Back to Basics: Introduction to Blocks in AutoCAD 2017 WEBINAR | AutoCAD

well hello everybody and welcome to another build your AutoCAD IQ webinar presented by product support from Autodesk today's topic will be back to basics an introduction to blocks in AutoCAD 2017 2016 really it's all the same in most versions recently I'm presenting my name is Zack with me today presenting will be Michael and moderating normally would be naman and rice but I think naman is not with us today so it'll just be Bryce and the questions portion of the webinar interface so any questions you have along the way feel free to ask as we go through so a little bit about us I am based in Lake Oswego Oregon office and I support AutoCAD NOT a cat LT AutoCAD electrical on a cat for Mac Michael is with us from Boston today he's out there supporting civil 3d naman is one of our expert elites he's out of Cincinnati and then we have Bryce who is also here in the Lake Oswego Oregon office supporting AutoCAD AutoCAD LT and all manner of other AutoCAD based products so please do if you have questions as we go along leave them in the questions section and we'll get to those at the end if we have time we usually do have a little bit of time so we'll try to pad that in there the session will be recorded and we will post these to YouTube on our YouTube channel and the links will be available as well as the slide deck and any files that we use here and we do these every week on Thursdays we do have four tracks that we go through and as you can see there on the Left we have upcoming webinars that cover for the next month we'll do be doing some beyond the basics doing constraints next week week after that we talking about materials as they relate to 3d objects and 3d modeling in AutoCAD June 16th is the Tips & Tricks and Dave will be going through an introduce into an introduction to AutoCAD MEP and then back on the 23rd we'll be back to our track the back to basics and we'll be talking about viewports and layouts as always if you miss this or any other webinar and you want to see them again they are up on our YouTube page and we'll have links throughout to find those our knowledge network has a lot of links to help you get into the program and find out what you need to find to get things done and by no means are they replacements for good old training and that extends to these webinars as well shouldn't take these as full training we're merely going through some of the features and showing you some things that you might want to incorporate into your workflows and that's really the emphasis of these webinars is just to get to a little bit more familiar with some of the interface and some of the options in the program and the commands that maybe you didn't know about maybe you always wondered about and and wanted to know more about and that's why we're doing these so just to provide some further information so what we're talking about this week is blocks and we're gonna go through defining creating editing and ultimately reusing blocks and show you why that will be helpful in your work clothes going forward in AutoCAD so let's get started let's talk about what our blocks blocks are nothing more nothing less than a collection of AutoCAD entities that are combined into a more complex object a block definition resides within the database of each individual drawing and a block reference is an instance of the block that's already existing in the drawing now there are a couple different ways that people use blocks people often use blocks that are defined within a DWG file and you can define unlimited amounts of blocks within an individual DWG file or you might also have geometry defined in an individual DWG that you use the whole DWG as its own block and for insertion into other drawings as you work some reasons why we use blocks instead of having to draw things over and over again it sure is nice to be able to block them together store them and then reuse them right also and this is something that often gets overlooked but I want to emphasize this if you take 18 groupings of objects and you save the file without having any of them as part of blocks the file size will be larger than if you had one grouping of those 18 defined as a block and then you had 18 instances of the block in your file and I went through in this preparation for this and I did some testing there and it's it's pretty significant how you can keep your file sizes down by using blocks so that's one unseen benefit that largely goes overlooked but I want to point that out here also company standards you're working a firm everybody is producing output to go to clients and title blocks company standards everybody wants to be using the same thing so there's a consistency among the work produced by your firm and that's where blocks really can come in handy as well so let's see how this all works in AutoCAD at this point I will hand things over to Mike and he will go through definition of blocks with us thanks Zack so let me show you my screen here already so as sec mentioned i'm gonna go ahead and show you a little bit about blocks in AutoCAD LT so this is actually gonna be in AutoCAD LT 2017 but as Zack mentioned you know it's basically it stays the same you can do this in 2016 2017 regular AutoCAD and some of the other verticals as well so first off what I'm gonna do is show you how to actually insert a block into the air drawing here I'm gonna have a sample floor plan and you're gonna notice that there's a few chairs so my cup stories are actually already in here Oh can't see it alright once I can't anyway may be missing yeah I'm not seeing it let me see if I can get this out all right how about mmm while we're doing