Drawing Dimensions in AutoCAD: An In-Depth Tutorial

In this video we will begin to draw our dimensions. To get our file set up, let's first close our blocks dialog box.

Let's change our current layer to a-dims and we can see that there's a panel on the home tab for annotation, but let's go to the annotate panel and then we see our full dimensions here. So let's look at some dimension examples. You do not need to follow along, you can just watch this part.

I'm going to zoom way in on this bathroom sink so that we can use the dimension style vdci-tick, which you can see is our current style. Now the reason why I'm zoomed in so far is this is a paper space object, so if we were dimensioning using these dimensions, they'd appear very very small on the screen and we'll update that before we dimension to match our floor plan. This button here is the dimension button and AutoCAD has added this in recent years where typically they've forced you to use either linear, aligned, or angular, or some form of dimension that was more specific from the start.

Now this dimension button will dimension multiple objects very quickly. So you can see as I click it, I can quickly create a linear dimension. This is a diameter dimension.

Here is a radial dimension. Let's see if I can grab it. There we go.

Here is an angular dimension and I'll hit ENTER to say that I'm done. Let's look at a few of these dimensions one at a time. A diameter dimension will go through the middle of a circle and end with two ticks.

This includes a dimension line, text, and tick markers. A radial dimension does the same thing except it places a point at the center of the imaginary circle, which this arc is a part of. Additionally, you'll see the dimension text with R and then the value.

More importantly for this project and architectural projects in general are the angular and linear dimensions. You'll notice on the handout we use exclusively linear dimensions for the floor plan. The radial dimension touches both pieces of geometry at the lines and leaves a tick mark and shows a degree value.

But the linear dimension is what we really want to study in this example. Linear dimensions have two extension lines which go and almost touch the geometry. You can see a small gap.

Those extension lines go up to meet a dimension line, which includes tick marks at the intersections. Ticks are a very common architectural symbol, but you might also see arrows or dots depending on the project you're looking at. Additionally, there is dimension text which will appear in feet inches in an architectural drawing.

As we go through the course, I'll introduce each one of these tools one at a time, but for now I want to focus on updating our dimension scale or dim scale so that it matches our current drawing. I'll do a zoom extents and control s to save. If I hit this arrow here, it will open my dimensions style manager and you can see that VDCI tick is currently selected.

If I modify it and I go to the fit TAB, I can see use overall scale of is set to one. Now there's also annotative and scale dimensions to layout and we might look at those in a future course, but for now we'll use an overall scale of one. If we wanted to, we could update this to match our dim scale, but I'd rather create a new option and leave our VDCI tick as is.

So I'm going to close and I'm going to type in D-I-M-S-C-A-L-E or dim scale and hit ENTER. Notice the current dim scale is set to one and I want to update this to match our one quarter inch dim scale. So that will be 48 enter.

Now it doesn't look like anything has changed, but let's go back to our dimension style manager and we will see that we have a style override. This style override has updated the dim scale to 48 and you can see that here. VDCI tick plus overall scale of 48.

If we want to lock this in and use it on future projects, we could right click rename and name this VDCI-tick-48. Enter. Now it has been added as its own style and we can set current.

I'll hit close. We can now see VDCI-tick-48 as our current style and we can draw our first dimension. That first dimension will be here at the top of our drawing and we will use the linear dimension.

The way this works is to snap to the geometry you want to dimension. Do not pick points in space. Do not pick anywhere randomly.

Make sure you use object snaps every time you draw a dimension. In this case, we're snapping to the outside wall here, the outside wall here, and then we are placing this dimension. We can go shift right click nearest on the second from the top line on our no plot.

We will use the no plot to organize our dimensions so that it is a nice clean drawing. Additionally, we do not want to place any text or objects outside of that outer rectangle or else it will not fit in our print area on our sheet. Next, let's draw another linear dimension using the same endpoint as our first point, but this time I'm going to come in and choose the endpoint here on the inside of the wall.

Again, I'll drag up and this time I can snap to the midpoint of that magenta line and you can see that our next dimension has automatically been placed. Now, I want to draw two more dimensions like you see on the handout here and here for the 2 foot and 11 foot distances. I could draw more linear dimensions, but instead I will use the continue dimension option.

We talked about continuous dimensions and baseline dimensions earlier in the course and here is where we could draw those two options. For now, I'll choose continue and because I just finished drawing the 11 foot distance, I have a new dimension string starting from there. Now, this is where I said don't click in space because I could find a 2 foot distance and click right here, but that's not helpful.

Always click to your geometry and then go back and update your geometry if the dimensions do not match. When I finish, hit ENTER to say that I'm done and let's go zoom extents and CTRL S to save. In the next video, we will continue drawing the rest of our dimensions.

See you there!