AutoCAD Xref Tutorial (2021)- Everything you need to know in 5 minutes!

welcome back everyone to another episode of civil textures my name is ferdi and today's video i'm going to be covering everything you need to know about exercise now extraps are a very important aspect in autocad and in the civil engineering process basically what extra phase is basically somebody what does one drawing and then we reference our current drawing with that drawing so basically think of it as the layers so when you have one layer and then you bring another layer imagine the other layer that you bring is from a different drawing rather than from the same drawing so what we're going to be covering we're going to be covering the units and the roll of units in the xrefs we're going to cover the difference between attachment and overlay and we're going to cover the difference between bind and insert and what to be careful when you're doing your extras so so let's start and try to cover everything as quickly as possible let's try and do it under five minutes let's say what time is it so it's 20 39 so to extraf so basically connect one drawing with another we're gonna use these examples so we have our main drawing topographical survey proposed model which is drawn in millimeters the proposed model which is uh drawn correctly and as you can see it's over here and then we have the [Music] proposed model with the wrong ucs then we have the extra drainage and the extra levels now let's start so in the main drawing let's say we're starting a new job and a new project so every the first thing you want to do is make sure you have your title block and what you want to do is bring your topographical survey in now if we didn't have xrif what we would do is create a layer to graphical survey copy paste that information but in this case we have extra so just type xref hit enter and this window should appear and all you have to do is hit that arrow and hit attach dwg if the option dwg does not appear then click the arrow to select the dwg you can extra multiple things actually let's call it attach so let's attach our dwg now it will request us with drawing so we're gonna go with the topographic or survey model and we're gonna this window will appear and let's go through everything so we have the preview we have the attachment or overlay which are the reference type now the difference between attachment and overlay is the following the attachment means that when you bring that topographical survey in your main drawing whenever you extract the main drawing into another drawing the topographical survey will be brought with it if we use overlay then the topographical survey will not come with the main drawing if you extract a new drawing the main drawing now this scale usually we should not touch it for the graphical server because they should have done everything to scale and the insertion point we should still not touch it because the graphical survey needs to be in the right coordinates now if for some reason they use different coordinates then you just can use the uh insertion point here now the path type is basically the folder type or location so if we have relative it means that it's relative to the main drawing so for the main drawing it's relative what will happen is it will be this and then plus this so the extra file will be basically uh the path would be this three dots will be that but if we go full path then the path will be the following now there is pros and cons regarding the full path and relative path the full path when you let's say you move that main drawing into a different folder the full path will continue to connect the graphical survey with the main drawing however if you let's say copy pasted the main drawing with the extras and everything into a different folder then the xref needs to be reloaded the reason being repath the reason being is because the full path if we go to our project folder it goes let's say system c civil textures folder tutorials if we move the xref and the main drawing to a different folder then they will no longer be connected however if we have it relative then it will be relative to the main drawing and then we have the rotation and then we have the block units so basically when you bring attach a drawing into the main drawing you check the units so in this main drawing we are unitless and the topographical survey is the drawing settings are unitless so the factor will be one and see here is the path and here will be the safe path if we do the relative one you can see it's dot slash xrf so that's the relative path to the main drawing so whenever we move the main drawing the main drawing the extra path for the top graphical survey will always try to find a folder named xref however if we put the full path as i said it will always go to c drive so we'll texture tutorials now they have the pros and cons for example if you're taking the job at home then it's easier to have relative path and because you're taking the whole job folder at home let's say you're working from home you're taking this whole folder with you therefore you want to keep it relative because the drive might change because you might save it on your desktop however the xrif is relative to the main drawing now enough theory so let's look into some practice so hit okay and we brought our topographical serving now the first thing you will notice is if we click on the topographical survey you can see it's been brought in layer zero so what we're going to go ahead and do and create a new layer and name it xref topographical survey so let's name it a cts