AutoCAD: Tips & Tricks

- [Instructor] So welcome to the world of AutoCAD once again, and we've got another tip and trick for you to use to make that little bit more productive, that little bit more effective in AutoCAD. Now you'll notice we've got a drawing open, which is MODELSPACE_CreatingNamedViews.dwg. So the name of the drawing kind of gives it away what we're going to do, we're doing to be working in the Model Space, and we're going to look at creating named views in an AutoCAD drawing. Now the trick here is, basically, to set up these named views to save having to zoom in and out of the drawing all of the time.

If I want to go and look at the staircase here, I've got to zoom in, using the mouse, like that, or I might need to use something like Zoom Window, over here, on the Navigation Bar. So I'll do Zoom Window, click and drag like that, and zoom in that way, maybe as well. And obviously, what I can do, is I can do something like Zed + Enter + E + Enter on the keyboard, and that does Zoom Extents. Wouldn't it be really nice though, if I just had loads of named views that I could just go to, click on the view that has a particular name, and I know it's going to take me to a particular place.

Well those are you named views, now whilst this drawing isn't that complex, it would be really nice if I could just jump to Staircase A, on the left, Staircase B on the right, perhaps the Office, top right in the building there, you've also got the lift shaft, you might want to zoom in on the lift shaft. And what you can do is, you can set up these named views really quickly and easily. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to go up here to this little word Top, and that is the top view in my 2D drawing.

You'll also notice that the View Cube, over here, is set to Top as well. And they correspond with each other, so for example, if I went to Top here, and clicked, and said I want a southwest isometric, you'll notice, there's my nice, flat 2D drawing, in a southwest isometric view. And you'll notice the View Cube has gone in to an isometric view, I can now click on Top there, it takes me back to the top view, and I'll just do a Zoom Extents, Zed + Enter + E + Enter, and I'm back to where I was before. So there's all these different ways of managing your views in AutoCAD, but wouldn't it be nice if I could click here, and click on the word Top, in the View Controls, and have some Custom Model Views here.

Well to do that, I've got to go to the View Manager here, and that will bring up my View Manager Dialog Box. Now quite often you'll find, in the AutoCAD Certified Professional Tab, you'll get asked questions saying, go to this named view in the drawing. And you think to yourself, named view? What's a named view, how do I get to a named view? Well, that's how you get to your named views, using this View Manager. Notice there are no model views available at the moment, so I'll click on Model Views there, we're working in the Model Space, and click on New.

There's a great big dialog box that appears here, and it all looks very complicated. A lot of it, you don't have to change, so we need a View Name at the top, and I'm going to do Staircase A over on the left, so we'll just call it Stair A, like so. Now the View Category, there aren't any in there, I'm going to type that that's a Plan View, so we'll call that Plan View like that, and you can categorize your views View Type is Still, obviously, if I click on that, I can have a Cinematic or a Walk, if I'm working in 3D, ours is just a still view.

Now the Boundary, we need to set, we need to define the window, so we click on Define Window, and that takes us into our drawing, and we've got this big gray area around and across here, and you're specifying the view. So my suggestion here is that you get in, and you click there, and you drag around your staircase, like that, and click there. And that black area, is the named view. Press Enter to accept that, that's all set up now. All I've got to do is click on OK, don't worry about these world settings, or backgrounds, that's all to do with UCSs and backgrounds for 3D views, you just click on OK.

There's our Stair A view, if I apply that now, and click on OK, it takes me to that stair view, can you see it, it's right there. Now what I can do is, go Top, Custom Model View, Stair A, and it zooms me in like that. How lovely is that? So we'll look what I do here is go here, Custom View, Stair A, done, and I'm at Stair A. So let's create one more named view, to see how that works. I'm going to do a Zoom Extents, Zed + Enter + E + Enter, sorry about the keyboard entry, I'm a little bit old-fashioned like that.

And we'll create another named view, so we'll go back to the Top View Control, View Manager here, and we'll go to Model Views there, and we'll click on New. And what we'll do this time is, we'll do something like the lift shaft, over on the right hand side of the drawing. So the view name this time will be Lift Shaft, and again the View Category, we can click now, because we've got Plan View, we put it in for the Stair A view, we define the window, and again, get in nice and tight, zoom in.

And I'm going to click there, drag the view around the lift shaft, click again, there's our little black box around the lift shaft, Enter to accept. That's all in place, ignore the settings and the background, they can just stay as they are, click on OK, and that's done. There's the lift shaft there, I'll OK that now, and there's my Lift Shaft View in the drawing area, so what I'll do is I'll type Zed + Enter + E + Enter, Zoom Extents, I'll go back to the View Control, click on the word Top, Custom Model Views, Lift Shaft, and there we go.

It's kind of nice, because you're tallying up the name of view to the area in the drawing you want to go to, and that's really handy, if you've got a really complex Model Space to move around in. So make sure that you utilize those named views, they're really, really handy in the Model Space. Like I've shown you with the two views that we've created.