From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

Working with the ViewCube - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

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Working with the ViewCube

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- [Narrator] Once again, were starting another chapter now in our AutoCAD essential training. We've got a new drawing for you, it's called navigating drawings 3D dot DWG. And as you can see from the name of the file, we're going to be looking a little bit at navigating in 3D and also 2D. The first thing we're going to look at with navigating drawing is working with our ViewCube. Now this is this funny little gizmo over here. It looks a bit weird. It looks like a compass, and you've got the north, south, east and west indicated there, and by default, you're normally in a top view, which is there on the ViewCube. And you'll notice when you hover over the ViewCube different view settings, pre-set views are available to you there as you can see. So, if I went and clicked on say that corner there, what it will do, is it will give me an isometric view. And you'll notice now why this is a 3D drawing because some of the walls have been extruded upwards there as you can see and be made into 3D objects. So if I hover over these, you can see there, that's a 3D solid. So the whole idea is, if you're working in 3D, your ViewCube gives you a load of pre-set 3D views that you can work with. Now the ViewCube is fantastic because what it allows you to do, is it allows you to work with all of these pre-set views. Now these pre-set views are also available here in the view list. See where it says south west isometric, if click there, I am currently in south west isometric view. If I went back to the top view, note that were looking back from the top and the ViewCube is now set to the top again. Now the nice thing is, is if you hover over the ViewCube, can you see there is a little home symbol there? If I click on the home symbol, that will open up the home view that is pre-set. So this view here, that I've got the top view. If I now right click over the ViewCube, I can set the current view as the home view, which is my top view of the ViewCube. And then what I can do, is I can go back to that isometric view on the corner there, click on it, there's the isometric view. If I want to go back to the home view, it takes me back to that top view again that I pre-saved as the home view. Now another thing you can do is with the mouse, you can hold down the shift key and you can also hold down the mouse wheel and that will allow you to do a manual orbit you'll notice. And as I'm moving the mouse, I'm orbiting around in that drawing, and you can see the 3D walls appearing quite happily. Now that's weird view there and it's not a pre-set view, but the ViewCube has aligned to it. So, if I go back to the home icon and click on it, it takes me back to that top view. So you can see how useful that ViewCube is. It's a really really useful view and a viewing tool as well. So I can pick up any view I want to. I can go the other way, different isometric view, the other side, and then go back to the home view. So that's how you can utilize your ViewCube both in 2D but more importantly in 3D. It allows you to work with pre-set 3D views when you're working with 3D models in AutoCAD.

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