AutoCAD XREFs Explained! External Reference Tutorial & Must-Know Tips

hey everybody Brandon here from CAD intentions and in today's video we're taking a look at x-refs or external references in AutoCAD I'm going to share some tips and tricks when working with them explain how they work and what they are as well as find some shortcuts along the way I think you guys are going to like this one make sure you stick around [Music] all right so starting off what is an x-ref or an external reference in AutoCAD and xref or external reference is what we call it when another drawing or base plan or other data is referenced or inserted into our AutoCAD drawing now you can bring up the xref menu by going to the insert tab up here on the menu and then clicking this little fly out Arrow under reference or you can type in xref to bring up the external references manager now you can see here we have no files referenced into our drawing now you can reference a variety of different file types including PDFs dwgs and imagery for this video and for most of your drawings you're going to be referencing in other AutoCAD DWG drawings but regardless of the file type all of the kind of tips and tricks and how they work is the same so you can right click in the external reference area and choose to attach which is how you add or reference another object or drawing or you can go up to the top here and hit the fly out to choose which type you would like to attach now for our example here we're going to attach an AutoCAD drawing I'm going to copy a link and paste it into my dialog box here it's going to bring me to my example drawings now we're going to reference in a floor plan now this is going to be pretty common with the majority of your AutoCAD projects that you're going to be referencing in some sort of Base data based plan or reference to work off of whether you're drawing something to scale or not you're going to want to reference in something to start with most of the time if say you're in architecture you're going to be referencing in the base 4 plan in unless you're drawing that in which case you might be referencing in say a site plan so you can size and locate your floor plan in relation to the entire site that you're working on for our case we're going to be referencing in the floor plan drawing here so we're going to hit open and it's going to ask you a few questions before attaching this external reference file to start typically you're going to want to keep a lot of these set to the defaults the main ones being scale you're going to want to bring most things in at a one-to-one scale meaning nothing is sized up or down it's coming in at the actual size that it was drawn in in the original file same as the insertion point typically you're going to want to insert it at zero zero zero which means that it's coming in in the same location it's using 0 0 as the reference point other than that you can choose between path types a relative path is just that it's going to in the future look for this file in a path relative to where this example drawing for us is saved so if it's one folder up or in the same folder it's going going to save that path regardless of the path before it so if you're working on a Cloud Server or a company server this is probably the best way to do it because if different people have their drives mapped differently this relative path will still work as long as the folder structure Remains the Same as in things are in the same location as they were when you created this if you'd like a full path you can do that and that is basically just going to save the file path of this reference file exactly as it is you only will run into major issues with this is if you're working on different drives than someone else that may work on this drawing and they have say their a drive called something else or your X Drive is called something else if the file names and paths are different it's not going to work or be able to find this reference and then the third option is no path this is only really going to work if your external reference file file and your drawing file are in the same folder at all times typically you're going to want to stick with relative as the default same as rotation you're not going to want to rotate your reference and down here is just telling you the units that the base drawing is in and if there is a scale factor being applied to it now over on the left here you have two options the default is an overlay and this basically just means that once this drawing is referenced into our example drawing if for some reason we reference our example drawing into another drawing this drawing the floor plan one will not also be referenced into that third drawing this keeps and prevents references from becoming circular basically referencing a drawing that has your drawing referenced to it you can run into issues with updates and changes if things kind of go into a circle like that if you want your references to all show up in another drawn if you reference it in you can choose to attach your xref to the drawing and that keeps the xrefs intact when you reference say this example drawing into another drawing it's a little confusing to talk it through but once you get to use to these and start using them you'll understand that difference there so we're going to hit OK and keep all of the defaults including overlay set and see where our floor plan lands as you can see our floor plan drawing is now in our example draw so an X ref as we've got it here is simply an image or uh mirrored copy of the other drawing so I can select it but everything gets selected at once and you can see right up at the top here that it's an external reference so you can't really edit anything in terms of moving or changing the objects and the locations of them but you can actually modify things in the layers so if we open up the layer menu here you can typically change any of the layer settings for the xref file in your drawing and it's not going to affect the original drawing now this is super helpful if you'd like to show things as different colors or thicknesses in your drawing but you want to don't you don't want to upset or change anything in the original floor plan drawing now you can see in my layers man manager here if I click the plus sign next to xref you can see the xrefs or the different files that I have referenced into this drawing and by clicking on it it's going to only show me the layers from that drawing now I can go and turn off a bunch of them I can change the colors I can change the names I can do a lot of editing here and this isn't going to affect the original this is a great tip to know when working with xrefs is you can go in and change colors line types line weights transparencies and turn layers on and off through the layer manager as well as through the layer buttons here using things like freeze you can go in and freeze the text layer like I just did there and it's not going to affect the original floor plan drawing it's just going to affect how it's displaying in my drawing as a reference before we jump into the next tip if you like this video or any of my videos and you want to learn more you can check out my AutoCAD fundamentals and workflows course it's over 15 years of tips and tricks packed into downloadable videos and streamable videos that are easy to follow quick straight to the point and it comes with a ton of downloadable example files including a full-on template that we create in the course and if you'd like even more support you can join the cad support forum and Discord which is where we answer questions one on one you can also request custom tutorials that I post up on the channel and take part in our monthly q a sessions where we all bounce and brainstorm new CAD ideas teach things do trainings and more again I'm going to put that link up above and down below I hope to see you all there cheers alright so now that we kind of know what an xref is and how to bring it into our drawing the next thing comes with if we need to edit the actual x-ray so you can select an external reference or xref and right click and choose edit in place or open an xref now these two