Creating 3D camera views in AutoCAD - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Instructor] We're starting another chapter now, and we want to start thinking about how we can create some great visuals in AutoCAD from our 3D design in our 3D environment. Now, you'll remember in the last chapter, we got everything set up to communicate our design intent. So what I've done is I've copied that file, saved it with a different file name, and you can download it from the library to follow along with this chapter. This time it's called 3Dhouse-visuals.dwg. So download that file, open it up in AutoCAD, and you should have something similar to what's going on on the screen at the moment. We're currently in the elevations 3D layout tab. You'll notice we have an extra camera and render tab as well, which just has the one viewport. You'll notice my viewport is active there, just double-click outside the viewport to deactivate it. You should always deactivate your viewports. We're going to utilize that particular camera and render layout tab later on in the chapter. What I'd like you to do is go to the Model tab, like so, and what we're going to do, we're going to set up our Southwest isometric view. You can use view control or the view cube, and then a little bit of panning and zooming, and zoom in on the actual 3D model of our house. Now, we're not working with things like elevations, sanctions or flat shots here, we're placing a 3D camera to get some really cool visuals of our house in our 3D model. So we're going to go to the layers panel in the home tab first, layer properties, and we want to create a new layer and we're just going to call it cameras like so. So there's cameras there, give it a color. I've got red, that's absolutely fine for now, but just make sure it's the current drafting layer. So just double-click there on the little sheet of paper or close the land properties manager and use the dropdown, but just make sure that cameras is your current drafting layer. We're then going to go to the visualize tab on the ribbon again, like we've done previously, and we're going to look over here at the camera panel. Now there's two commands here. Create camera, show cameras, make sure that show cameras is on like so, you want to make sure that that's on and then create a camera. Now, as soon as you do that, you'll see this little camera appear. Now we need to specify our camera location. I'm going to pop it about here. So sort of looking towards the entrance and the little awning and the column there. So I'm going to click once and that places it, and as I drag now, can you see the lens of the camera comes out and goes across the building like so. Ideally, you want to take it all the way through the building to say about there. You can, if you want to though, pick on a point on the building. So if I pick that top apex of the roof, the camera you'll notice is looking upwards towards the apex of the roof. Now, ideally you want to give this a name, so click on name, I'm going to call this entrance 3D because it's a 3D view of the entrance of the building. So I'll just put entrance-3D like that, and press enter, that gives it a name. Now, as soon as I click on exit, like, so, my camera is placed and every time I hover over it, because I've got show cameras on, it'll highlight them. That's why I always leave the show cameras on. When I'm working in the model space, you want to be able to see where those cameras are. Now if I go to the view tab here on the ribbon though, and click here, you'll notice my entrance 3D camera view has been saved as a named view. That's great because I can now apply my camera views to perhaps a viewport in a layout tab. But before we do that, we want to make sure our camera view is working. So I click on the camera, and as soon as I do that, I get my camera preview and I love this. This is a great tool, and I always leave this ticked. I always display this window when editing a camera because I then get a sanity check of what my camera view actually looks like. So at the moment you remember, we placed the camera down here and it looked up to the apex on the roof there. So you can see, it's kind of on the ground looking up. That's because the Z value of our camera at the moment is zero. So with the camera selected, it's a right click on properties. And you'll see that our Z value there is zero. I'm going to change that so it's actually up and looking down on the house, let's say three and a half meters, 3500 millimeters. Now as soon as I do that, can you see it changes? It kind of looks horizontally at the house now, and you can see there that that's still not really where I want it to be, so I'm going to change that value. Let's change it to two meters. So that's about six feet above ground level. And that gives me a nice view you'll notice there. So I'm going to close the properties palette, and what I can do now is I can hover over the camera, click on the grip, and as I move the camera around and move it back, can you see, I'm getting a nice view in my camera preview, like so, click again. And my camera has now been moved and my previews given me a great preview of the front, the entrance 3D view of the house. Now what I love about this is I can change my visual style at any time, so I can see what it looks like. X-rays quite a nice one actually for camera views, I quite light x-ray because you can see right through your 3D model, but as you can see there, you've got all these grips available to you to edit the lens of the camera and how wide you want the lens of where you want the lens to be. So once you're happy with that, you can close the camera preview for the moment and just hit escape a couple of times to de-select your camera, is now placed where you want it to be. And if you go to the view tab here on the ribbon and click here, you've got your entrance 3D view. So if I click there, you can see there's the entrance 3D view. If I go back here to see my Southwest isometric, like, so, I can see my camera there as well. Now you'll notice because we've been using cameras, it's also utilizing perspective rather than parallel because a camera gives us a real world view. So I go back to parallel and as you can see, there it is right there. Now, bear in mind, I can alter this view at any time like, so. There's my view there, there's my camera preview. That's the view that I'm going to get when I look through my camera and I can change the visual style, like I said, at any time. So just de-select your camera now. And what we'll start thinking about is how we can utilize that view in a layout tab to become part of our 3D project.