AutoCAD Architecture Tutorial
I am NOT going to be showing everything there is to be had in the software this is just an introduction I'm really happy to see that there's a lot of people online so there must be a lot of interest for
AutoCAD architecture and I'm really curious to know what industry the 31 percent of people there in an other industry are in but I guess I will have to just wonder about that so the first thing I want to talk about with the software is a little bit about the user interface so it's very similar to
AutoCAD means built on AutoCAD so you know what you know in AutoCAD is available inside of AutoCAD architecture there may be some commands that are not as visible as they are and the in the people are AutoCAD version but you can always go back to the AutoCAD version if you wanted to by changing the AutoCAD
profile to AutoCAD architecture but it's the same kind of interface so we have you know a ribbon where we have access to our various objects the the most important thing with the software is that instead of managing drawing a building using AutoCAD entities like lines arcs blocks etc and you know managing the layers of things are being placed on in AutoCAD architecture we're actually using real-world objects so when I draw a wall
I'm drawing a wall I'm not drawing a bunch of lines that that may be on different layers with hatch patterns or whatever
I'm actually just drawing a wall when I insert a door the door knows how to behave within a wall so you can see how that all works and objects can be very simple um you have a door is not a very complex object but they can also be very complex so when
I when I get to drawing a stair or curtain wall you'll see how how intricate these objects can be how they react so we have the the ribbon is is certainly the main thing and you'll see that when I draw a wall or something and I select on it we also can get a contextual tab with commands that are specific to that type of an object so it
brings up the wall tab here with information where I can get style or I can change information about you know the justification or any of any of the different types of commands that can be manipulated within that type of an object we also heavily used tool palette so on the the main tab here the design tab you'll have the various types of objects but it's just going to start the command so if I pick on wall it's just gonna start the wall command we also can break it down into specific types of walls so if I wanted to draw a concrete wall
I can select on concrete and I'm drawing a concrete wall instead of just a generic wall so you have a lot of information that's readily available
here and the tool palette that you can access directly and you'll see in a little bit how much time you can save by using these objects instead of just lies acts and circles so AutoCAD architecture you know gets into everything from basic construction drawings drawing walls drawers windows it does space planning so you can create different types of spaces and create reports about the spaces we have symbology for
furniture plumbing fixtures all that type of stuff that's built-in you can do solids using something that is a lot more user-friendly than a solid something we call massing elements which are much much more memory efficient than just a traditional AutoCAD solid and and at least as is flexible if not more flexible than an AutoCAD object so we have all of that type of information and if you right-click on the tool palette you'll see that we can switch between the designs palettes which I have open
right now to the documentation palette where we can get into information like various types annotation different types of call-outs and tags and schedules that are defined within the software also some display things so it can create spaces based on fire rating and things like that know create a thematic map of the of the object of the spaces and we also have the detailing panel where we can get into just a basic detail components but again you could break this down into getting directly into masonry components or various components to draw your construction details and it'll go ahead and place the information here
So I can just place a bunch of CMU's real quick so that's the tool
palettes a mist can go back to a design palette for a moment some of the other things that you're going to use quite a bit here and I'm not going to get into a lot of detail but we have the style manager which will allow me to manage the various types of styles that I have in my drawing so if I look at a concrete wall I can actually see the components
there that the walls made up of material that's assigned to it you know assign endcap or cleanup information and how the walls going to react to doors and windows same things I look at doors or anything so this is going to show anything that's in my current drawing file and you can open up a style drawing just in the open command and drag and drop something in here but we also have something that introduced recently the
last release or so which is called the styles browser and this tool will allow
me to search to whichever drawings I have as far as content and so right now
I'm looking at all my content drawings and then I can sit there and say you know I want a CMU wall and it'll show me all the walls that are defined as a CMU wall so in these walls can be quite
complex right they don't have to just be a simple wall if I want to just you know
double click on this wall to draw one of these walls and just turning a corner
here you'll see that first of all I'm not drawing a line and offsetting it and
setting it to a specific layer and on a different color and adding hatching this
is actually just a single object you know I can stretch or change however I
want and it automatically cleans up with its neighboring objects so I have this
wall cleaning up with this one and
we're getting nice crisp clean ups here but we
can even do things like assigning
the return on my brick so the brick is actually stopping and coming back and
meeting up with the insulation or
