Custom Title Block - Autodesk Inventor Drawing Tutorial | Autodesk Inventor 2021 IN DEPTH

hey everybody it's alex with engineering applied in this video i'll be showing you how to create a custom title block and autodesk inventor if you want more easy to understand and practical content like this made by an experienced engineer like myself make sure you like this video subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so you don't miss out on any helpful content like this in the future if you're looking for a specific function check the description for time stamps and if you don't find what you're looking for in this video i encourage you to check out the other videos of my autodesk inventor series playlist because i know you'll find exactly what you need there let's get started okay everybody so here we are in our drawing file so the objective of this video is to learn how to go from a standard title block so currently i'm in the ansi standard drawing format so this is the title block that comes stock with the program or with the autodesk inventor software and we want to go from something like this to something like this so this is the title block i use for my company of course yours can take tons of different forms depending on your preferences and your needs for information on this sheet but anyhow what i would like to point out before diving into this video is i recommend you go watch my video on creating custom drawing templates because that will show you how to get up to this point it's really important that you know how to create a custom drawing template so that we can make those edits in the base template file and then carry those edits into every new drawing file that we open okay everybody so here we are at the home screen so what we want to do first is we want to open up our windows file explorer and we want to navigate to this particular folder so you're going to start out in your c drive or the hard drive in which you've installed your operating system and then work your way all the way along this pathway to the en us folder now this is the folder in which all of the standard templates are housed one thing i'd like to note is that we have two different types of templates we can start with we can either start with the dwg which maintains compatibility between autodesk inventor and autocad and then we have our dot idw which is an inventor drawing format so typically if you don't have a preference i say go with the dwg for most cases because it will allow you to share files with users of autocad the first thing we need to do is create a copy of the standard.dwg file so i'll right click on that go to copy let's jump up a level to the templates folder and i created a folder called history here so we'll go in there and this is where i pasted that standard.dw file okay so there are two main benefits to using this approach the first benefit is of course we're creating a backup of that original drawing template the second benefit is that we can go back into the enus folder and directly edit the standard.dwg file so that we can maintain compatibility with this drawing button here in the home screen okay so when you hit this drawing button it looks within the enus folder for a file called standard.dwg so when we edit this file we can launch our new custom drawing template very easily using this button of course you can jump into the advanced menu and click on the specific drawing template you want to start a new drawing from but me personally i like to be able to use this button on the home screen and maintain that functionality so that's why i'm showing you this approach now i'd like to take a moment to emphasize how important it is that you back up the original standard.dwg file like we did previously here by putting it in the history folder or wherever you want to keep that original backed up file because once you change the standard.dwg file within the enus folder those changes are permanent okay so that's why we created a backup so now that we've backed everything up let's go ahead and open our drawing template that we'll be editing you will be editing the standard.dwg file i will be editing customtemplate.dwg because my standard.dwg is already complete with my own title block so double click on standard.dwg okay and it will launch this in a new window and of course at the top you want to make sure that it says standard.dwg in my case again it says custom template because this is what i wanted to call this template that i'm editing here if it says drawing 1 drawing 2 and so on and so forth you are in the wrong file so if you were to go to new and just launch a regular drawing it'll be indexed as drawing one two so on and so forth okay if you make changes to this it won't stick okay you need to make changes in the base template that's why it needs to have your template file name here at the top to make sure that you're always opening the correct template just use file explorer to go into the enus folder and double click on standard.dwg okay you can either do that or go up to open go to that same en us folder and launch it from here so those two ways will get you to the correct drawing template so that you can edit the right file and save all of your changes now that we're ready to start editing this title block i want to go ahead and shrink the sheet size down by a size currently it's size d i want it to be a size c so what i'll do is i'll just right click on sheet one go to edit sheet okay and i'll change this to c all right within this menu you can change the location of your title block so if i click on this top right hand button here and click ok you'll see that the title block jumps to the top right hand corner i actually don't want that i'll keep it in the bottom right okay so i'll go back to edit sheet okay and i'll just click this button here and we'll leave the sheet in landscape so i'll click ok now that we have the sheet resized we can take a couple of approaches to creating this new title block we can either start a title block from scratch by going up to manage and going to the define section on the ribbon and clicking title block or we can use uh predefined templates under drawing resources so we open up that folder go to title blocks open that folder and we can either start with ansi large or ansi a so currently we see antsy large this is what i like to start with as a base and then modify it for my preferences but if you need a little uh more condensed starting template you can go with ansi a and i'll show you how to do that in just a moment but if you want to start from scratch go up to manage define and title block and you're just going to