From the course: AutoCAD Architecture Essential Training

Creating custom column grids - AutoCAD Architecture Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Architecture Essential Training

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Creating custom column grids

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- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our Autocad Architecture Essential Training Course, and what we're going to look at is structural design. Now, you may find, when you're working in Autocad Architecture that you need to develop a structure to build your architecture around. Things like columns and beams, and in turn, you will need a column grid to place your columns on in order to space them effectively in your Autocad Architecture model. So you'll notice, I've got Autocad Architecture open right now, but I haven't got a standard Autocad Architecture drawing open, ready to use. Now the reason for that is, depending on what units you're using, and depending on what part of the world you're in, we need to specify a certain template first, so you go to your start screen in Autocad Architecture like so, and in the start drawing here, can you see where it says Templates? Click on the down arrow here like so, and you'll see that there's all these different templates available. Now I'm going to use a metric CTB template, that one there, because that's a color table drawing using metric units. As you can see there, it says, Autocad Architecture Metric CTB Model Template. Now if you're working, let's say, in America, you would use a different template that allows you to use feet and inches, for example. So when I click on that, like so, you'll see it takes me into a blank Autocad Architecture drawing, and you can see mine is called Drawing3.dwg at the top of the screen. What I'm then going to do is do a Save As, so I'm going to click on the application menu, top left, Save As, and I'm going to save it as a drawing, a .dwg file format, and that will go to my folder that I've used previously to save a drawing. Now you would save this wherever you want to save it, and I'm going to call it, Structural Design, so you can see I've got one there already, and that's because I've tested this process already in preparation for this video. I'd like you to save your drawing as a drawing called Structural Design.dwg, like that, and then what you do is you click on Save, like so, and that saves it. Now I've already got it there, so it's asking me if I want to replace it. I'll just say, yes, to that, and then you'll notice, you get the big long path at the top of the screen. Just click on the Save icon there in the Quick Access toolbar, and it just then gives you the filename, rather than the big, long C drive path that I had there in the first place. Now, the first thing you need when you are creating your structural design in Autocad Architecture is what they call a custom grid, so we need to create a grid that is spaced so that we can start placing our structural columns onto that grid. Now, you've saved your Structural Design.dwg file. What I would also do is make sure that there is a metric, and I must stress that, metric structural design drawing in the exercise files if you want to download it from the website, so that will be in the exercise files if you want it. Bear in mind, it is in metric millimeters. It's not in feet and inches, it's in metric millimeters. So, let's have a look at this custom grid. Let's see what we're going to do. Now we need to be in the Home tab on the ribbon, and you will find your Custom Grid command in the Build panel here, and it's this little flyout here. Can you see there's a grid with a lightning symbol on it? So when I click there, there's all these different grid tools available to me. I can do an enhanced custom grid. I can do a custom grid convert. I can do a column grid, and you'll notice also, I can do columns, custom columns, beams, and bracing I might put in an elevation view for my beams and columns. We want this one here, Column Grid, like so. I click there, and you'll notice, I've got this purple grid floating around on the screen. Now I'm just going to roll back a notch on the wheel, so that fits nicely in my screen real estate. You've probably got a much bigger screen than me, so don't worry about that too much. Now as soon as I put this custom grid in, can you see now that my Properties palette has kicked in again like it does with lots of other commands in Autocad Architecture. Now we're in the top view of Autocad Architecture, so we're in a flat 2D view even though we are working in a 3D model. We're looking it from the top, looking flat down onto our grid. Now to place the grid, you literally are just going to click in the drawing area, but before we do that, look down at your command line. You've got width, depth, x-spacing, y-spacing, x divided by a toggle, y divided by a toggle, or match, so it could match to an existing grid, or I can sample those settings if I want to. Now a lot of those settings are available to you in the Properties palette, so I'm just going to jump up to the Properties palette. I've got a rectangular shape there. If I click on there, I can have a radial one, if I want a circular grid around a center point. We want rectangular in this case. So make sure you set that to Rectangular. Now we've got dimensions. These are the overall dimensions, so you can specify these on screen. It's set to No at the moment by default, but if I set that to Yes, I can specify them onscreen if I want to. So the width is 30,000, 30 meters or 30,000 millimeters. The y, the depth is 18,000, which is 18 meters, or 18,000 millimeters. Now you've got a thing here called Layout Type Repeat, so it's just going to repeat the base size over and over to fit those overall dimensions by 6,000 in both the x and y directions. Now I can add a column to this grid. Can you see that? It says None, at the moment, so if I click there, I can go for standard column, and what it'll do is it'll place a grid with all of those standard columns on the grids. So if I come in here now, and I'm just going to click once, like so, and then I position it. Can you see I've got the rotation now. Just drag to the right, horizontally, using your polar tracking, set it to zero and click. Now you'll notice there, there is a grid with funny little squares on it. I'm now going to hit Escape a couple of times to cancel that command. You'll notice the Property palette disappears. If I zoom in on this now, can you see, I've got a column at each intersection of my grid, and if I go to something like the southwest isometric view, so I'll go over here, Top View, Southwest Isometric, my columns are already in place. How wicked cool is that? I've got all my columns at every single grid intersection all set up and ready to go. So what I'm going to do now is make sure that I save my drawing, so I'm just going to go up here and Save, like so. Make sure that you save that, and save the work that you've done. I'm going to roll back on the wheel on the mouse a little bit, and there's all my little columns ready to be used, so what we've done there is we've basically added a custom grid with a group of default columns that we can use in our 3D Autocad Architecture model.

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