Creating an Architectural Site Plan with Meets and Bounds Drawing in AutoCAD

We have made terrific progress on our Meets and Bounds drawing. What I'd like to do next is for us to start working on our actual AS 1.0 sheet, the architectural site plan. So let's go File, New.

Let's use the template. And let's save the file with the name VDCI AS 100. And I will overwrite the file.

What we want to do is to first look at our overall layout environments. You can see down here at the bottom, our template file has the 8.5x11 and the 11x17 layouts. Now we could always go and create our own 22x34 layout, or we can use the design center and import a layout environment from an existing sheet.

So let's go up to Insert, the Insert tab. Let's go to the design center. And what we want to do is to bring something in.

So I'm going to minimize CAD 301. I will expand CAD 302. And what I want to bring in is information from my A201 drawing file.

Now again, this A201 drawing file was also included in the dataset drawings that you downloaded in your zip file. I'm going to expand the A201. And you can see that an option I have is for the layouts.

I'm going to slide this bar over here on the right. And you can see that my A201 sheet has a VDCI 22x34 layout. So I'm going to select here.

Hold down on the mouse. Drag it over. When I'm into the black part of the screen, my mouse has a suitcase, and I lift up.

So I have now brought, and you can see that I've brought my 22x34 layout into this drawing. So I'm going to close this interface. I'm now going to go on and select on the 22x34.

And what you'll notice is that when I brought in the layout, I brought in everything that came with that layout. Because if you remember from CAD 201, on our A201 sheet, we had included our floor plan keynotes. Well, we want to have our site plan keynotes here, not our floor plan keynotes.

So what I need to do is I need to get the floor plan keynotes out of the drawing. When I have an XREF that has been brought into a drawing, I do not erase that information. Instead, what I do is I detach the XREF.

So you do not erase XREFs. You detach XREFs. So I'm going to go to the XREF manager, this icon right here.

I'm going to choose my keynotes floor plan, do a right button, and go detach. And I will now close the interface, so I have now detached that XREF key plan file from this sheet. Control-S to save.

Now, I'm going to go down into here, and we want to modify some attributes. You can see that this is saying A2.1. I will double-click on this. Again, this was our TBTX file, and I will let it be AS 1.0. And also what I'd like to do is to change this value here so that it says architectural site plan.

I will keep the label as 1, but I want the scale to be 1 inch equals 10 feet, because this is the scale that I know is going to work for the drawing. Because if you remember, when we brought our no-plot view in into our meets and bounds drawing, we brought it in at a scale factor of 10. So, bringing an engineering title block in at a scale factor of 10, on the architectural end, we will say 1 inch equals 10 feet.

I will go Apply. I will go OK. Zoom extends, and I will save the file.

So, everything in our paper space environment is now correct. What I want to do next is to bring the meets and bounds drawing into the model space environment of this sheet file. So, I'm going to go to the Model tab, and I'm going to begin by XREF attaching in our meets and bounds drawings.

So, I will go to Reference Attach, and the last time I did an attachment, I was in our real-world drawing. So, I will go to here. I'll go to CAD302, and I will bring in my CAD302 meets drawing, and I will go Open.

Now, I'm expecting something unexpected to happen, but I'm going to deselect Specify Insertion Point on Screen, so I'm going to be bringing in my meets and bounds drawing at 0, 0, at a scale factor of 1. So, I'm going to go OK. Now, what you'll notice is that it mapped world coordinate system with world coordinate system. Remember when we were working on the meets and bounds drawing that what was happening was that we said, draw everything relative to north, and then we created a special UCS to facilitate our viewing of the image.

But still, we're bringing it in in the world coordinate system environment, and this is the normal world coordinate system environment orientation. Now, let's zoom in, though. Do you see how this says that the distance is 128.87 feet? And if you remember, in our meets and bounds drawing, the units that we were using were decimal units, where one unit represented a foot.

We are now in an architectural environment. If I were to say, go to Home tab, if I were to say measure the distance from the end of here to the end of here, you can see that it says 10 foot 8. If I were to hit Escape and type in DD units, and if I were to make my units fractional and go OK, and if I were to say now, what's the distance from here to here, you can see that it shows that it's 128 inches. Because remember, in our meets and bounds drawing, one unit represented a foot.

Whereas if I bring this drawing in one-to-one, whereas in this architectural site plan, we are thinking in terms of foot inches, that one-to-one, bringing it in, brings it in as 128 inches because one unit represents an inch. So what I need to do is I need to backtrack, go on and get this xref out of here, and to bring it in at a scale factor of 12. Because in the source file, one unit represents a foot.