click title block and then let's go ahead and just draw a couple rectangles it doesn't matter you know where they're at or anything at this stage this is just an example we'll go to you can either right click and go to save title block or you can go to finish sketch at the top okay and then let's just name this example hit save okay so under the title blocks folder now you see our example title block so let's go ahead and clear our existing one here by going under the sheet 1 designator here so we just expand sheet 1 right click on ansi large and click delete okay you can only have one title block at a time so now we go up to the title blocks folder right click and then go to insert on our example title block and you see it jumps to the right hand corner where we want it and uh has the shapes that i drew there of course this is just an example to show you how to create a new title block from scratch you can of course draw it up to your company's specifications and move on from there from scratch i personally started with the ansi large template and just sort of formed it to the end result that i wanted okay so now let's go ahead and move on here so i'm actually going to delete this example title block by right clicking on it going to delete and i'm going to delete this here okay because we don't really want to use that so let's start out with our ansi large version so i'll just right click on this and go to insert so it inserts that base template again but now we can actually edit this template and save it as something else so that we can use it as a base while maintaining the original template to do that all you have to do is go up to the title blocks folder once again right click on your starting template that you're using for the title block and go to edit before you make any changes here make sure you go up to finish sketch first and then go to save as okay and then save it as your custom title block name so i'm just going to call this one custom title block okay you can name it whatever you want and click save now under the title blocks folder we have our new custom title block name okay so we want to make sure that we're using this custom title block within our sheet so let's right click on what was in there previously go to delete right click on our new custom title block name go to insert and now we are going to see this title block updated as we actually edit this title block element now go back up to title blocks right click on the element that you want to edit and then go to edit now we can start making changes to the title block itself let's start by taking a look at adding and changing our line elements so of course you can add line elements or various shapes and whatnot using the sketch tools available to you and this ribbon here at the top or we can trim stuff out we can remove lines we can also change their weight so let's say for example i wanted to change the weight of these separating lines here that run across under the signature boxes here so what i can do is right click on the line of interest and go to properties now you can also pick multiple lines at once by holding ctrl and selecting all the lines of interest that you want to change okay and then once you've done that you can right click and go to properties and here at the top we have our line type and currently it's set to by layer but of course you can change the line shape or the uh style by opening this drop down and selecting the entry of choice so you can change that but i'm going to leave it on by layer and we can change the line weight underneath here so we can just open up this drop down select a standard line weight or you can type in a custom value so we can really thicken up a line for example so we'll just go to 0.039 inches and we'll click ok so there now we have thicker lines we could finish sketch and click yes to save the edits and now you can see those lines are a little bit thicker than the rest okay so now let's go ahead and undo that okay now we can trim lines out so let's say for example we wanted to open up this field down here for a little message such as remove all burrs and break sharp edges something along those lines okay so what we can do is we can go up to trim you know we can trim out these lines for example all right so i'll trim this one out as well okay and uh let's go ahead and delete this field here so let's say we don't want this approved spot so what we can do is uh you know get out of the trim tool i can delete this and that and we'll leave this line up here and now we can go to finish sketch and hit yes to save those edits and now we have a space here to put some text in let's go back in and edit this one more time i'll right click on my custom title block go to edit and now let's take a look at what we can do for text now there's tons of flexibility for text so pay careful attention to the types of entities that are used here because this will affect your workflow on a day-to-day basis so what we'll go ahead and do here is let's go up to text and we'll drop text anywhere in this empty space out here we'll just left-click and it opens up this format text dialog box so in the top section here we have all of these standard tools available to us with a typical word processor but what we're especially interested in is what's available here in this type drop down menu okay so we have properties and we have prompted entries so the main difference is that properties pull information from the i properties data for the drawing for a model and so on and so forth whereas a prompted entry allows us to type whatever we want at any time i typically like to use prompted entries because it allows me more flexibility on a day-to-day basis but i'll show you both and let you decide what will work best for you in your typical workflow so let's go ahead and start with something that you would typically find in a drawing so we'll open this drop down and go to properties hyphen drawing okay so these are drawing properties and then you want to jump over to this drop down here and we can toggle the specific property that we're looking for so let's say for example we want to have a field for the designer's name so we'll go down to designer left click on that now this is really critical to enter a property whether it's for a model a drawing or so on and so forth you want to go over to this little x with a down arrow and you want to click add text parameter so when we click that it'll drop that into the space so now that we have our element there we can click ok and now you can see we have our element for our designer name now let's go ahead and drop in a prompted entry so that we can