Autocad - 4 Tips to make your dimension lines looking professional!

hi friends in this video i'm going to show you four tips that will make your dimension lines looking more professional in your projects with this i mean when we plot our drawings how can we always keep the same sizes of text extension lines etc even if we are using dimensions in different scales how to keep the same spacing between the dimensions and the objects and how to create a template file with your own personalized dimension styles let's start [Music] draw the dimension line at a specific distance from the object suppose we have this example and we need to add dimensions to indicate the lengths of these lines in fact that's easy to do we just need to activate the command dimension linear click on two points and finally click again to place the damage line right okay now i'm going to do the same but for the left side and also let's add a horizontal dimension here in the bottom as you can see the dimensions are correct and there is nothing wrong with them but as you can notice i used a random distance from the lines for each of the dimensions okay maybe it's not a big deal but in my opinion it's better if we use a specific dimension spacing for the entire drawing or even for the full project let's see i'm going to do this again this time i'm drawing a dimension line measuring this section but then instead of clicking on a random location for placing the measurement i decided to have it for example at 500 millimeters above the line and when i see this extension track line i type 500 and press enter in this way i will have that distance between both objects then for the left dimension i use the same method i hover the end point drag to the left and type 500 again finally i repeat the same process down here type the 500 millimeters and now you can see that all the dimensions have the same separation between the lines making the drawing looking nicer of course there are always exceptions in a rule let's use the command continue for the dimensions above ah first i have to choose to select the object that i want to continue i click on select then on this extension line as you can see i am adding another dimension connected with the first one and finally add the third dimension by clicking in this last corner of course as you can see this last dimension is far away from the line but in this way i can have all the dimensions in this side all along the same reference line finally here you have an example of this method applied in a floor plan set specific lengths for extension lines another nice setting is to set a fixed length for the extension lines those bars that limit the measurement using the default settings when i add more dimension lines all along this side and look that i can do it pretty quick by just clicking in each intersection they start from the points where i click with an offset gap that is also specified in the dimension style manager i'm going to access that menu by clicking on the icon located on the dimensions panel select the dimension style this one annotative and click on modify in this section below put the tick here to add the fixed length on all the extension lines as you can see the length here is 3 millimeters and actually as this is an annotative style this value means that the extension lines will measure 3 millimeters in a paper after printing it click on ok and you can see the result use annotative dimensions especially in projects that we use more than one scale this layout is a drawing about an elevation of a building the viewport above shows the complete drawing in scale 1 per 100 and below i created two viewports with the details of the windows and doors ah and the scale is also smaller one per twenty as you can see the dimension lines are in the same size in all of the viewports now suppose that i created them with the standard dimensions i would need two different dimension styles the ones on the elevation the text height has to be around 200 millimeters and the dimensions on the details i would need a style of 40 or 50 millimeters of text height and in addition to that in order to make them to look exactly in the different scales we need calculations to make them with the same proportion yes hopefully there is a much easier way to do this and it's with the annotative dimensions let's make this exercise we are going to draw annotative dimensions in the drawing above which has the scale 1 per 100 and then i have another viewport for this section with scale 1 per 10. the method is easy first of all set the dimension style that is annotative as our current style annotative dimension styles can be recognized by this symbol before the name it's easy now before selecting the style let's modify it and set the text height as 2.5 millimeters and save the changes then i'm going to set the scale in the model space to match the viewport scale of the full drawing it's one per 100 and put some linear dimensions there here you can see them in the viewport then double click on the viewport of the detail zoom in until you find it and set the scale to 1 per 10 then let's readjust this to put the drawing more or less in the center back to the model space i change the scale to 1 per 10 and add 2 dimension lines on this detail here and yes this time i'm leaving the dimensions at a distance of just 50 millimeters from the lines because the scale here is smaller so again in the layout you can see the dimension sizes look exactly in both viewports and if i double click on each of them you can see that they have the correct scales one last information in this source tip annotative dimensions only displaying viewports that match their exact scale did you see if i change this to 1.50 they just disappear use template files with your own dimension styles this is a good practice if we want to keep the dimensions with the same appearance in all the projects we are working on suppose you have a file about the project of the building x then your next one will be about the building y and then the building set as you will probably use different dwg files for each project to keep the same dimension styles the best is to have a template and use it whenever you start a new project so in a new file which can be from a template you have created and i don't have any objects here in the workspace i'm going to the dimensions tab on the annotative menu and click on manage dimension styles so these are the default styles i can modify any of them or create a new style if i want and that's exactly what i'm going to do i click on new then on the first blank i should write the name for the new style start with means that i copy the settings of the style that is showing here in this case annotative below i decide if i want to use annotative dimensions by checking this box and finally i can continue so now we can make the changes that we need text arrows primary units etc i'm going to add just a suffix here as the symbol of millimeters because i put it on the title and click on ok to save the changes after i can add more styles for example let's say i am creating a similar style with the same settings except for the suffix i'm going to set meters and for that i put a scale factor to convert millimeters to meters of course this is in case i make into drawing in millimeters and when you are ready with your styles let's save this file as a template choose the name and save it on the default templates folder or create a new one in this way you can start your projects with the same template and you don't need to edit the dimension styles again okay it looks like we reached the end of this tutorial i hope you enjoyed it and if you haven't done it yet subscribe to calling black there you can find all the content of tutorials for beginners see you on the next occasion

Channel: CAD in black

Views: 337,134

Keywords: autocad tips, dimension lines, cad in black

Id: iBuv5hMGxlE

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021