topographical survey now i let's say i wanted to graphical survey to be green so we're going to set it green and if you noticed here in the extra four in the layer properties it created an extra and you can have a selected graphical survey and you can change your layer coloring from here now let's do an example so if you want to change the levels let's say to red let's change them to red they did not change now why is that that might be because the levels are not set by layer so if we go to a topographical survey and if we select everything and let's go and set it by layer let's say the color it was set but probably wasn't saved because there is an asterix there so if we go up apologies if we go and save it the asterisk should be gone if we go back to our main drawing it will ask us to reload it there is a window here at the bottom so hit that and you can see it became red now this is when we change the layer properties from the excerpt what will happen if we move the topographical survey into the topographical survey layer it's not going to become green the way to control this is to go back to your topographical survey select everything and change it the color property from by layer to by block by doing that you're telling the properties the entities that they will be done by blocks so in whichever layer they are they will be transformed so if we hit reload you can see becomes green and if we let's say we want to make it let's say i don't know a light gray it'll become a light gray all of them together without having to change layer properties by itself this is good it has its pros and cons again so if you have multiple extra if you want to color code them then that's one way to do it if you have few xrf then just keep everything by layer just so you can know that you left the same drawing uh tip never touch the drawings that you come always save them as xrefs so if you do any changes you always have the original file that came on now let's look at the example of the conversion now we're gonna go attach the proposed model that is done in millimeters so this drawing its units is in millimeters and the drawing has been drawn in millimeters now yes some people might ask so why would you have the units millimeters and not draw millimeters well you might forget that your cat settings were set in millimeters but usually you should have set it in unit list and then draw accordingly as you can see here is 26 000 which equates to 26 meters so let's save this one and let's import it and see what's gonna happen attach it and let's see what has gonna happen so we're gonna go propose model hit open and you see here it detected that it's millimeters now because the main drawing settings is unitless it will not do any conversion so if we bring it in you can see that the millimeters drawing is up here where the extra the topographical survey is down there one way to solve this is the following so let's detach it so you hit right click and detach so you remove it completely and let's go attach again now since we know that the proposed model is drawn in millimeters all you can do is just change this hit the uniform scale and just do the conversion factor from millimeters to meters it is not point zero zero one so if we hit ok now and we zoom in you can see it brought it back in place now the other way to do it so let's detach it is to change the units of your drawing so from unit list we're going to make it into meters because that's what they usually draw the civil engineers structures drawing millimeters so we got attached to wg and if we go to the proposed model and you can see here millimeters and the factor is 0.01 so it automatically detected the conversion factor so if we hit ok it brought it right in place so it's good to know about this so you can always have set up your drawings uh unit less and always do the conversion by yourself so you know what you've done or you can just do it automatically by having your doing meters and then just going into the cad folder and just making it in millimeters like so changing it to 0.01 the other way to do it this is just basically select your model and then scale it down by 0.01 but it's like whichever you see it's fit so now that example is out of the way what's the next thing that we want to cover we want to cover the attachment and overlay so let's say we are in the drainage folder and let's say we have the proposed side model extra then so if you see there is the dwg icon and then there is a white paper space behind it so that is an atta an overlay as you can see here it says overlay it to change that you go from extra type to attach now let's do the overlay first so i can show you what's the difference so let's detach our proposed model and what we're gonna do is we're gonna bring the drainage so let's bring the drainage in it's unitless no conversion factors we're gonna do the overlay relative path and then hit ok you can see that it brought only the drainage however the drainage drawing has the proposed extrav to change this and bring it with it just right click excerpt type attach and then save your drawing and then if you go back to your main drawing it will reload and you can see it broader with you so this has its pros and cons so some cases you don't want to have duplicate xrefs and the other cases you want to always bring it with it for example you're working on drainage and you have an excerpt in it that says existing drainage so you always want to bring it with the drainage model wherever you extra fit in so this you can you understand the benefits the more you use it now let's do