that while we're getting that ready let me throw out a couple of polls here just to get things started out as we often do we want to know is this your first honest health webinar and most of the time we've got a lot of returning clients but in this case we'll see how this goes give everybody a couple more seconds here to finish up and we'll take a look at the results here looks like we're over 80% here so I think I'm going to call that I won't share the results with you they're an overwhelming number of here coming back for repeat visits with us and we certainly appreciate that and for you newcomers welcome we hope you learn something here and again as we always say it's not really a substitute for classroom training and auto cad as you can get at your local resellers and autodesk training centers but it's just more a way to focus on sharing information and and getting you some some information about commands and and areas of the program you may not have explored before next up we want to know which program you use so if you give us some information about that just go ahead and choose which one you use it helps us go forward and prepare the content for these webinars as tailored towards our audience looks like we're just about finished on that one there so a little bit over 80% there we'll go ahead and close this one out and show the results I think last time it was mostly AutoCAD LT so that's switched a little bit here but it's good to know we've got all walks of Auto and represented here and lastly this one I want to cover right now before we get into it Michael is related specifically to blocks and just curious as to how you work with blocks whether you make your own or your company makes your own and they specifically say don't make your own or if you just randomly go out and get them online find them download I'm using that way or you know if you're completely unfamiliar with the concept of blocks that's okay too perfectly fine for that so that's why we're here and we're gonna go through what a block is how to define it various things that go along with it so give a couple more moments here for this pull-on block usage and I will go ahead and close it out here and share the results looks like the majority of you're pretty familiar with creating blocks a lot of you have standardized blocks with your companies and yet others of you going out online and getting them would point out that on one online resource that we have is our seek website so that's seek autodesk.com which has a lot of open source free DWG blocks that you can pull down as well as for other of our products as well and some of them come in PDF formats so it's a good place to get blocks from all right Zach let me know when you can see my screen up there will do and you're under the option for show screen clean yeah there you are very good looks like you're all set alrighty so sorry about that earlier a little bit of technical difficulties but I guess this sort of stuff happens when you're trying to do a live demo but um yeah so over here on my screen I'm gonna kind of show you how to do a few things with blocks within AutoCAD LT this is a latest version of 2017 but as we had mentioned before it's kind of the same from year to year not too much change has changed with blocks so first off I'm going to show you how to actually insert a block into the drawing so first off you're gonna go up here I'm going to show you how to do it through the ribbon so you're near the insert tab up here then blocks insert and then for this actual drawing what I'm gonna try to put in a dining room table so there is you know it's prompting me to as to where I actually want to place this table I'm gonna place it between these chairs and there you go so now I have like you know nice little arrangement over here all the chairs are individual blocks and then I also have the table block so you're gonna notice that the table block is a little bit different you know besides being a totally different shape because obviously it's a table it's actually a different color and layer that it came in was the zero layer so if that ends up happening to you all you have to do is click on it and you could actually change layer and you know the property is over here so I'm gonna switch it over to the iPhone so now the table is in the same layer as all the chairs so um I'm gonna actually show you some of the things that you can edit when you're actually inserting the block into your drawing I'm gonna kind of go back you can notice that at the bottom of the screen and the command the command bar there's a few options and I'm just gonna quickly run through them just so you can get a better feel as to what you know what things you can edit when you're actually trying to go through this and turn and block so the first one is base point if you press B this actually lets you select where you're gonna be gripping the block from so if you want to grip it from a specific corner you can go ahead and do that yeah let's be again I could actually change you know edit that where I'm gripping it from doesn't even have to be on the block itself I could edit you know edit where I'm gripping the block from so the next option is scale so scale actually lets you scale the block in the different axes so you'll notice that it's X Y and z-axis you could actually do it you know you could scale it in just one axis and not have it adjust for the other ones there's options later on that I'll go through but for now this one I'm just gonna show you how to edit know how to change the scale for the block in a particular axis so this is gonna be on the x-axis and then I'm going to make the table twice mom oh let me go back there you go no it's