Creating 2D and 3D sections and elevations for viewports - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Narrator] We're moving into another chapter now where we're going to look at developing your 3D design a little further. You'll notice on the screen that we've got a house that looks a little bit more sophisticated than the house we worked with in the previous chapter. That's because it is, it's been enhanced a little bit with some extra windows, doors. It's got a roof there with an awning and a porch and so on. And what I've done there is given you a nice, little sort of simple, 3D house to work with for this particular chapter. In fact, the drawing is called 3Dhouse.DWG, and you can download it from the library to follow along with the videos in this particular chapter. When you open it up, make sure you are in the model tap, and you're utilizing the Southwest isometric view there. Make sure it's not set to perspective like that, you want it set to parallel for the moment, like so, and I'm using the shaded visual style. It's better than conceptual in this case. Conceptual looks a bit pasty I always think, so I'm just going to use the shaded option, like so with the visual styles. So remember, south west isometric, parallel and the shaded visual style. Now, what we're going to look at in this chapter is things like elevations and sections and how we can create those to work with our designs, so that we can communicate our design intent later. Because at the moment, in this particular south west isometric view, you're not going to be able to add any dimensional annotation for example, you want to be able to do that with elevations and sections and come off of known snap points, object snap points, where you can actually place the dimensional annotation quickly and easily. So let's have a look at how that works. One of the things you can utilize is your preset views that are already in AutoCAD, in a 3D environment. So on the home tab, on the ribbon, we're going to go over to the view panel here, click on the flyer and say, I would like multiple viewports. Now, as soon as I do that, you'll see that two of my viewports have worked really well. I've got a top view and I've got my south west isometric view there, but these two views have gone blank. Now, bear in mind, these are preset views. So they're using default settings. So select the view, double-click on the wheel to zoom extents, and there's your front view there. Basically what it's doing is it's going to a preset view that's looking elsewhere. So we're going here, double-click here again on the wheel. Double-click on the worlds to zoom extent and there's our right-hand view as well. And they're pretty basic views of what is a pretty basic, little house model that we've created. Now, the whole idea of this house model is to allow you to generate those elevations and sections. One of the benefits you have with these preset views that you can see in the viewport, is you can apply them to any of your layout view ports at any time as well. So we've got this view here in this particular viewport and it's front shaded. So if I go into the elevations 3D layout tab, I've got a simple viewport. Let's click on the edge of it, click on the grip, drag, make it a little bit bigger. I'll double-click inside the viewport to activate it. And then I'll double click again with the wheel to zoom extents. So I've got a south west isometric shaded view at the moment. I can change that to my front view, like that. And there's my shaded front view in my viewport. Double-click outside of the viewport, that can then go on a sheet in my plot, my print, my PDF that I'm going to show to the client later on in the meeting with the client, to show progress on the project. So you can see how those preset views save you a huge amount of time. Imagine having to try and generate those in a 2D CAD environment. The lovely thing is, you've got a real life 3D model, and I can actually say I'm looking at it from the front, with that front view in that viewport. Very quick and easy to set up. So let's jump back now to our model tab. What I'm going to do is select the top view here like so, and I'm going to go into the top view. I'm going to roll back on the wheel, just a notch on the mouse and pan a little bit. So that's sort of central in that viewpoint because the other thing that you can generate in 3d AutoCAD is sectional views. And to use a phrase, a picture does paint 1000 words. And what you can do here is just add a section plane really quickly. So if I go to the home tab now and into the section panel, there's section plane, click on it, and I'm just going to put a horizontal section plane, click, drag horizontally using the polar tracking, click again and there's my section plane. And the benefit I have is that section plane can be clicked on and it can be moved in any direction. So what I can do now is I can actually click on this and drag and move it down. Can you see, I'm moving it around in the other views there. And when I release and click again, it updates and I've now got, if I hit escape once just to de-select that plane, a really nice view here. You can also see some of the 2D elements that we used to create the 3D house as well. So if I click this isometric view and just zoom in a bit now, can you see, I'm cutting through the house, through the windows there, through the window frames. And I've got a really nice sort of sectional view going on there as well. I'll just double-click now to obviously zoom extents on the wheel. Double-click on the wheel to zoom extents at any time, in any view, if you get a little bit lost, but the lovely thing about this section plane is I can select it and I can also flip it. So if I click on this little arrow here, flips it round, and I've got a section plane looking in a different direction. So I'm keeping this part of the house. And now the section is kind of over here. So I kind of need to flip it round. I can click in here if I want to, just flip that around that way, doing an orbit, let's say so that's holding down shift and holding down the wheel and there you go, I've got a different sectional view now. And what I can do there is use the view cube, clip there and actually make it the north east isometric view if I want to. So you can see how we can start to generate these sectional views and elevational views in our AutoCAD drawings, utilizing our 3D model. That's what we're going to do as we work through this particular chapter in the course.