the bind and insert so let's say we need to send the string to the client the one way that pretty much almost everyone knows is publish e transmit and the in transmit will ask you to save your drawing first and then it will compile like put together all the extras you're using see we're using the topographical survey the drainage and the drainage has the external reference of the proposed model so we'll bring everything all this together but let's see what we're not gonna send a zip file to the client we just want to send him one dwg simple as that because we might not be a cad proficient so one way to do it is to right click on the proposed model and then go we bind but in this case we cannot bind it because that proposed model was part of the extra drainage so let's fix that by going to extra type overlay save it and then let's go to the main drawing reload and we're gonna bring our proposed model in as well so we're gonna go bring the proposed model which is in millimeters so we're gonna do the conversion 0.001 hit okay it brought with it let's say we want to send this drawing to the client so let's bring our extra strainage so we hit right click bind the difference between bind and insert when you bind it it will bring the either bind or insert it will bring the drawing the extra drawing into your drawing as a block but the difference between bind and insert is if you bind it in the layer aiming system what you will do is we'll put the name of your drawing first and then it will follow up with the layer settings so let's do the bind for the graphical survey and you'll see so if you go to layer properties you can see extra drainage which is the name of our drawing and then the layer name now if we go with insert and let's do it for the proposed model bind insert it will only bring the layers without the layering name on it so let's go back to our drawing so if we go layer properties you can see cad building cad car park everything and you can see they this icon is there these are the ones that they're being used let's say so you can actually use them change them and these are that cannot be used because they're part of a block so you see that graphical server came as a block the same as with the proposed model now this should cover the all the aspects regarding the extras with dwg you can do images dwf but we will cover them very very later now the only thing you need to be careful of is the ucs ucs basically is this thing down here your y and x axis now if we don't have the grids you can have the y and x axis and if you turn on the grids you can see the rectangles are like all of them like straight lines perpendicular horizontal now we have a proposed model here is ucs and what we want to do is we want to bring it to the main drawing now let's say the ucs of this drawing is messed up it's not correct when we go extra and let's say we want to bring our proposed model in the proposed model will not come in the right place the reason being is because the act the ucs is set up differently so my advice is always make sure that when you before your excerf make sure your ucs is set correctly and to set it correctly you type ucs and then hit w for world and hit enter and then if you want to make sure it's rotated correctly to the true north type plan and then current and that should be it and now if we bring our proposed model which is set on a different ucs it will bring it in the right place because what happened is the ucs of the xref gets overridden by this ucs so you can see it's brought here as per it was however here the ucs was wrong but if the ucs was set up wrong here and we extra fitting will come in the right place so basically when you extra from one drawing to a drawing that the ucs is not correct then the excerpt will not come correctly but if you extract a ucs that is not correct into a drawing that the ucs is correct then it will still come correctly and that should cover everything that you need to know about the extras last thing is if you want to change your path you just go here select your xref and just go here and change it or you can actually change everything through here so you can avoid the double click and here you can change the referencing name so let's say we don't want to have proposed model ucs we want to say that it's today's date so zero sec one 2020 actually 21 and hit enter it will just rename it for you or just right click and or just hit f2 apparently rename is not in the options here and you can compare it now with the new version of the cut with recent changes and you can select a new path change path types make absolute or relative so it's up to you you can open it from here or you can edit your extra through the main drawing so just select it hit right click edit extra in place it will ask you is that the extra if you want to edit yes i wanna and then all you have to do is just edit it now my drawing was locked that's why i didn't open it but for you should open it just fine so i hope you find this tutorial useful and you learn something new and we will be bringing next a pds tutorial regarding the grading so basically how we can create a slope from an existing line or how to create a slope to time with an existing ground model so subscribe and stay tuned thank you for watching

Channel: Civil Tech Source

Views: 17,444

Keywords: autocad, xref, civil tech source, civil, tech, source, ferdi, jafar, attach, autocad attachment, CAD, external, reference, civil egnineering, drawings, autcad

Id: _BbSn8duk9Y

Length: 19min 59sec (1199 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021