actually changing them all okay yeah give it one more shot over here it's so what's going on here it's actually scaling the entire block but so this one actually it's scaling the x y and the z axis but you'll have specific blocks and you'll actually be able to specify the axis so if you want to make the table twice as long you could do that through there the last option is the rotate so that's pretty self-explanatory you could rotate the insertion of the blocks if you want to have a 90 degrees there you go if you want to bring it back to the default just SR in space twice and I'll bring it back so for you keyboard warriors out there you actually don't have to go through the ribbon to insert a block you can actually just type insert and this little pop-up window will come up so you'll notice here that you have basically look very similar options to what was coming up to this row on the screen before except that you actually have it on a pop-up window you'll have the scale rotate you could specify the insertion point on the screen here but one of the cool things is that you could actually look for blocks on your computer or on a you know network location if you're working at a company that has blocks stored elsewhere I'm so you would just click browse and you could actually you know look for the blocks that you actually need a lot of times the blocks won't actually show up yeah all this does is that'll these are the blocks that are currently in the drawing that you're in so that is a good tool or a good way to find the blas eight you need one other thing is if you go to more options you'll notice that the same little pop-up window comes up so I'm gonna try to insert the table again through here actually before I do that I'm gonna go to home I'm gonna change my current layer to the eye furniture lower the eye fern one and you're gonna see how that changes the table or the block but I'm inserting there you go so the block actually took on the active layer and it makes me you know I don't have to go through the step of selecting it I'm going to layer and changing it to the layer that I actually want to use so there you have it there's two different ways of inserting blocks into the drawing you have that ribbon or at the command line there's other ways but for now I'm just gonna show those two so now I'm moving on I'm going to show you how to actually define blocks and a few of the tips and tricks that you could do with that you're gonna notice that there is another chair over here this one's actually a little bit different than the other ones this one has slightly longer arm rests that'll come into play a little bit later and another thing that you'll notice is that it is not a block so you could actually go in and select the specific line work so what I'm gonna go ahead and do is I'm gonna go back up here to the ribbon press insert create a block create block and then where did the window go there you go all right so once you press the create block this little window will come up and I'll ask you for the block block definitions so for this one I'm going to create a new block I'm gonna call this one new chair the base point I'm gonna specify this on screen so once we press ok on this block definition it'll actually ask me where I want to you know have the base point for this block so that'll come into play a little bit later but if you don't want to specify it on screen you could actually go in there and edit the points manually so as for objects gentlemen you could select objects specify on screen what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select the object I'm gonna select this guy then it gives you some more options so this is kind of after this block doesn't we're done with this block definition you choose to delete the linework convert the current line work to a block or just retain it it also lets you play around with the behavior of the block so you could have annotated I'm not going to go over annotation and you know annotate of items objects and scales that actually gets covered in another future webinar you could also do the scale uniformly so the problem that I ran into before where the I was trying to edit this scale and the whole block was edited you could actually set it so that you could you know edit all the scales at once so you can edit all the skills at once or you could just specify specific axes and then you know player out the scale that way another option that you have is exploding so you can allow the blocks you'd be exploded or prevent users from exploding it if you don't want anybody to touch again another cool thing is you could add a description so if you want to add a little bit more information about this specific block it also gives you the option to open it a block editor so you can go and it makes some more find like fine adjustments for now though I'm gonna keep this as is then I specified this is the inertia point and since I selected elite the chair is gone so now I'm gonna go back what I showed you guys before gonna insert block you're gonna notice that there's a new chair block and there you go so now we have created our own new block one cool thing that you could do with that block definition window is me use the oops command to bring back the old line work that we just delete it so for those aren't familiar with loops command it's kind of like an undo except it doesn't actually undo so if I undo it I could have brought back the chair but it would have gotten rid of the block that we created so I just want to bring back the line work use that oops demand there you go chairs back I'm gonna go back to the create block I'm going to name this one actually let me show you why I'm gonna do this