the CMU on the other component so you can
you can draw things here in arkad
architecture very simply and if we would
just flip to a 3d view and I look at
this in realistic mode this is kind of a
boring site just by CMU side here
but if I flip to the other side to the wall
you'll see there here's my brick so
materials are being mapped to these things as well and you'll see how that
works as we as we kind of move
through and then if I wanted this wall be on one
of my two pallets and it's not there
already you can just drag-and-drop the tool pallet or the object to the tool
pallet and you know link to that
style as well so the Styles browser is a a great way of searching
through things and you'll see that
within the Styles browser
Miska changed back to to the 2d
wireframe okay and it looks like my
cursor is not behaving there we go
so we can also search for other types of
objects yeah it looks like I'm made
of
locked up AutoCAD architecture so
bear with me for just a moment I'm sure that
it's that GoToWebinar that's causing
the problem I don't get architecture all
right so let's go restart AutoCAD
real quick
I'm sure that nobody on the webinars
ever I had an experience but the
software is crashed for locked up on
them so this wouldn't be a new experience for you but it's just wait
for this to lock load back up
it looks like we're almost there
this just gives me a good opportunity to
remind everybody he does save often
and save early just like loading right so
thankfully I didn't really lose anything
because that was just working with a dummy file anyway bringing that back up
so just a couple other things real
quick as far as user interface and again I'm
not gonna get into a lot of the
details here so we also have something called a display manager and I show a
couple of
examples here with what this does
but basically you you can tell AutoCAD architecture how to display various
objects depending on the view and
what you want to see so in one viewport you
could be showing a very high level
of detail so you're seeing they are the hatching
in the walls and such and another
viewport you could be displaying just a very basic simple level of detail low
level of detail or presentation view
of the model and that could spend an entire
session talking about display
manager so we're not going to get into a lot of detail here the other thing
that I'm not
really going to touch upon but I
just explaining a little bit here it's the project navigator and project
navigator
is similar to the sheet set manager
if you're familiar with the sheet set manager in AutoCAD with additional
capabilities so I can set up
information in the project navigator with floor to
floor Heights and you know things
like that and it'll create various drawings
for me automatically just by setting
up the sheets so it's a very powerful tool and people that use project
navigator
you know that's all they do is they
use it every for every project it's a it's a
very important part of the software
so let me let me give some examples here what we can do with the within the
software first of all my palette
back over here and where I wanted it since I'm up they put it on
the other screen is well I just
start drawing a couple of walls so I borrow a
wall I can give it a start point you
know 10 feet comma 10 feet just so that
somewhere here and not gonna say
that I want to draw a 40 foot building by 30
feet and then I want to go back in
this direction and just make a rectangular building so what I'm gonna do is I'm
gonna use the ortho close option and
just pick the direction and it'll figure out how far the wall has to go to meet
the the other corner of the building
so we have a really simple in this case you
know just a generic wall and like I
said you know you can draw very complex walls
so it doesn't have to be just
something like this it can be you know something
actually let me do this I'm gonna go
back into my Styles browser and you're
hoping it up on the side and I go
back to my walls and let's search for siding
so I have a five and a half inch
wall since I'm in New Hampshire we need to
have you know thicker walls you
might have down in floor or something I'm just gonna select that and I'm not
gonna draw
that wall I'm just gonna go ahead
and close this I'll select the walls here go
to my property palette and I'm gonna
select my wall with siding and I
probably put that in the wrong
direction so if I'm unlucky which I believe I am
here so I can flip the walls around
so
that the siding is on the outside of
the wall instead of on the inside of the wall just using my grip and again if I
were to look at this in realistic
mode right now I've got siding on the side of
my wall not just a generic wall so
these
grips that are available within the
software are very very powerful
if I just select it on a wall you'll
see that there are grips to extend the wall
so I'm going to extend it there's a
grip to move the end of the wall so I can
just move it or things like flip
which will you know flip the wall from inside
to outside so you know these grips
are there to help you in your day-to-day
drafting hey when I place the door
in the wall so I'm just gonna grab a I'm
just gonna select it from the two
from the ribbon here and let's see what we have right now I'm set to just a
standard door so I can just place
this actually when I go to place a door
you're gonna see that I can select
the size to the door just by picking the little drop down here and I can enter
in
whatever size I want and then
there's a nice option in here as far as stretch
this out just a little bit so you
can see it there's an option here says position along the wall and I can have
it unconstrained where I can just
pick the door and it'll just kind of follow
along wherever I put it or you can
tell it to case it was a little bit more of
intelligence I said I wanted to
either be offset in this case six inches from a corner or centered on the wall
so you'll
see as I move my cursor now it's
it's putting it in either six inches from the
corner and you see the temporary
