Discover the two common workflows for setting up elevation files in AutoCAD and learn how they can be implemented in the design of a small house project. This article dives into the differences, advantages, and disadvantages of these methods, helping you determine the best approach for your own architectural drawings.
Key Insights
- This article explains two methods for setting up elevation files in AutoCAD. One approach involves creating four different copies of a plan XREF, rotating each one to reflect the four sides of the house. This method makes it easier to draw elevations but can result in larger file sizes.
- The second method utilizes a single XREF in the center of the drawing, with each elevation organized around it. Drawing in this manner can seem challenging, but the use of features like the view cube and the user coordinate system (UCS) can simplify the process.
- Which method to use depends on the specific project and the CAD standards of your office. The article suggests practicing both methods to gain a deeper understanding of their workings and potential applications in different design scenarios.
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In the next part of our course, we are going to build the four elevations for this small house project. Now, before we get started building the elevations, I want to discuss two common workflows for setting up elevation files in AutoCAD.
There are two different ways you can set up an elevation file that uses a plan XREF to generate the data for an elevation. Now in AutoCAD, all of this generation is done manually. It's not like a BIM software like Revit, where the elevation files are generated automatically when building the plan file.
In AutoCAD, we have to build it all one drawing at a time. You can see on the screen that I have two elevation setups. Now, both of these reference the same exact plan, and in this case, I've labeled that plan XREF so we can see what the XREF is.
And also, you can see the elevations A, B, C, and D. Here, there are two ways that this might be set up. Let's look at one of the ways now. In this setting, there are four elevation files all in a row, A, B, C, and D. Now, these four drawings all reference the same XREF, but it's in four different copies.
So this is the same file at the top, but copied and rotated so that each individual side of the building points down. Now, this makes it very easy in AutoCAD for us to draw the elevations. We can, for example, draw our geometry down from the buildings to get our building geometry in this direction.
And then as soon as we know our horizontal directions, maybe from a plan or PDF, we can use that same datum information to go across from one elevation to the next. And this goes all the way across our drawing. Now, this is a fairly simple way to understand our elevations in AutoCAD, but it makes the file size much larger.
In this case, we are loading four versions of an XREF into one drawing. This could create a very large AutoCAD file, even though these are referenced. AutoCAD still has to load each reference individually.
Additionally, if we consider a building that might have more than four sides, say eight or 10 sides, this rotating process at the top would become a little confusing. We'd have to know exactly the direction of our walls, rotate the building, and then potentially even use XREF trimming in order to get our elevations so nice and neat side by side. Let's look at the other example.
In this example, we have one XREF in the middle of our drawing. Then each elevation is organized so that it is away from, and you can see A is down from this wall. So B is on the right side of this drawing.
So B is away from the right side. And the ground line is always furthest away from the floor plan. C and D are the same.
Now, you might say this is impossible to draw. I would have to draw C upside down and D and B on their sides. That would be true, except for the use of a couple of key features.
We are able to change the orientation of our view using the view cube. The view cube allows us to rotate in 3D, but using these arrows on the top sides here, we can also rotate our drawing around to see different views. Rotating the view cube isn't enough by itself, however.
You can see in the bottom here that our X and Y coordinates have not changed, even though we rotated the view cube. You can see the word top is upside down and our positive X is now going left and our positive Y is going down. We have not changed our user coordinate systems, or UCS, in order to align ourselves with this new view.
When using this radial approach, where all of the elevations surround the drawing, we also need to update our user coordinate system. In order to see your user coordinate system settings, you will have to go to the View tab and then right-click in this gray space, Show Panels, Coordinates. Here is the Coordinates panel.
You can see that there are many ways to change coordinates, and most of the time this is done in 3D modeling in AutoCAD. However, I am able to change the direction of my coordinates to align with any view in any direction. Here, we're only changing our X and Y values.
Z is still up or straight at us, and we don't use it in this course. Additionally, I can then assign views not only to the location and rotation of this view, but also assigning our user coordinate systems. Let's take a look at some views that I've already set up.
Here, if I go to the A view, it automatically snaps me into this view, this rotation, and it assigns the UCS. In this case, the UCS is the WCS, which is the World Coordinate System. You can see that here on the ViewCube.
Now let me go to B. I've done some work beforehand to set this up, but you can now see that I have oriented automatically to the B view using my named view, that's what this is, and my user coordinate system has changed. This is because I made a new user coordinate system with positive X going along the ground line to the right, positive Y going up my elevation, and then I saved it by naming it B. You can see I have B, C, and D automatically made. I can continue to go around my drawing and see each of my views with the user coordinate system being manually updated and saved so that I can now draw and pull data from my floor plan in any direction.
When would we use one of these systems over another? It very much depends on the project you're working on and the Office CAD standards where you are working. We are going to do this procedure because it is the more difficult of the two to set up our user coordinate system and so on. If you would like to experiment and try this procedure on your own, please do so on your own time, but do not do it in this course.
It would be great practice to try and redraw these elevations after this course using this system. In order to ensure that you are going to be able to follow along, please make sure that you have your coordinates panel shown by going to View and then right-clicking Show Panels and make sure the Coordinates is checked. In the next video, we are going to begin our elevation file.
See you there.
