Create a 3D Site Plan Using CADMapper and AutoCAD

so many times when a project is kicked off you don't necessarily have a CAD file to work with and that's okay we're gonna create one today so you can see here we've got an email with a little bit of information on our site let's go ahead and download this and what this is it's just a screenshot of a drawing and here's what we have to work with our goal today is to take this little bit of information and turn it into a CAD drawing that we can use for any kind of CAD program so let's go ahead and get a CAD Napper com if you hadn't been here before go ahead and do get started creating a file if you have sign-in and so what we need to do is find our site specifically now we've already referenced it in Google Maps and this is more for just a visual reference it's on CAD mapper we can search for our location we know it's Memorial Drive in Houston Texas so let's start with that and that'll put us on some arbitrary point on Memorial Drive so it's a zoom out and look at downtown Houston here here's our site generally over here so in CAD mapper I can kind of start to hone in and so catnapper makes it a little bit more difficult to find your site if you don't know the coordinates specifically and can't just plug them in you're gonna have to do a little back and forth to really hone in on what exactly you're looking at CAD mapper is just a source that gives you vector information so you can't overlay a satellite image to really reference like you can on Google Maps so this is about what we're looking at right here we zoom it a little bit more we can kind of start to see buildings so we can see parks we can see other bigger buildings and so this is just kind of what we have to work with right now so the thing with cad mapper is that it is free but only up to one square kilometer of information so what I like to do is maximize the total area that you have to work with and sort of try to capture the entirety of the site important thing with this is even though when we look back at our screenshot file here we have this red line that's what they want always give more information than you need to and the reason for that it might be obvious but if you need that information in the feature you have it you want to think about in terms of diagrams and graphics and maybe you want to zoom way out of your site later to do some specific research it's better to have it and not need it than to not have it and then need it in the future for something so maximize the map size and then let's just go down the list here so select your design program I use AutoCAD some people use Rhino sketch of Illustrator there's a there's a number of other programs that you can use I'm an AutoCAD guy use AutoCAD and Revit almost exclusively so depending on the program that you're using go ahead and make your selection I've got AutoCAD here and so this is important here the include so we want to include 3d buildings because it's just more information that we can use if we need it or not topography you want to tick on topography that's that's really really important because the whole point of this sort of exercise is to create a 3d topographical file that you can work with to create the base for your design so go ahead and select topography and then do contours every let's do four meters because the lower the number the more contours you're gonna have which is just more information and we want as much information as we can get out of this file so just do four and then row geometry you can leave center lines but I actually like to do outlines and I'll show you why by default I think these numbers are all eight and then five I changed them to ten eight six and four and that's to help me distinguish different types of roads and the CAD file once it's generated if everything looks good to go go ahead and click create a file you can see we have a 3d axial view we have two dvo and we have topography really we just want to focus on the 2d view and the topography but what this allows you to do is you can download it into a package so go ahead and hit download once we've opened up the CAD wrapper file and brought it straight into AutoCAD we haven't touched it we haven't changed anything we've just simply looked at it we want to verify the units and we need to convert from metric to imperial so CAD mapper exports by default to meters and we simply just want to convert that to feet so let's zoom in on a spot here we know that all these roadways we gave specific measurements so we said minor roadways get a value of 6 meters let's take the distance D is T and measure from one point to the other and we can see that we're given a distance of 6 meters one meter is 3.2 808 4 feet so we said those roads were 6 meters so when we convert them when we scale the drawing we want to make sure those roads are reading as 19.6 85 feet so here's how we can do that first thing we want to do is go ahead and type in units to verify and we actually want to change this to architectural and then we'll say inches so once we've checked our units we can go up here go ahead and type PL for polyline and make that polyline a distance of 6 and so we want them to be nineteen point six eight five feet under that six inch line go ahead and draw another line nineteen point six eight five feet hit enter and so basically we want this which is the current width of these roads to be this distance I'm going to tell you about a really useful command that you can use to quickly scale parts of your drawing that command is called a line so let's go ahead and type in a line let's select all of our objects but since we're scaling