dimensions that show to show you what's happening here or in the center of the
of the wall or six inches from the
other side so I want this to be in the middle
and I wanted to be an inswinger in
to the left so I just move my cursor so
that you see this wing we want and
place it
so very you know very easily I was
able to place that and if you make a mistake you don't have to erase it you can
just
use the flip options to have
position the door how you want it so I did wind
up the way I had it there so so very
simple right I'll go ahead and place
some windows and see when I said to
you I'm set to just a standard window I'm
gonna say I want this to be a double
hung window I don't want to be three foot by five foot so you want to make whatever
size you want right now I'm placing this it on the head height of
the window and then telling it that
I want that to be at six foot eight so I place the or select a wall again I
have
this set to be offset or Center but
this time I have it set to three feet away from the corner or centered so
that's
what I want and I'm just gonna go
ahead and and move my cursor you see that it's jumping from whatever to
whatever so
I've got three feet from the from
the corner I'm gonna say I want to be feet from the door to be feet from this
door
and to be feet from the other corner
so really quickly I could place those those
windows you know spaced evenly a lot
in my building and again this is don't
don't judge my design because I'm
not an architect but it's that easy to place
and then if you had I just want
place another one of these same types great
tool that we have is this add
selected feature and add selected will start you by placing the same object
type so maybe
I have a kitchen back here and I
want that same double hung window but in this
case I only want it to be maybe
three feet high because it's going to be above
the counter and I just want to place
it there and let me see if they just flip
to a view point here you'll see that
now I've got my double hung windows which probably
flipped around backwards me I
shouldn't should be the top camera on the outside but again to switch swapping
something
like that is just hit the flipped
grip and you can fix the the pianos there but then they have my three-foot
window
which is has the same head height
but it's only to be feet high instead of 5 feet high so very quickly I'm
starting
the layout of a very simple design
and certainly AutoCAD architecture does a
lot more than residential design you
know it can be use to create the Freedom
Tower in Manhattan just as easily as
it can be used to create a you know a nice small log home or something but I
want
to show you a little bit more about
how you can edit some of this information so first of all this this is that's a
pretty boring door right now right
it's just a solid panel door and that's the front of my house so I might not
want
that to be just a really simple
solid panel door so I can say maybe I want
that to be an exterior door with
some pianos in it alright and I can change that and now I
have a nice looking door there it's
not just you know a solid piece of wood or metal and you know if you didn't
want
something with you know glass in it
or something you know just go to the Styles
browser and you can find a different
style for me I've always liked buttons
in my windows so instead of just a
double hung window I'm gonna select on where these windows and I'm gonna go do
the Edit style button up here in the
in the ribbon and I'm gonna go to the
display properties and I'm gonna say
I want to add some buttons in here and I
wanted this to be added to both the
top and the bottom and only wants us to be a
half-inch wide that's good and I
want
say maybe 2 by 2 and we hit OK you
see
that I just added some buttons to
the to the windows here so you know you can add
in a lot of detail if you want to
see that level of detail within the drawing okay so I'm gonna go back to my
plans
and I'll show you a little bit more
about some of the other types of objects so obviously this is right now it's
just
a single story building but just
like the government I'm gonna go ahead and
add a steer to nowhere so I'm just
gonna put a steer in here and let's say it's
stupid a that's fine my floor the
floor heights 10 feet I'm just fine and I'm gonna say just when I started here
and I
wanted to start up that way to my
second floor so again imagine how much time it
is would take you to calculate your
riser and tread size draw the steer in a
plan view you can see that I have a
cut plane here which is controlling the display so the bottom portion of my
stair is showing up with the treads
and such and the top is just displaying as a
box and again if if we want to
actually let me do this go to viewports and I'm
gonna say I want two vertical views
and on the right side I'm gonna set to a 3d
view so not only did we create the
stair and for my construction drawing but I'm
also getting a stair in 3d that can
be shown in elevations or renderings or
whatever you want and these stairs
can be if I go back to the content Styles
rowser and I'll look at stairs okay
you
don't see that right out of the box
you know we have you know some industrial
style stairs you can't leave it
stairs concrete stairs we've got steel steel stairs ramps so
there's a lot of content here that
you can choose from right out of the box the
other thing that we could do is what
good's a stair without a railing so let's go back over here to railings and
I just wanted to set this to be just
a generic standards railing and I'll select the
side there and you can see that I
just added a railing and in this case since
awfully boring railing but if I went
to my style and I changed it to be a guide
rail it would balusters now I've got
a nice looking staircase with some nice
balusters on the side and you know
sometime with a little bit of detail that looks nice and again you can see
the materials being applied to the
objects as we go through so that was a pretty simple steer what happens if you
had to steer that's a little bit
more complex so I'm gonna do add selected
just to draw a stair let me pan out
