Adding followers - AutoCAD Tutorial

Wouldn't it be cool if we could turn raster lines into actual poly lines? It would be even cooler if we could do the same for contours. Well, we can do that. In this video, we are going to be bringing in a site civil in, then we're going to scale it up, create a couple of layers and start converting raster lines into actual poly lines. Okay, let's get started by dropping into AutoCad, let's click on Get Started right here. Let's go to insert, I'm going to grab my Site Civil, but you can grab any site drawing you want. I'm going to click open, I'm going to click next, then next and then finish. Okay, this is tiny and I'm going to want some dash lines in here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my match again, so I'm going to zoom way out, I'm going to zoom way back in, I'm going to type l for line and pick a point in here, I'm going to hit F8 I'm going to go out 100 feet. Then I'm hit skip a couple of times. Now I'm going to double click my wheel button, its going to zoom all the way out. Now let's match this, its this wall that's 100 feet. I'm going to click on match, make sure your snaps are turned on, So, I'm going to click this point here and I'm going to click an end point here, I'm going to hit F8 and turn your Ortho off, I'm going to click a point here and go all the way down and I'm going to click a point here and now I've got 100 feet. So the first I'm going to do is I'm going to use a law. Let's type in layer and hit enter, The G-Anno-Stnd-Hidd, let's use that. Instead of color eight though, go ahead and click on color eight, let's make a red color and hit OK. Now let's make a new layer, we can come right over here, click new layer. And this is going to be called C-CONT-MAJOR. Let's make this one yellow, hit OK. Now for the line type, instead of HIDDEN2, I'm going to scroll down, let's put it on DASHED, let's hit OK. And we can close out of our layers. Now under Vectorize & Recognize Text I'm going to go ahead and click on this little button right here, VTools General. Now, under VTools General, for the Removal Method, I'm going to click on Vector Separation, let's go to General. The default layer, I want to click the drop down here, and I want to go down to G-Anno-Stnd-Hidd. Now let's go to Contour and my Minor and Major, I'm going to set both of these to be C-CONT-MAJOR, because that's what we had in this one. I'm going to click OK. Now I'm going to click OK. Now we're going to do something dirty. So, under Followers, let's click the drop down and let's select Polyline Follower. Again, make sure your raster snaps are turned on. I'm going to simply come in here and select any area on this line and pick it Now what we see is we have that blue line, we see that it's following that poly line all the way down. We have a little more to go, but if we look at your command prompt, we have a lot of different choices. I'm going to type in o for cOntinue, and I'm going to click on this line here. It looks like it stopped it right there, but that's okay, I'll type O, enter. And click on this line somewhere along it, usually it will bring it to the last point. Now we see that the entire frame is blue, I'm going to hit Enter, we hit Enter again, zoom in and look at that, it's a poly line, following the exact shape of that line we had. Cool, let's keep going, what I want to do is come over here and do the same thing for this contour. Under Followers, let's click the drop down, let's go Contour Follower. Again, I'm just going to go ahead and select this line right here, looks like it hit it all in one shot for us that time, all I have to do is hit Enter, Enter again, and bam, I've turned it into a line. We don't really like that, but we can always go back through and be a little more selective with our picks. I know this a little tedious, but boy is it a much easier way and more accurate than tracing.