AutoCAD Viewports Explained! Layout / Paper Space Tutorial & Must-Know Tips

hey everybody Brandon here from CAD intentions and in today's video we're going to be taking a look at viewports in AutoCAD I'm going to explain how they work the differences between layout and model space as well as how to create viewports quickly and easily in AutoCAD along with some tips along the way I think you guys are going to get a lot out of this one so stick around let's Jump Right [Music] In all right so first up the difference between a layout and a model space is going to come in handy uh you can see here in AutoCAD we are in the layout or paper space portion of the program and that would be the tabs down here that control that layout uh is one of the default ones and model is the default for our design space so in model space that's where you're going to be doing all of your drawing and design work and in layout space or paper paper space that's where we're going to be creating our sheets and our drawings now a viewport is a very specific object typically a rectangle but it can be any shape basically as long as it's a closed polygon and that is going to exist in our layout space and it is basically a window into the model or design space you can think of it as a picture frame that rectangle or viewport is going to allow us to see what's inside the model space now the scale and zoom of your viewport is going to change the scale and how much or how little of a drawing or image or design you can see based on the scale as you may already know the viewport this rectangle here can be set to any number of scales to view a different area or size of your model space so the smaller the scale say 1/8 in uh to a foot or say 1 to 50 if you're in metric or uh standard scales is going to be a small scale which would be quite zoomed in now if you zoom out to say 1 to a th000 that's going to be a more zoomed out or overall view of your project or design depending on the type of work you're doing the scales you use are going to vary quite a bit and things like architectural and civil drawings are going to use a larger or more zoomed out View for most things like site plans and Flor plans whereas smaller mechanical designs are going to use a smaller view or a more zoomed in scale hopefully that makes sense and we'll touch on scales again a little bit later but now back to the viewport so like I said a viewport is basically a picture frame or window looking into your model space now you can create multiple viewports in a layout if you want to show different scales and views of your project and I'm going to show you how to add those right now now when you're in the layout tab here you can click the layout tab up above on the ribbon aptly named because we're working in a layout space now from here you can create new viewports uh as simply as clicking this rectangular button here that's going to create a rectangular Viewpoint you can hit the drop down to create different shaped viewports but for now we're going to stick to rectangular I've also got videos on all of these topics that dive a little deeper into each portion that we're talking talking about and I'm going to list those in the description down below for you to check out once you're done today's video so back to clicking on rectangular it's going to allow us to specify the corner so we're just going to create another viewport over here and we'll just end it somewhere around there so you can see it's shown the entire model space we're just going to zoom into the portion that we're interested in say we want this one here to be a zoom in of our kitchen area you can set it to a specific scale by clicking this little arrow here and displaying all of the scales you've got in your drawing now this upper one is at 1/8 equals uh 1T I believe so we're going to zoom this one here in a little bit and let's say we go up to 38 = 1T you can see that's a little bit too zoomed in so let's go to one4 so double clicking inside our viewport allows us to move it around by holding in the right or the center click button or the OS wheel you can click that into pan or you can type pan into the command line to move your drawing around once we've centered it in kind of the position we'd like you can simply double click outside of the viewport and double click inside to activate it outside to deactivate it you can also simply just click the model or paper space tab here and that'll activate or deactivate your viewport so now you can see we've got another viewport set and it's showing these same objects just at a different scale and extent than the other viewport this comes in handy for drawings where you'd like to show close-ups and zoom inss as well as an overall picture of your design or if you've just got different designs in your model space and you'd like to show them around your drawing say a front side and back view of a uh part you can set up a new viewport for each view allowing you to keep them separate and label them and all of that um this makes it a lot easier to set up a more complicated sheet in your drawing and layout space here so this kind of brings me back to an earlier video I did last year and I'll put a link to that one as well but scaling in AutoCAD is a popular topic and we're not going to dive into that one today since this one is just about how to create and what a viewport is but you should always be drawing at 1: one or actual size in model space in AutoCAD at that means if something is 1 in in real life it will be 1 in in model space this applies as well for very large objects I work in civil design and in a lot of times uh highways and these can be hundreds thousands of kilometers or miles long and you're going to draw all of that at full scale in your drawing you can simply zoom out as much as needed to the millions of units and you're never going to run out of space now your drawing may slow down if you've got large scale projects and in those cases we'll break them up into sections to keep the drawing size small but we're never going to scale our objects in AutoCAD to anything other than one: one unless there's an actual good reason for it or you're drawing a say not to scale detail or example schematic um everything else is going to be done at one: one or true size and you're going to choose your scale and sheet sizes based on your viewports and layouts now before before we finish up talking about viewports one important note about viewports is that they can be locked and unlocked by simply selecting one and clicking on the lock icon at the bottom right of the toolbar down here or right clicking and choosing display lock and just hitting yes a locked viewport will no longer move when you double click inside it it is a locked in that view and at that scale this prevents you from accidentally moving it if you making changes through the viewport here because anything you change in say the viewport affects the rest of the drawing you can see I just deleted that yellow hatch and it's disappeared in this view as well it will have disappeared in model space so again this is just a window looking into model space so changes you make are permanent and going to affect your design and model now there are workarounds and I've got videos on that including things like viewport specific colors layers and setting so you can have some layers and colors display in one viewport that don't display in another viewport and those are all controlled through your layer property manager and then through these VP uh properties so VP means viewport so viewport line type viewport color viewport line weight all of these including the viewport freeze will only affect the viewport that you've got selected so if you want to go into the viewport as I have here you can start changing viewport colors and viewport layer freezing options and you can see here if I select say everything withr a and viewport freeze it everything's going to be frozen or not display in this viewport but you can see down here it's not affecting my other viewports now that's a drastic example but you can go through and change individual colors individual layers line types and Aline weights and this is only going to affect this this viewport if you've got it selected and you're only changing the VP Columns of your layer manager now back to the Locking of viewports if you do decide you want to move or shift a viewport at a later time simply selecting the viewport right clicking and turning that lock to no or clicking the locked icon down here you can now move it around and change the scale freely you're going to want to be careful with that since it's very easy to accidentally Zoom it in or out or move it off the screen so I would only unlock those for major changes typically once you've got all your viewports set you're going to lock them and leave them just like that now there are a ton of other features in AutoCAD revolving around layouts and viewports including the ability to rotate uh spin create multiple object sizes uh customizing your viewport settings and adding and removing custom scales and I touch on those in many other videos on the channel and if you'd like to learn a ton more about setting up drawings viewports design XRS sheet sets and more don't forget to check out my course AutoCAD fundamentals and workflows in a hurry I'll put a link to that up above and down below it's discounted using those links for viewers such as yourself if you guys enjoyed this video don't forget to subscribe and thanks for watching don't forget to leave a comment down below letting me know what you'd like to see in the next video cheers

Channel: CAD Intentions

Views: 15,148

Keywords: cadintentions, autocad productivity tips, autocad tips and tricks, autocad hacks, autocad design tricks, autocad tips for beginners, autocad viewports, autocad insert drawing, autocad insert dwg, autocad make viewport, autocad layouts, autocad model, autocad sheet setup, autocad scaling, how to setup viewports, autocad multiple viewports, autocad scales, autocad viewport tips, autocad model space, viewports

Id: 5QheAJYcd9o

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2024