this these blocks are actually called chair one so I'm gonna go create block and I'm going to search for them so chair one and then what I'm gonna do is kind of do the same exact steps that I did to create this block in the first place it's just gonna specify the base point on screen select the object I'm gonna leave everything as is and I'm gonna press ok now what's gonna happen is burma's gonna say hey you already have a few instances of that chair one block and the drawing what do you want to do so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say redefine the block specify the insertion point okay so I'm going to show you what actually happens in a little bit but someplace that this could be useful is let's say if you you know finished inserting all the blocks into your drawing and you decide hey you know what I actually don't want those chairs I prefer longer one option is you can you know create this new chair block you know insert a different block go in delete all the old ones and replace them or you could do what I just did go to the you know redefine the block go here and now you'll notice that all the chairs were changed with we're replaced with that new chair block and the extended arm rests so yep there's that's some of the things that you can do when you're defining creating blocks and now I'm going to turn it back over to Zack so that he can continue showing you guys some more about blocks in AutoCAD exactly that yeah I sure am so you know when you see me there I think my autocad's Owens yep I can see it alright so what I want to cover here are things that you can do an extension of what Michael is covering and what things you can do once you have your blocks in your drawing so I've got a blank drawing here I'm going to start I'm just going to go do an insert which is letter I or you can do it from the ribbon as Mike showed you there I'm gonna browse and I'm gonna pull in this chair drawing file and we'll put it here that's fine now if we take a look at the things that this that came in with this block before when I started this brand new drawing I just had layer zero and that's it and now if I look at my layers I have a seat layer a seat finish layer seat other these these other layers that don't have any color specified these used to be for attributes that were in this block but I got rid of the attributes so in reality I could probably get rid of the layers too but I just wanted to show that when you bring a block in any layers that were defined in the block that's what also is shown those layers come into the drawing definition when you bring a block in so the main way that we have to edit blocks is the block editor and that's B edit or if you simply select a block you can right-click it and you can choose to go into the block editor now within the block editor everything that isn't the block and you can have blocks within blocks everything that isn't a block will show up as its regular object type for example these are polylines I think everything in here is polylines if I'm not mistaken let's take a look at the properties palette it looks like we've got five polylines here as you can see and they're all on the seed layer what I wanted to do was take a couple of these objects and I can move them to different layers within the definition of the block so I'm going to put these on say the other layer now as you see there the color is obtained by layer and the other layer that I put these on it doesn't have any specified color at this point so that's the color little beads it'll just be black or or white depending on whether your background is black or white so let me take this other one here and I'm going to change it to I'm going to change it to get its color by block and we'll see what that is in just a minute here because by block by layer and by object are things that the definitions I think they're important to know a lot of people are kind of mysterious about what my block is they never use it they just either do individual they set the color or they set it by layer and they just skip over the by block and I'll show you what by block is for you may decide to work it into your workflow or you might not but having the knowledge is good so you can take it forward and do what you like with it so now that I've made these changes to this block I'm gonna close out of the block editor and I'm gonna say yes that I do want to save the changes to the chair so right away we can see that these objects here that are not blue that we moved to other layers are not there they're there it may seem like that they're all getting their color by what the layer thereon is and it's not exactly true so we change the color on this other layer to green the two objects whose color we set to inherit their color by layer they inherit the color now the other object if we go back in be edit here we take a look at the other object that we changed layers on this one we put it actually we didn't move it to the seat layer sorry I was going to change it to a different layer so let's go to seat view right and again its color is by block not by layer but it's on the seed view layer so let's close out and save that change so now if we go to the seat view layer and we change its color nothing happens to this object that we put on to that layer and that is because it's set by block now what does my block inherently mean let's take a look at that if we select the block and we look at the block in the properties palette the whole block is set to get its color inherited by layer now since we've set things the way we have the only object that's really doing that are the objects that are blue because they're on the seat layer the seat layer happens to