compare the two entities side by side so what we'll do is we'll go up to text click here next to designer okay so now we want to go down to the type box and select prompted entry you'll notice that the property box or the property drop-down is grayed out and we cannot select a property that's because prompted entries don't require a property all we type here is a label so just whatever we want to label this particular entry as and then we can click ok so let's go ahead and do that now i'll go ahead and erase everything that we see here inside of this box and change the symbols a little bit so that we can easily distinguish between our property elements and our prompted entry elements okay so let's go ahead and just highlight all of this and i'll type in whatever it is that i want so i'll type in designer and prompted entry now we'll click ok and uh so now you see my text string pops up here of course you can click and drag it wherever you want in the title block and then we can click finish sketch and yes to save those edits now as you can see we get this dialog box that pops up with our text string that we entered manually for our prompted entry so here's our property field so this is the label that we assigned and then here's the value now i want you to notice something when we click on value the little uh cursor here on the left turns into a pencil that means that we can actively edit this value on the fly so let's go ahead and just enter my name in as the designer for that prompted entry field and we'll click ok now you'll see that my name pops up there well you don't see anything pop up on this side let me show you how to change an i property field so the first thing you want to do is you want to go over to your model browser expand sheet 1 expand custom title block or whatever you called your custom title block and double click on field text all right so within this space we can actually see everything all at one time because we have a filter here at the top that we can change so currently it's set to all so we can see everything at once but if we just want to see our drawing properties and sheet properties and so on and so forth you can toggle that accordingly we'll leave it on all for now now let's go ahead and click on our designer field so here it is at the bottom and when we click on that notice it remains as a mouse cursor okay so that means that we cannot edit this value from this particular menu because it looks for an i property value so now that we've clicked on this let's go ahead and go up to i properties click on that and then now we need to find a field that says designer so let's go ahead and try the project tab okay there it is right there designer so what we can do is um type in my name there and i'll do uh just type in i property so that you can see the difference between the two we'll click ok and okay so there you go so on this side that was that designer string or the drawing property string in which we entered the i property to populate that field on the right side that is the prompted entry field where i just typed in my name as that dialog box appeared so again if you want to edit a field with a prompted entry you can go back to field text double click on that and uh let's go down here to this uh prompted entry field here now if you use a lot of prompted entries i recommend just changing your filter to prompted entry so that it only shows you those and then let's click in this field and change it to something else so let's just do i don't know john smith just a random name okay we'll click ok and there you go now we've easily changed that field without having to go in and worry about changing the i property so again if you want to only enter an entity once or a value once and have that automatically propagate in multiple places i suggest using some form of a property it could be a model property a drawing property whatever and you would enter that value through the high properties menu however if you want more manual control over every little field that you have in your drawing i would suggest using prompted entries now that we understand the basics let's go ahead and make some changes to this title block and save this template so that we can see how this opens when we index new drawings okay so first of all let's go ahead and enter a company name up here so uh in this particular case i don't want to change the company name ever since this is going to be a single company's title block we can go ahead and just type regular text here and format it accordingly so let's go ahead and just delete this okay we'll go back up to text we'll click somewhere in here it doesn't matter and then let's just type engineering applied okay of course we can highlight all of this and change the font size i'll go to 0.240 inches all right that looks good and let's click ok we'll right click and go to ok to finish the text command and we'll just leave it somewhere there in the right side because i want to put an image here so what i'll do to insert an image is go up to insert under the sketch tab go to image and you can either draw sort of a space where you want to drop your image in there or you can just click once so that your original image maintains its aspect ratio i typically recommend the second option so that your image doesn't become distorted so like you don't accidentally elongate it or throw off the aspect ratio of the image itself so uh what i'll do is i'll just hit cancel there all right and let's go ahead and just hit escape a few times let's try that again we'll go to image and let's just click anywhere it doesn't matter all right so um let me navigate to the engineering applied folder and we'll pull in the company logo here okay so i've navigated to my artwork folder and uh so now let's go ahead and select a logo to drop in so i'll just double click on that and as you can see here it's a giant image here on the page but we can fix that so let's go ahead and hit escape a few times to get out of the image drop tool and uh so now what we can do is we can just sort of move this over towards the center and we can shrink this down by dragging the corner getting it to a size that's favorable for us okay so let's go ahead and uh do that again and make it a little bit smaller yeah that's fine so we'll leave it like that for now and so we've dropped our image in we have our company name here let's readjust that of course we can change whether or not we want prompted entries in here um so you can go nuts with designing your title block okay now that we have our entries of interest there we can go to finish sketch click yes to save and as you can see we have