a little bit so you can see what I'm doing here I'm just gonna draw on the side
and
I'll say that I only want to go up a
few treads and then I'm gonna add a landing and then I'm gonna continue all
stacked
direction and we just drew a nice
l-shaped steer with an extended landing
or if I select on this do add
selected again and you can see this is all the
same command okay I want to come up
and make a further make a u-shape stair so I
can sit there and swap between
various it didn't draw right maybe so we draw a
u-shape stair so you can add in you
know with a single command something very
simple or something very complex and
again adding a railing or something is just a matter of picking the edge of the
stair and it telling it to add a
railing so it's very simple to add even a high
level of detail so right now on if
I'm had this house with my spirit of nowhere
I'd probably be getting a little wet
right now if it started raining it's been raining here quite a bit last day
or so so let's put a roof on this
and to add a roof
I'm just gonna pick on the corners
of my building and you can see how it's adding
in my roof just by picking those the
corners there all right so I've got a nice roof being placed and I don't
really like the hips I would prefer
you know a gable over here so I'm just going
to use my grip on the corner and I'm
just gonna stretch it out and do it this
way stretch this and I now have you
know
a hip or a gable on both sides of
course
I'm still gonna get wet if I if it
rains because I have this big hole here
between the roof and my wall so I'm
gonna go back into my wireframe and I'm
just gonna pick on the wall again
remember the contextual tabs and such there's also by the way the same kind of
commands in the right-click menu and
I'm gonna go to this wolf roof floor line
hold down here and I'm gonna say I
want to modify the roofline and what I'm
gonna do is I'm gonna auto project
it to my roof right and you can see what
happened here do the same thing over
and sit on this side I'm gonna go to roof floor line what if I roofline
I don't project and pick a note and
I now have that whole side of the building
filled in that's add another door
let's do it edie selected and we'll just put a
door and over in that direction and
maybe I want to add another window over
here so little air in there and you
can see you can work and plan view just as easily as you can in a 3d view just
making keeping an eye on a clock
here so we're able to create something pretty quickly right so that's you know
some of
the modeling things I want to show
at least one examples of a more complex object
here even in the stairs and roofs
and stuff if I go to curtain wall and I
don't know if I created or if I
added a curtain wall in here already how I did all right so I've got standard
no I just
got standard right now let me add
something I'll start with that one
curtain wall and I want this to be
39
feet high that's whatever right and
I'm just gonna pick a couple points and you can see that I'm actually creating
an
entire set of panels for a curtain
wall but if I go to the styles browser and I
look at curtain walls let's say
let's do
it to be story what building is fine
and I'm just gonna go ahead and select that
and change my style and now I've got
a
curtain wall with windows and you
know materials and everything else so again
I'm not gonna explain how to create
these styles because you know that can
be a whole webinar by itself but and
actually is kind of an interesting
little side note is that I think all
the styles that are in here and from my curtain wall library I actually went
through Boston taking pictures of
some of the buildings in Boston and that's what they modeled some of these
curtain
walls on it's for our samples so it
was kind of an interesting experience where I was able to add some informations
that
became content within the software
so I have let me go back here too
I don't need this other viewport
right now so let me go back to the single view and let's talk a little bit
about some
construction drawings and scheduling
and stuff like that so I'm gonna go to I
just go to my annotate tab because
all I wanted to window tack and I'm gonna select on
my window I'm gonna select a
location for it what's going to happen here is
this tag automatically is attaching
property set information based on what the tag is pointing to so it's pulling
information out of the object so it
see the things like the Styles double-hung
the width and the height the head
height you can enter information about the
materials and the manufacturer all
kinds of information so I just placed that
tags the window I'm going to use the
multiple option because I'm lazy and I don't want to attack each of these
individually okay and I'm just gonna
hit
OK and looks like it looks like I
missed
at least one of these windows but I
can undo that window tag yeah okay
multiple maybe it got confused
because they had some windows on one wall versus
the other anyway so I'm placing some
tags so we can we can put that
information in here and then I'm
gonna do a window schedule and I'm just gonna select everything and
place a window schedule here and so
I didn't get all the tags and
that's okay so I want to add some
more I just do add selected okay okay okay and
then you can see that the line that
shows up in here I can tell it to update the schedule and now I've got all my
windows I think I forgot one that
maybe erased that one in the back of the
building but I've got all my windows
here in my window schedule so it's that
easy to place and in the schedule
instead of having it manually updated
you can tell it to automatically
update things so si automatic update yes you
know you might want you know if
you're doing like a renovation maybe you wants to know so that you know if you
make a
change building it's not automatically
changing and then when I automatically add new objects yes so now if I made a
change to
the to the schedule or to the
building this one's going to be four feet high
you can see that it's automatically
changed in my schedule so really simple