be blue the other objects that are not blue we've either said to be on other layers or to get their colors in other ways now if we change the entirety of the block to say yellow for example the only thing that changed is the object that we set to be by block so everything else inherits its functionality has properties from other methods like from the layer that it's on or from we set independent colors for them we could do that too but in this case since we've set the whole block to be yellow the only object that takes its color being yellow is an object that we set to be by block now sometimes things will arrive at your doorstep and they'll be out of sync like this and the originator may have done it on purpose they had a specific reason in mind why they set things this way but you might not want them that way now you can go into the block editor and you can edit the block and select everything and maybe you want it all to be on one layer or maybe you want it to all get their colors by by layer and only by layer and that's it and that's fine too you can do that but another way to do you know let's say you want everything to be by layer but you don't want to go in the block edit there is an easier way to do that and the command there is set by layer we'll just pick the block here and it's going to ask us if we want to change the objects that are currently set to by block two by layer we'll say yes to that and do we want it to include blocks yes so that which was yellow is now magenta and it is magenta because the seat view layer on which that object resides is that color so if we now subsequently go into our block definition here and we select this object that was by block previously and we look at it in the properties palette we now see that it's set for by layer and that's the power of the set by layer command in fact if we select the whole thing all the objects we see that all the objects have their color set to by layer no matter which layer they happen to be on they're inheriting their color specifically from the layer that they reside upon so that's the difference between setting things to be by block or by layer or by object hopefully that clarifies any doubts your my questions you might have had by that so let's get into another way to make blocks and that is by using the W command Mike showed you the block command which you can select objects and create a block definition within your current drawing so if we take a few objects here and we copy them and and let's see how above here and here and here like just so we take these objects we can do block and define a block that's going to reside within this existing drawing it's going to be a block definition inside this drawing now we may not want to do that we may want to take these objects and imagine you've got several other objects in your drawing you just want to take a few of them and make them their own drawing that's easy to do all we need to do is select the objects that we want and we'll issue the command to write block which is W block now the destination is going to be in your Documents folder by default but of course you can use the button over here to browse for any location you like to store the new block and you can also change the name of the new block and let's call it maybe we call it my new block you can pick your base point and it's going to be the insertion point that's used whenever you take the new drawing and let's say we want to make it the geographic center to this whole thing it should be right there say ok to that and now this path here this my new block it's going to make a new DWG file in that location now you could do entire drawing if you wanted all of you the objects in your drawing to become a new drawing file but in this case we just want the specific object we've chosen and it shows us that that's what we're doing here shows us how many we have so let's go ahead and say ok there and now if we were to go and do an insert now that does not to change the fact that these objects here are still the same objects they were they're still a circle and and polylines but if we went to do an insertion now we could browse the Documents folder and we would have that my new block there it is right there insert it and we could rotate it and give it a 45-degree angle here and and there it is and if we check its properties we see that it is indeed a block if we explode it it returns it back to its individual objects from which it was made now I would like to point out that just because you explode a block that doesn't do anything to get rid of the block definition within your drawing so let's back up a couple steps here to where we didn't have this block in this current drawing so if I go in to do an insert my list of blocks in this current drawing is empty because I don't have any block definitions in this file so that should change when I put in the my new block into this there is now let's do the 45-degree angle because it's fun all right now when I go to do an insert I do now have that in my list of blocks that I can insert because it's now defined within my drawing database now if I take this block and I explode it it reverts it back to its independent components however if I go to do another insert you see that my new block is still an option there and I can indeed insert it and it will be a block now if you didn't want to keep the block definition within your current drawing you can purge the block definition out but in order to do that there can be no current instances of the block in your drawing so right now if I did a purge I'm showing items that I can purge you notice here that the blocks section doesn't have a plus next to it because there aren't any