the basic changes that we made and now all we have to do is go up to save so we've now saved our custom template we can go to the home screen and now let's open a new drawing with our custom template so i'll go to advanced and just open up that custom template it says that it's currently open i've actually got to close out of that real quick let's try that again we'll open up custom template okay and there we go so now it opens up with the default setting so it's defaults to a size c of course you can change the sheet size as well if you right click on sheet go to edit sheet you can change it to different sizes it'll maintain everything in the title block which is pretty nice so let's go ahead and change that back to a size c okay now i want to point out we have our image our company name and so on and so forth now before i go ahead and finish up this video i wanted to take a moment to walk you through my personal title block design and the elements that i used in that design as a point of reference for you to get started so i'll go ahead and open up my template here double click on that all right so here we go this is my standard.dwg file and as you can see here i have all of my basic elements already filled in here just as a point of reference for me so that when i make changes here i could see how it would look fully filled in and of course i've added a table of revisions here at the top as part of that standard template okay so now let's go ahead and go into the drawing resources title blocks and my default title block for my company go to edit okay so now let's take a look at what we have here starting on the left side all of these notes here are all plain text elements so if i were to double click on any one of these elements you'll notice that there's no property associated to it okay it's just regular text moving to the right all of these elements in here so the names and the dates those are all prompted entries okay so i typed in whatever label i wanted to see in the prompted entry menu and uh you know entered that and clicked okay all right so moving to the right uh plain text for the company name plain text for the legal jargon here image for the company logo this one's interesting in the bottom right hand corner it's actually a mix and match of various elements so the word sheet and the word of are just plain text but the sheet number is a sheet property for the sheet number and the number of sheets element is a drawing property for the number of sheets the total number of sheets in the drawing so you can mix and match those as you wish moving on here this third angle projection i just manually sketched all that and dimensioned it so you have plenty of flexibility here you can even dimension the text based off of an anchor point and i'll show you how to do that now all you have to do is double click on the text string of interest that you want to dimension and the anchor point for the dimensioning is based off of the justification so this particular one is left justified towards the top so when i zoom in on this you'll notice that there's this little dot here in the top left hand corner that is the justification point and off of that point is where i've dimensioned this string of text now if we move down here to the bottom left hand corner i have a string of text that's pulled off of the center point and so this one is center justified towards the middle so that point resides in the middle of the string of text and that's exactly where i dimensioned these two lines off of so um now let's go ahead and finish the sketch we're not going to save anything because i don't want to make any changes to this and let's go ahead and change some of these prompted entry fields so i just open up sheet 1 i open up my title block you know field here double click on field text and as you can see here i have all of my prompted entry fields that pop up i want to actually filter this to only prompted entries so that i can see exactly what i'm looking for and here we could just type in whatever so i can just type in aleks i can type in different dates right so i can type in 05 05 2022 for example it doesn't really matter and then of course you can change the drawing the part number right so we can change all of these fields and click ok and you see all of these things change so the name field changed the date changed here the drawing number and so on and so forth now let's go ahead and open a new drawing so that we can see what this looks like in practice so when we click on drawing i get a pop-up for my prompted entries we can either enter our values now or we can enter them later i usually enter them later so i'll just go ahead and click ok and ok one more time and as you can see here i have a brand new blank drawing file based on that template that i was editing earlier and if you go up to the top you can see the drawing file name is currently drawing 22. this is a generic name assigned to a blank drawing so i know i'm not accidentally editing that template so we're good there and then of course we can go down and edit the fields in the title block by going under sheet 1 going under the title block name here and double clicking on field text and then we can filter everything out other than the prompted entries and then enter the values accordingly that's all for this segment of the autodesk inventor drawing creation module where i showed you how to create a custom title block i really hope that you found this tutorial to be helpful and that you put what you've learned into practice so you can continue developing your skills as you work your way through these lessons also before you watch the next video in the series make sure you subscribe to my channel and turn on notifications to stay up to date on future content that will help you create the future you want for yourself and of course don't hesitate to leave a comment or reach out via my website contact page and let me know if there's anything else you'd like to learn about or see on this channel i really appreciate you choosing to stop by and learn with me and i'll see you again soon [Music] you

Channel: Engineering Applied

Views: 3,474

Keywords: autodesk inventor 2021 tutorial, autodesk inventor tutorial for beginners, inventor tutorial 2021, inventor professional 2021 tutorial, inventor 2021, autodesk inventor 2021, inventor 2021 tutorial, autodesk inventor, autodesk inventor tutorial, inventor, autocad 2021, how to create custom title block in autodesk inventor 2021, title block autodesk inventor 2021, custom title block

Id: s5lMZZeNGfk

Length: 25min 27sec (1527 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021