From the course: AutoCAD: Plotting & Publishing

The Model tab - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD: Plotting & Publishing

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The Model tab

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- [Voiceover] We're starting off a new section now in the plotting and publishing in AutoCAD course. We're going to be looking at model space and paper space, and those are the two spaces that I mentioned in the previous section where you work in two spaces. You work in model space full size, layout or paper space, you're working where you have your scaled viewports and scale everything to fit. Now, in this first video, we're going to be looking at the model tab and just the model tab. So we've got a whole new drawing which is 02_ModelspacePaperspace.dwg. You can find that, as usual, in your Lynda.com exercise files, download it, save it locally, and then you can follow along with the videos in the section. Now, we're staying in the model tab this time. Now the model tab itself is down in the bottom left corner of the AutoCAD drawing area. It's right down here. There's the model tab there. Now if I right-click on the model tab, you can see that there's always a shortcut menu available. So I can create a new layout from a template, I can select all the layouts, I can activate the previous layout, I can set up a page setup in my model tab in preparation for me to plot, and there's also a drafting standard setup as well. Now, these tabs are extremely useful. I'm just gonna hit escape there to lose the shortcut menu. But the model tab itself is where you do all of your design work. It's where you do everything full size. Like I mentioned in the previous videos, everything is one to one in model space. So if you're working in inches, millimeters, meters, feet, whatever it takes, you use those settings all the time and you do everything full size. So this particular building in the model tab, which you may recognize from the previous section, is full size according to the units that we're using, which in this case are metric millimeters just so that you know. Now, one of the really neat features in AutoCAD that's been around a long time, when you're working in the model tab itself, you can tell on the status bar which space you are in, and it's down here. Can you see that? It says model. So it's telling me whether I'm in model space or paper space. What happens if I click on that word "model" on the status bar? It takes me straight into paper space. So you can see now, it says "paper". If I click on paper again like that, it takes me back to the next layout tab like so, but does it? No it doesn't. Look, the viewport is now active. Can you see my crosshair only appears in the viewport? That is known as floating model space. Be careful with that one because if your viewport isn't locked, you can mess up the scale of your viewport. Just come outside the viewport, double-click outside the viewport like that, and it will deactivate, and you'll notice now that the status bar is telling me I'm back in paper space again. The only way you can get back to the actual model tab itself is to go and click on it like so, and I'm back in the model tab, working with my full size model, communicating my design. So that's the model tab where you do all of your design work, your modifying, your drawing, creating the doors, the windows, the dimensions, the gridlines, and so on. That's where all of your design happens, and then what happens with the layouts, the paper space, which we'll talk about in the next video, is where you communicate the design intent using the viewports and using the scaling.

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