kind of accomplish the same thing but are slightly different editing and xref in place is going to basically unlock all of the line work and text here and I can move around and make edits and then close and save it within my drawing now that may be the easiest way to edit an xref if you have minor changes and tweaks to do something like deleting a line or changing the spelling or a piece of text but if you want to make more edits or work on the drawing you can choose open xref both are going to accomplish the same thing but as you'll see here opening the xref is a nice and easy way to open that entire drawing in case you want to add more to it remove change things up shift things from one layer to another now you can see in our example here I'm just going to select all of the text quickly and I'm going to change the layer to say text data 1. now you can see all of the colors have changed and the layer has changed for all these pieces of text now when I'm done editing my xref this is the original file you need to remember that you are making changes to this floor plan drawing in case anybody else is using it or referencing it these changes will be seen on all of their drawings as well but when you're finished making your edits simply closing and saving the drawing is going to update it and you can see in my example drawing I've now got a pop-up telling me that I need to reload the floor plan drawing which has been modified by admin if you're working on a company server this will likely say the user's name that has edited by clicking this pop-up it's going to reload your xref and you can see the xref compare has popped up here it's going to show me the things that have changed so you can see that the text has changed here I'm going to hit OK because I don't need to see that comparison I know it the other way you can reload a drawing if it has been edited is to go to the external reference dialog or manager here right click on the xref and choose reload now I'm going to show you here I'm going to open this floor plan I'm going to change my text back to my text layer close and save it and you'll see right away I get that pop-up again but you'll also see in my external reference manager that it needs to be reloaded now right clicking and choosing reload is going to do that it's going to tell me that things have changed it's going to ask if I'd like to compare the differences I'm going to say no this time but you can see it's put it back on that red layer which we had Frozen in this drawing which is why the text has gone and disappeared again all right so next up I'm going to show you a quick trick and shortcut on how to bring in or add more references and I've talked about this in other videos but you can actually drag and drop things into AutoCAD so for our example here I'm going to drag and drop the windows DWG drawing directly into our drawing and it's basically going to ask me all the same questions as that dialog box did I'm just going to do it through the command line so it's asking for an insertion point I'm going to use 0 comma zero and hit enter it's going to ask me for a scale factor I'm going to type in 1 and hit enter and it's going to ask me for my y scale I'm going to type in 1 and hit enter and now it's going to ask for my rotation it's defaulting to zero so I'm going to hit enter to keep it at that you can see that it's now imported or inserted a new reference drawing that contains all the windows for my building on this floor plan so now you can see I've almost built out a bit of a drawing without actually creating anything I'm simply referencing and adding example data or base data to my drawing now would be the part where you can start designing maybe laying out electrical or Plumbing Line work on your floor plan and have a nice base data set that is referenced into your drawing and dynamic so if a wall changes if a door changes you're going to get that reload update and you can simply update your plan accordingly having everything dynamically linked and not worrying about if your floor plan is out of date from the main one that your project is working on all right so before I let you go as we just did with a drag and drop into this drawing the new drawing in here is actually just a block reference so it's very similar to an external reference but this one is actually within our drawing so this one is not an external reference but it is a block reference that basically means that it is stored within our drawing so I can select it I can still edit layers the same way but when I go to say right click I can block edit it so it's not going to open a separate drawing it's going to be a block within my drawing so if I want to make changes here these aren't going to affect that original drawing this is simply a copy of that one inserted into my drawing slightly different than an xref but also super useful in different ways if you do want to make changes this is a great way to do it without affecting the original and you can always reload in or add another block reference if the old one does change and then lastly if you'd like to remove or detach any of your references you can simply open up the external reference manager here and select the reference you'd like to remove maybe you're done referencing it maybe you don't want to see it anymore maybe you've just got too many in your drawing you can select it and right click and you have two options you can unload it which removes it from your drawing workspace here in the model space but it doesn't take it out of your drawing you can also reload it and that brings it back and if you right click and detach it that's going to delete it completely from your drawing and it's no longer going to be in there and it's not going to be on your references list now I'm just going to undo that and bring back our floor plan external reference here and now before we finish up today's video you can actually also go to your external reference manager here select A4 plan or reference and right click and choose bind this is one of the other options and this is basically going to insert or import your external reference directly into your drawing as a copied block reference just like we inserted with the windows one this is going to disconnect the reference from the original and put that copied block into your drawing for the differences between bind and insert I've got a video on that I'll put a link Down Below in the description but for now we're going to choose bind and hit OK and you can see that it has now been removed from our xref manager and we now have the block within our drawing of our floor plan now this can be useful when sending drawings to say clients or packaging them up at the end of a project binding your xrefs into this drawing ensures that someone in the future when they open up this drawing all of the different layers and references that you used when creating it are still going to show up instead if you had left them as xrefs and the folders had changed or something had gotten lost or removed you may not have those linked into your drawing but that's all for today's video hopefully this has helped demystify and explain xrefs or external references in AutoCAD if you have any questions at all don't forget to leave them down below in the comments and if you'd like to learn more or you'd like additional CAD support check out my AutoCAD fundamentals course or join the cad support group and get the course as well both of those links are in the description down below thanks for watching have a good one and cheers foreign

Channel: CAD Intentions w/Brandon

Views: 28,401

Keywords: cadintentions, autocad productivity tips, autocad tips and tricks, autocad hacks, autocad design tricks, autocad tips for beginners, autocad viewports, autocad insert drawing, autocad reference manager, autocad import drawing, autocad insert dwg, autocad how to xref, autocad external reference explode, autocad external reference, autocad drag and drop, autocad insert and scale, autocad xref command, autocad xref tips, how to make xref in autocad, how to add xref, autocad xref

Id: wfsUyR9xp70

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2023