blocks defined in this file that I can purge they're all in use there's all a current instance so if I take the only current instance of the Block in this file and I delete it and if I then go back to purge now the blocks section is available for me and the my new block is one that I can now perch out of my drawing and the result of that is the next time I go to do an insert my list of blocks that are defined in this drawing is now empty now if you're inserting a DWG file like we were doing here this my new block for example point is as we defined it the geographic the geometric center of the objects now you may want to change that you may want it to be at one corner of the square you can easily redefine the insertion point for your blocks by going into the block editor choosing your block and your authoring palettes over here various parameters you can set the key one we're interested in here is the base point parameter now the base point currently is the center of all these objects but it's now asking me to specify a parameter location let's say I want it to be this corner so I'm going to snap to that endpoint of that corner now that's going to be my insertion point anytime I insert an instance of this block so let's see how that works so let's do an insertion and now you can see where the crosshairs are the crosshairs indicate where the insertion point is now what does the insertion point matter the insertion point matters for various things like when you're going to move a block whereas the grip going to be that's where the grips going to be is the insertion point of the base point of your block also if you do a rotate command for example the base point is automatically going to be the base point of your of your block of course you can specify it differently if you didn't want to use the insertion point of the block as your rotation base point but that's what it will automatically be if you don't specify any other point so how do we reuse blocks now that we've modified them we've deleted them we defined them various ways to get blocks into your drawing so we've seen you can do insert you can browse for DWG files you can insert blocks that are already defined in your current drawing but in math how do we have a library how do we pull blocks in if we don't want to do them on a one a time browsing for files there are a couple of ways to do that one of the ways that people commonly use is by using the tool palettes and the tool palettes you can bring up by doing control 3 or you can also pull it up through the options in the ribbon but control 3 for me is the quickest so when you install AutoCAD you'll have a lot of tool palettes that are built by default and if you're wondering what the lightning bolt is that indicates that it is a dynamic block as opposed to a block which is not dynamic and we have a whole different webinar that talks about dynamic blocks and what they are so we won't get into that here but suffice it to say that there's a difference between dynamic blocks and regular blocks which are not dynamic so let's just pick something that like this here this valve Imperial all you have to do is click it now these have attributes which we have another webinar to cover attributes in blocks because it's it can be pretty in-depth but attributes are ways by which you can have input for text and various values that you might have for a block that you need to reuse the block geometry over and over but the text and the values for the type and the part and things might change so you'd be prompted for it every time so now that's one way to get a block into your drawing is from the palette but how do we get the blocks into the palettes a few different ways to do that the easiest though is if you've saved your current drawing and let's call it contains blocks let's take this block here and you just grab the insertion point and you can drag it over to your drag it over to your pallets I can do it right at work there we are there we go so now there's the my new block sitting on my pallet and if I open up a brand new drawing which doesn't contain any blocks at all I can just click my new block and put it in there from the pallet the way that this works is it keeps track of the location of the source DWG file if that ever changes you can redefine the tools on the palettes but again tool palettes is another entire webinar unto itself so we won't get too much into that I simply wanted to show how tool palettes can be used to store libraries full of blocks as you see here and each tab has its own set of blocks you might have your company parts that you reuse over and over in your drawings and you want to have them ready and available to you at any time when you're making new drawings and tool palettes is a great way to do that another way by which we can do the same sort of thing in bringing in blocks is you can use the design center and design centers been around for a long time I think it's largely underused but we hope to change that by getting this information out there maybe take this information and go forth and use the design center and here's the power of the design center what we'll do is we'll look in our sample directory that comes with AutoCAD you can see down here at the bottom what the path to that is the Program Files Autodesk AutoCAD sample and within the sample folder you have several folders that have drawing files let's go into the Design Center one here and let's take a look at this CMOS integrated circuits now one of the things that you can find out about inside the definition of this drawing this CMOS integrated circuits a DWG file is what kind of blocks it has now you can do all kinds of other things with it you can bring