In the destination, in this file, one unit represents an inch. So bringing it in by a scale factor of 12 will scale it all up and the units will work appropriately. So I'm going to go up to Insert, Reference, go to the xref manager.

I will take the meet file, do a right button, and I will detach it. And now I'm going to go Reference Attach, and I will attach the meet file. But when I bring it in, I will have Uniform Scale Factor, and my scale factor will be 12.

Popping it in at 00. Zoom Extents, Zoom Real Time. Now, if I go to Home tab and measure the distance from the end of here to the end down here, you can see that number one, I'm in inches, which is why the inches are pretty big.

So I'm going to go DD Units. I'm going to go on and change it back to Architectural Units, and go what's the distance, DI for distance, from the end of here to the end of here, and you can see that it's 128 feet. So again, our source file was generated using decimal units, where one unit represented a foot.

Our destination file has one unit being an inch. When I import a civil engineer's drawing into my architectural drawing, it is very typical that I would bring it in at a scale factor of 12, so that the one units representing a foot in the source, one unit representing an inch in the destination, that I can now bring it up by a factor of 12, and I can measure everything using foot inches, and I'm going to say CTRL S to save. One other thing I'm going to do while I'm here is I'm going to create another UCS, so that my UCS will allow me to have a view that's oriented correctly for the screen.

So I will go to the View tab, and I will go 3-point UCS, here's the origin, positive X is down here, positive Y is up here. So I've now given it a new UCS. I now want to name the UCS, so I will go to Named UCSs, and again, you will see that it's unnamed.

You'll notice that in our Meets and Bounds drawing, we created a UCS that was called Aligned. But when we bring the geometry in, not everything in the source file comes in with it, and one of the things that does not come are named UCSs. So I'm going to do a right button, Rename, and I will rename this with the name Aligned, A-L-I-G-N-E-D.

Set current, OK. I now want to go into a plan view, Plan, Enter, Enter. Now I have a view that looks normal relative to the screen.

I'm going to zoom back. I'm now going to go to my 22x34, double-click, jump through the hole. I'm now down in the model space environment, zoom extents.

Ah, do you see what happened? When I zoomed extents, it zoomed extents for the sheet file, because in our layout environment, we already had our viewport locked. So I've jumped through the hole, and you can see the quarter inch equals a foot from CAD 301. I'm going to unlock the viewport, double-click, there's everything.

Now, I'm in the viewport. I'm just going to go to UCS, go to the named UCS, Aligned, set current, OK. Because, again, this paper model space environment had a view that was aligned on the plan view that we used in CAD 301.

Now I need to have this view related to the aligned relationship that we just created. I have the UCS appropriately aligned, Plan, Enter, Enter. I'm now in a plan view of that aligned UCS.

I'm now going to do my zoom window. I'm already in the view tab. I will say zoom window from the end of the top left to the end of the bottom right.

And you can see that I have this scale right here. Well, this scale is technically one inch equals ten feet, and I would like to prove those numbers to you mathematically. So, if I were to choose down here on the viewport scale, and if I were to say a quarter inch equals a foot, we can see it zoomed in like that.

A quarter inch equals a foot means a quarter inch represents 12 inches, which means one inch represents 48 inches. If I were to go and say an eighth of an inch, this is one to 96. And you can see, looking at my listings, that the only scales that they have listed right here are for the standard architectural presentations.

These scales up here are more decimal oriented, one to one, one to two, one to four. So, what I want to do is I want to create a new custom scale factor to show on this screen. If I slide down and choose custom, and if I go to add a new scale, the scale appearing on the screen, I'm going to say one inch equals ten feet.

So, that's what I'm going to see on the screen. But remember, our units are one inch equals ten feet. If we convert inches to inches, the scale factor would be one in paper to 120 in drawing units.

So, I will go okay, and I will go okay. If I now roll my mouse, and if I were to say zoom window, view zoom window from the end of here to the end down here, you'll notice that the scale factor down here now does say one inch equals ten feet, where I had one to 120. So, I'm now going to lock my viewport, and you can see looking at the image that the line type scale factor doesn't quite look right.

So, I'm going to go to paper space, and I'm going to go up to view, and choose regen. That's only regenerating the paper space environment, but if I go down and say view regen all, you can see it's now regenerating paper space and model space, so that my overall presentation will look the way that I want it to. Well, if you would please, go on and get your sheet up to this level, and then what we're going to come back and do is to start working on our site plan notes, and we're also going to go back into our meets and bounds drawings, add some more information.

We're also going to be reference attaching our building into the file, doing some dimensions, and then we will have our architectural site plan complete. Good luck.