grip just there on that text. Can you see it? If you hover over it, you get various options of placement. Use move text only and you can move the text and just place it a little bit further up there. It might not sit exactly in it. It's bit tight. Can you see that? So you might want to place it just outside of the dimension extension lines and click. Hit escape a couple of times. Look at that, nice and neat and tidy. We've got a couple of dimensions in there. Now as you can see, those dimensions are quite large. In fact, they relate to these dimensions between the grid lines because I'm using that 1:100 annotation scale. Now obviously those are just some simple linear dimensions. You might want to place a different dimension. Let's say a radius. If I click on radius and select this arc with the pick box, there is a radius of 750. And again, you might not want that inside the table, so come outside before you place pop it there, I'll left click and there's the radius of 750. Note there's a little dot there highlighting the center of that radius as well. Now what I'd like you to do as a call to action is jump into this list and perhaps use some of the other dimension types while you're working on this particular drawing. You don't just have to dimension the table. You can dimension anything you want. Something you might want to do is just double click on the mouse wheel to zoom extents. There's a lot of things in here that you can play around at and dimension. You'll notice those dimensions there all sit nicely in the new conferencing area with the new conference table and so on. And if I jump into the ISO A1 Landscape tab, can you see there? They're in that particular viewport. Now as long as you don't double click on the viewport to make it active, you can zoom in and can you see there? They all display nicely and look consistent based on the dimension style. Double click on the wheel to zoom extents again and again it only zooms to the viewport when you zoom extents in the layout tabs. So you might need to roll back on the wheel a notch just to centralize that, pan a little bit. It's always good to have your sheets centralized in your layout tab when you're not using it. We'll jump back into the model tab now and you can see there's our dimensions there and we might want to place other dimensions in the drawing as we use AutoCAD.