this line here to be the same distance as this line let's deselect that line hit enter now so specify the first source point so we want to take this point and say this is where it's gonna start and then for the second source point we want to say this point it's going to be a distance of this so that's all we need we just need two points because it's just a 2d alignment and it asks about scaling objects so you want to hit yes and so what that did is you can double check if you select one line it took that short line and made it the same distance as this other line and so since we had everything else selected it scaled those parts of the drawing as well so now if we want to double check let's go back to wherever we were referencing from earlier say from here to here now we're looking at a distance of 19 feet 8 and a quarter inches which is about this right there so now all of the elements in the drawing are scaled properly we can start separating them out into external references let's type in LA for layer we can see that cab mapper has separated certain elements into specific layers we've got buildings contours outlines parks topography some of these other ones we're not we're not too concerned with right now so basically what we want to do is we want to take all these layers and turn them into separate drawings separate CAD drawings the reason that we want to do that is that's kind of just standard practice for design documentation type work it allows for multiple people to work on kind of one project at the same time so if you have six layers and there's six separate drawings that means six people can work on one project at one time so it'll help you in the future not only keep your files more organized but kind of set yourself up to understand the conventions of being a CAD designer and kind of creating a system that multiple people can work with so here's how I quickly separate all the elements that were given into separate drawings so if you want to type in LA for lair and let's freeze everything and we'll start with this first layer at the top here buildings unfreeze select all enter and you want to do ctrl shift C make sure you hit that shift because that turns it into a copy with base the base is important because that's gonna be your origin point that's gonna allow you to line up all of your drawings to the same point so that when all the layers come back in together they're going to be lined up properly so copy with base we're gonna specify the origin at 0 0 0 and then we're gonna go ahead and create a new drawing and say control V copy clip and then we're gonna type in 0 0 0 zoom all and here's our buildings and so all we do is save as I'll call this first site drawing 3500 site buildings so that's that all your buildings exist on this drawing when I go back to that primary file will unfreeze contours freeze buildings and do the same exact system again select all enter ctrl shift C copy with this 0 0 0 for the origin create a new file ctrl V 0 0 0 zoom oh and here's your contours there's no go ahead and do save as 3500 site contours and so basically you want to repeat that for all the layers in your drawing so we want to make like one master site file and so go ahead and do new drawing XA which stands for X reference attached and we just want to start bringing all of these individual drawings back into this one drawing that we're creating now so do site buildings open reference type is an overlay inches and scale factor of 1 1 to 1 scale specify the origin or insertion point as 0 0 0 we can zoom out and here's all of our buildings and just repeat that process for all of your external references all right so now that all of our drawings are in this one master drawing let's go ahead and save it as 3500 site master and we can order it around we can take a quick look and see what we have to work with we can look at shades of grey and it's basically at the same initial file that we had to work with but now all the information is separated so that say you have somebody who wants to work on the typography they can open this drawing and work on the typography by itself or if you have somebody that wants to work on this buildings you can open that drawing by itself so the way that these extracts work is if somebody was to update an individual X reference it's going to ask you on the master plan if you would like to reflect those changes so for example let's go into this site one and let's just draw a bunch of crazy lines somebody came in here and just you're a bunch of lines everywhere you're gonna save and so when you go back to the site master plan it's gonna ask you external reference has changed you want to reload it say yes and so now you can see that a bunch of lines have been drawn on that external reference so this whole system of X references is just kind of standard for conventional design documentation type work I just wanted to share it with you guys in case you found it useful if you did please let me know in the comments below if you have any suggestions or any questions I'll be happy to answer them it helps me to help you so give me a thumbs up if you liked the video be sure to subscribe if you want to keep up with any future tutorials that I'm giving and I'll catch you later you

Channel: Jon Henning

Views: 78,487

Keywords: Jon Henning, Rascoh Studio, AutoCAD, CADMapper, Tutorial, Architecture, Drafting, Design, Architectural Drafting, Civil Engineering, Rascoh.Studio, Rascohstudio, Scaling AutoCAD Drawing, Unit Conversion, Metric to Imperial, External References, AutoCAD Commands

Id: SyvZq2V3SzY

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019