Follow this comprehensive guide on how to accurately draw and manipulate dimensions of a complete floor plan view of a house using CAD tools. Beyond the discussion on creating dimensions in the bedroom, kitchen and other sections of the house, the article also includes insights on adjusting text objects and printing the final design.
Key Insights
- The article outlines a detailed process of drawing interior dimensions and working on dimension overrides, starting from the bedroom to the kitchen, and utilizing a linear dimension tool. The author suggests highlighting the dimensions as you go through the process to avoid missing any dimensions.
- It further discusses how to manipulate text objects and dimension text overrides. The author emphasizes the importance of not overriding a dimension with other dimension text unless it's a totally different word that does not include a distance value.
- Finally, the article provides information on printing the completed floor plan. It mentions the importance of checking print options, including the use of the VDCI color table file for pen assignments, and ensuring the printed layout matches the intended design.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Let's finish our dimensions. To start, let's draw our interior dimensions and then work on our dimension overrides.
It might be helpful to highlight the dimensions either in your PDF reader or on a printed version of your PDF as you go through so that you can make sure that you don't miss any dimensions. I'll start in this bedroom. Linear.
I'll go from this endpoint to this endpoint, dragging down and click, and we'll finish with our dimension overrides. So let's keep going. I can do a linear dimension, choosing here to here.
Click to place. Let's come down to these doors. Linear dimension.
Here to here. Click. I'll continue across to this wall edge here, across to the door, and to this door.
Escape to say that I am done. Choose this dimension and hit delete. Let's add our three-inch jam typical dimension.
Linear. Here to here. I'll place it there.
Again, we'll do the dimension text overrides later. Let's dimension this door. Linear.
Here to here. Click to place. Let's jump down and do this wall.
Linear. Here to here. Click to place.
And let's finish with our kitchen dimensions. Linear. This point here to the edge of the wall.
Out to place. Continue. And in this case, you can see I'm continuing from the top edge.
If I hit ENTER and then I pick this side of the dimension, I can continue from the bottom edge, and this goes to the bottom corner here. Enter to lock it in. Now I can start moving my text and adding my text overrides.
I'll hit escape, escape, escape. Let's go back outside and change those text objects, and then finish with our text objects on the inside. These two are equal, and I can double-click to edit the text, hit the delete key to delete the text value, and type equal.
I'll do the same up here by clicking and then clicking on this dimension text, hit the delete key, and then type equal. Remember, we never want to override a dimension with other dimension text. If it's a totally different word that does not include a distance value, it's okay.
Next, let's move some of these text objects away. I'll click on this text, click the grip to make it hot, right-click, move with leader. I'll place this leader here.
I'll jump over to this side and do the same thing with these two. Click the text to make it hot, right-click, move with leader, and this time I can move to the right. I'll shift-right-click nearest.
I'll place this one above, click to place, and I'll do the same with this. Click the dimension, click the grip to make it hot, right-click, move with leader, shift-right-click nearest, and I'll place it here. Escape, escape, escape.
Now let's work on moving our text on the inside and adding our two text overrides. I'll start here, clicking this dimension, click the grip to make it hot, right-click, move with dim line, and I'll place this to the right. Hit escape, escape, escape.
I want to slide the five foot six up in our drawing, so I'll click it, click the grip to make it hot, and simply move it, clicking to place. If I move it too far onto this line, you'll see it breaks it, so I'm going to keep it above the line. Then let's update this dimension, click the grip to make it hot, right-click, move with dim line.
I'll place it to the right. Escape, escape, escape. Now I'll double-click on the text, hitting end on my keyboard, space, T-Y-P, period, and I'll click outside of the text.
With my text edit still active, I can single-click on this three-inch value, end, space, jam, T-Y-P, period, which stands for typical, hit escape, escape, escape, and finally click this, click the grip to make it hot, right-click, move with dim line, and place it here. Escape, escape, escape. Zoom extends, control S to save.
We have a fully dimensioned, complete floor plan view of our small house. Once again, control S to save, and then I'll jump over to CAD 201, A201. I'll get the notification to reload my plan, and we can see in our compare view that all of our dimensions have been successfully brought over into our A201 sheet file.
I'll click the check mark, control S to save, and we can finally end by printing this PDF. In this course, we will not need to make any e-transmit files, but you could do that if you would like. For now, I'll go file, plot, and we can see that some of our options are automatically set up, thanks to our template.
This includes DWG to PDF, ANSI full bleed A, and this has to be full bleed or else we couldn't have placed our title block in the appropriate location. We are printing the layout, and we're printing a scale factor of one to one. One thing that's very important to check, however, is if we go to preview, we will see that this is printing our layer colors.
I'll hit escape. We want to print with our unique color table file, which has pen assignments. If I hit the drop down, you can see that our pen assignments are not here.
Our VDCI color table file is not in this drop down. If I hit cancel, I can see why that is. Here is our CAD 201 file downloads folder.
We can see the color table file here, in the same folder as our plan model and extraction model. However, we are currently working in our A201 file, which is in our sheets folder. If I want to see this table file in our sheets, I want to move it into the sheets folder.
There it is. Now when I go here, I can save this drawing, and when I close it and open it again, file open, A201, and hit open. I'll go file plot, and I will see it in the drop down, VDCI color table file.
This is because it looks in the folder where our drawing file is saved, and in this case, it was in the sheets folder. Please reach out to your instructor if you would like instructions on how to put this color table file in a permanent location, so it will be referenced by all of your folders. I'll hit preview one more time.
This time we can see exactly what we would like to print. I'll hit escape, and I'll hit okay to print this PDF. I will browse to my CAD201 sheets folder, and I will name this CAD201 A201-.
I'll rename this with my initials. Please use your initials in this case. I'll hit save, and we can see that there are no errors or warnings, and the plot job is complete.
Additionally, you'll notice that it might open in a PDF viewer. In the next video, we will begin to talk about the other plan views that we will tackle in this course.