dim styles and layers in but for the purpose of this webinar we're going to focus on blocks as we have the rest of the hour so blocks if we double click this all of these are blocks that are defined within this single file and to get them into your current drawing it's as simple as dragging them in and now this block from this seamless integrated circuits DWG file is now a part of my brand-new drawing that I just made same goes for any of these and just like any other blocks that you might bring in you can go into the block editor now you notice here my insertion point is here on the top left corner here on this line maybe we want to change that so using the block editor we can change anything about these blocks that we might want to including the insertion point maybe we want to make it the geometric centre again like we did on the other one for a circuit you probably don't want to do that but just for the purposes of demonstration that's what we're doing here we'll close it we'll save the change and now if we do an insertion of that same block again the insertion point whether you see the crosshairs is dead center in the middle of the thing so that's the design center and it is a very powerful way to browse within existing drawings that have blocks defined within them and this may be your block library you may use a folder full of DWG files or maybe just one DWG file depending on how you categorize things just store your blocks so in this case we've got all these circuit blocks in this particular drawing maybe we've got another drawing that's full of fasteners and we look at the blocks in here and you see all these screws as different shapes and lengths and whatnot same goes for other fasteners one let's see we've got in here more screws but you can see here just as with the tool palette each tab of the tool palettes may be a different category of blocks that are each in their own individual DWG file similarly with Design Center you may store a bunch of blocks inside of one DWG file and use the design center to bring them in as you're seeing here so like the kitchens has lights which is a microwaves and phone jacks everything you'd find in a kitchen you find in this kitchens DWG file so the more in one way to use blocks and hopefully we're showing you ways that you maybe didn't know about and can work into your workflows so a design Center it's an oldie but a goodie you access it by just typing DC I can't think of any faster way to get it you can launch it from the ribbon as well tool palettes control 3 brings up your tool palettes that's the way to get that up there alright so at this point I want to open it up that's pretty much the end of the presentation that we had prepared on blocks and we'll go for questions at this point and see what we've got let's take a look it pop this questions thing out here looks like Bryce has been taking care of most of this in there I indeed good point Adam control to indeed is the design center just like control 3 brings up your tool palettes control 2 brings up the design center and one thing about the designs they're also what I mentioned while we're talking about design center is the blocks that you can access through them we used to have a tab in the design center called DC online and what that was was a tab that you'd click on in design center and it would access an FTP site on our web page or on our web site and it would it was just filled two blocks there was an FTP site filled with DWG files and you could just drag them right in from our FTP site via the design center interface so a few years back we did away with that and we moved to this seek interface and what that is is seek autodesk.com and actually I could probably just bring that up here and we'll show it real quick we'll go seek autodesk.com and it is a location from which you can download free blocks as you can see here though lots of them let's look for chairs just for kicks and if I spelled chairs it'd probably get the right results huh chairs there we go so as you can see here there are a lot of different chairs from different manufacturers you can pull in you've got DW geez you got DW F so you've got PDFs of these you've got Program Files you can pull down to open up in Revit all kinds of different chairs so that's just a small sampling of what you can find here on the seek website and honestly I think this does a much better job representing the blocks that you can get as compared to the old DC online it's just a different way to access the same kind of content it's all categorized you can use the options here on the left to look for what narrowed down things by what you're looking for maybe you're only looking for office furniture for example and that would narrow it down to only drawings and chairs that are specified to be office furniture etc the same thing goes with kitchens and electrical equipment and that sort of thing so seek is a powerful tool if you haven't checked it out before go try it out see even you might find some blocks that you want to use and again just because a block is that way when you get it the power of the block editor is you can go in and make limitless changes to the blocks so that they work for how you want them to look into the question section here so Doug looks like you're having troubles with the Design Center you know I can architecture 2017 not sure why that would be slow for you but it assuming you're looking at the same blocks in the same locations that's a difficult question to answer right off top of my head but it's something that certainly if you wanted to submit a support case we're happy to get into with you and investigate it a little bit more perhaps we could duplicate the problem