to add annotation and schedules and
this can be in separate drawings it doesn't have to be in the current drawing
I'm
also going to do a couple of
elevations let's say I'm on inhalation here and looking this direction you
could if
you're using the project navigator
you can put this in a different drawing and have it linked in this case I'm
just you
know showing a real quick example so
they're just saying that I want it to be here oops
gonna bleed my prompt sometimes
elevation kind of drawing specify the
corner yes and result over there
there
we go so I just created an elevation
you can see it get my double-hung windows
and my door and the door swing and
the siding and my roof let's go ahead and do
another elevation over on this side
and by way if this was going into a separate
drawing file it would automatically
update the tag with its sheet and view
number and such so were able to make
you know place that kind of information on the model real quick the other piece
that I want to show here and again
I'll just give a quick example because we don't have a lot of time is the
detail
component manager and I think that
the software is worth using even if you're
just using it for the detailed
component manager it's a really powerful piece of the software so we have a
huge library
here of detail components so if I go
into cut into masonry and I want a
concrete CMU and it won't have to be
core CMU you can see you know different
things here and different sizes I
want six by six by eight I'm gonna say I want
to insert this in my model and I can
tell how I want us to be placed if I
want an elevation section a plan in
this case one elevation and I want to go from
here Matt Dan what section no and
they
want to draw it up ten feet so I
just drew all the CMU's for 10-foot wall
right and see hatching and
everything that goes along with it and I'm just
gonna go back into my detail
component manager and you know there's brick
there's metals all of your steel
framing
right your various shapes and and
everything that you would need all your
standard sizes one of the ones that
I like to draw here is all right
steel joist I'm gonna go steel joist
and I wanna h-series steel joist and then I
say insert this and again we can
come over and say in this case I want this to
be in elevation view and this picks
a
corner of this and draw it a little
ways and then I can add in my end piece here
and you can start building up your
detail with all of the various components you can do keynoting of the
details you know and and have just a
nice set of tools to build this I'm
not again I'm not changing layers or
inserting blocks it's doing all this
work forming automatically so so what do
you think actually is that uh do you
like my design or should I make any changes to this yeah Dave I personally I
really like the look of brick can
you change the exterior walls to brick
change to brick let me see that's
probably gonna take a little while because I have to you know draw some new
hatching and everything but I mean
let me take a look here first of all do I have a I have a style my drawing so
let
me just check no I don't have brick
and
my drawing currently so let me go to
the Styles browser and let's go find a brick wall style so I probably want to
search
on brick I would think and let's
just do
a standard no I don't want a four
inch brick let's do a double brick wall so I
select and the double you know
double wall there to bring it into my drawing
and I'm gonna select on the exterior
walls and go to my Styles browser and
select a brick and if we were to
look at
this now you've got brick walls
instead right I like the brick but I have a have
a couple of other changes for you as
well I like to have a lot of light in
the house and I'd really like to to
see if you can change the windows in the front of the house to double casement
windows mm-hmm okay let's see so
again let's start off by going my Styles
browser because arcade architecture
does have a lot of different styles in here and let's say double or casement so
I
could double casement window style
let's try that one and let's pick on these
four windows goes in front of the
house of my properties and let's see you want
this to be a casement double and we
don't want it to be C let's say I wanted to make it five feet wide
okay does that look better much
better much better yeah I'll make this one back
to five feet tall too just so yeah
kind of looks goofy the other way
okay and the other the other change
I'd like to see more using a room on the
second floor and I was thinking if
you could change the roof to a five pitch roof I think that would work better
okay
actually right now I think I have a
12 pitch which is kind of crazy but let's change this to you know five twelve
roof
and then I'm just gonna go back to
my walls through the floor line modify the
roof line do an auto project to fix
my wall do the same thing over here
I don't project yeah so what do you
think about that much better so let
me just show you what it looks like here with the realistic style
okay so we could you can see them
okay actually see you bye to my windows by the way and see the stair that's in
there steer to nowhere and then what
I'm gonna do with a mess I probably need to
update my construction drawings as
well which happened to be in the same drawing
here so you can see that my
schedules automatically updated I now have my casement double showing up
and then my but my elevations are
wrong so I'm just going to tell it to refresh
both of these and there's my updated
elevations so you can I hope that you
know when there's this very brief
presentation I was able to show how AutoCAD architecture is is the right
tool for doing anything within
AutoCAD for doing building design it's very easy
to use a lot of automation that's
happening in here you know automatic
sections and elevations and the
construction details and everything else that's in there I wish I could spend
more time you know showing it
because it doesn't off a lot more than what I've shown
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