Copying Geometry Using Copy with Base Point in AutoCAD

I'm going to close my blocks dialog box, and let's talk about how we're going to copy this geometry onto our other views. In this case, we have hatches, text, and blocks that all need to be copied onto our other views, and some of these objects rely on the coordinate system to get direction, including our blocks, and more specifically, our hatches.

We can't simply mirror these or copy them using the copy tool. Instead, we need to use a new tool that we haven't used before, which is called copy with base point. Copy with base point in AutoCAD utilizes the copy clipboard, and you might be familiar with this already, in that you've used clipboards in other softwares.

Copying something to the clipboard saves the data into a temporary location and allows the software to reference it in a future command, in this case, paste. The normal copy acts like a move that leaves a copy of the original object at the beginning location. Copy with base point acts as a pure copy.

It saves the data to a temporary location, and then we can put that data in new places. Let's give that a shot. Now in order to copy with base point, I'm going to pre-select my geometry.

I'll zoom into my hatch down here first. Using a crossing window from right to left, I'll select both hatches. Then I'll pick this hatch at the top.

Then with a selection window from left to right, I'll grab these four objects, both text objects and both datum points. Then finally, I'll click on this elevation text, and I've selected all of the objects I want to copy with base point. Under edit, we can see copy with base point, and the keyboard shortcut is control shift C. Now I'll copy with base point, and it's going to say specify a base point.

Okay, this is the most important part of copy with base point. Where is the base point in relation to the objects? Because when we paste in the future, that's the point we will use to place the geometry. It's almost like the zero zero location in a block insert, but it's only used in the moment we place.

After we paste the geometry, it just behaves as regular geometry again. In this case, I know that my top of plate and floor level and elevation views, elevation text, all relate to the same datums. That is our ground line and our two datum lines.

So for this copy with base point, I'm going to zoom in and choose the ground line on the far right. It's the end point of the red line. I'll click, and you can see that it says in my command prompt, specify base point, eight found.

This has achieved our copy with base point. Now I'll go escape, escape, escape, pan over a little bit, and hit control V. Now I'm not going to paste the geometry over here, but this is a great way to check to see if your copy worked appropriately. Don't click, just move your mouse around to see if the paste operation will work, then hit escape, escape, escape.

Now let's go to our view tab and switch over to our back view. This view is where these objects are all going to move in in the exact right location, because the back view and the front view are very similar. We can go control V to paste, and then zoom in and pick this end point right here.

There we go. Because we switched to the back view, it updated our coordinate system, and that allowed us to paste these objects in the exact right location. Now that we've pasted this onto the back view, before we go anywhere else, let's make sure we change the text elevation.

I'll double click and type back space, and I'll leave the word elevation in there. Now the back elevation is almost complete. One more thing we can do just to make the back and front elevations look a little different is to simply grab our hatches and move some of these grip points around, kind of arbitrarily, just to make the shapes appear a little different.

What you do not want to do is change any of these grips on the edges of the building, or else the hatch will not be quote unquote in the lines. But I can grab some of these others, and now those look like different shapes than on my front view. I can zoom in down here and do the same thing with my stucco if I like, but you don't have to move the stucco hatch.

I'll try to match that shape as best I can with these yellow lines. There we go. Excellent.

Now let's see what happens when we try to put it on our left view. I'll go to the left view, CTRL V to paste, and I'll choose this point here. Now a couple of things are exactly in the right spot.

First, our top of plate and floor level and our elevation text is exactly where we want it, but this hatch is completely unnecessary. We can select it and hit delete. And then second, the stucco hatch on the handout is over here.

We can grab these hatches, do a quick rotation by going to the Home tab, rotate, and in this case it doesn't really matter where the base point goes. This is a hatch moved into a slightly arbitrary position. So I'll choose somewhere around here, and I don't even have to choose a perfect 90 degree increment.

I can just do something like, let's say this. I'll grab the hatch, go back to the Home tab, move, and I'll just move it again slightly arbitrarily right here. Perfect.

Before we update the text for this view, let's copy with base point our new geometry so that when we go to the right view, this will fit in perfectly. So here I'll grab my top of plate, my datum, this datum, and floor level. I'll grab both of these hatches with a crossing window and my elevation text.

I'll go edit, copy with base point, and again I'll zoom in and grab the ground line base point here. Perfect. Escape, escape, escape.

I'll do control V just to test it out, and you can see I got everything correct. Escape, double click the text elevation, and type left space elevation. Again, this is our left view.

Perfect. Now I'll go back to the View tab, switch to my right view, control V to paste, and paste it right here. Now this elevation, I can double click and type right space, close text editor.

Let's go to our original view, that was the front view. Now that these are all copied around, we can change this text right here. Front space, close text editor.

Okay, I'll go to my left view, zoom extents, control S to save, and from this far zoomed view, I can just quickly check to make sure I have all of my text objects. I can see them on each view, they're kind of white blocks, but I can still see them. My titles, they're easier to read, I can see them all.

Excellent. And my hatches, I can see those from all the way zoomed out. That confirms that all of our elevations have these standard objects on all of them.

In the next video, we will add our multileaders and dimensions. See you there.