here and then dig in a little further with our resources and figure out why that's happening now let's see question about the difference or benefit of using the base point command to change the block insertion point them you know to me thanks Brad for the question I much prefer just straight up editing the block and putting the base point where I want it the the base point command I've never had much luck with it I just I'd like the result better going in and using the block editor but in theory it's the same in this the same result you're using it for the same purpose you want to change the the insertion point of your block so you know functionality wise there really shouldn't be any difference to answer that question so by layer and by block that's something we wanted to go over again real quick we can do that certainly so let's pull up let's do an insertion again let's browse for my my handy chair again alright oops looks like it's bigger than the existing geometry I've got here alright so let's let's get in let's dig into the block editor on this guy so if we take a look at all the polylines that make up this chair object their color and their line weight for that matter and their transparency for that matter and the materials they're all set to obtain those properties by layer so if for example the layer seat had a line type that was let's see let's set the line type to by layer so we'll show what that does we'll save our changes and we'll change our seat you know let's go into layer properties and change the line type for this layer I'm gonna load some more line types here let's make this one for example or how about this okay so now the line type for the seat layer is no longer continuous it's going to be that dashed one we load it up here and it may be that the let's take it may be that the let's take a look it may be that the lines aren't long enough to realize the the dashes here but let's stick with something like color because it pops out here so let's change the let's do what we did previously let's select these two objects and let's change their definition of color to get it by block instead of by layer so the color of the block is what let's take a look the color is by layer it's on layer 0 layer 0 scholar is white let's go ahead and change the color of the block to yellow so the the block itself is yellow so any object defined within the block whose color is set to by block will now get its color from whatever you set the block to whereas all these other objects the outline all this is blue their color is by layer so whatever layer we put them on so let's take this whole chair and put it on a different layer let's put it on which one is I change here seed other let's put the whole layer a whole chair on seed other of course we've changed the color to yellow let's change it back to by layer here so the block gets its color by layer so the block is the turquoise color and since the block is the turquoise color the by block objects inside of it also get the turquoise color now if we look at the definition of the block though these other this is still on the seat layer so even though the block may be inserted on a particular layer all of the individual objects within the block might be on separate layers and that's why this outside line and some of these other lines remain blue because they're still on the seat layer which is still blue again all this will be up on our YouTube channel so hopefully the you know you can watch this part over and and really understand the distinction between by block by layer by object so at this point the only other thing we had left I wanted to throw out one more quick poll and I know polls aren't everybody's favorites but they help us to tailor the content a little going forward so let's do our last poll which is and here it is and we'll launch that few more moments to answer that hopefully you learned something from these and again as I always say it's not a replacement for training it's just a way to hopefully expose you to commands and areas of the program you may not have explored before and may not have known about you may have seen them anything I'll skip over that we did we didn't cover that in training so I'm not gonna even try but hopefully this gives you some more information to move forward so we'll close this out here quickly share the results with you here as we are getting toward the top of the hour so it looks like majority a majority of you out there have seen something new during this webinar that you didn't necessarily know before about the program which is great and that's that's our goal here so I think as long as that number remains high we'll feel pretty good about that so as always we certainly appreciate you attending these we want to invite you to join us every Thursday at this time same link same everything and here are some additional resources for this week's particular topic blocks links here that should help you out there again the Autodesk YouTube channel is youtube.com slash Autodesk and all these webinars are up there so hopefully we see you again real soon thanks again for joining us

Channel: AutoCAD

Views: 10,428

Keywords: autocad, autodesk, autocad tutorial, build your autocad iq, build your autocad iq!, autocad 2017 webinar, autocad 2017 tutorial, autocad 2017 blocks, autocad blocks, how to, webinar, tutorial blocks, autocad lt, cad design, modeling tutorial, autocad 2d, drafting, auto cad, autodesk subscription, technical drawing, autocad tips and tricks, animation, 3d, software, cad, 2d animation, 3d modeling, computer animation, 3d animation programs

Id: Hiod6qtcDaw

Length: 61min 7sec (3667 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2016